Ricky Gervais: why I’ll never apologise for my jokes

There’s a moment in Ricky Gervais’s 2018 Netflix stand-up show Humanity when he talks about buying a first-class air ticket, only to be informed that nuts would not be served on board due to a fellow passenger’s serious allergy. ‘I was fuming,’ he says. ‘If being near a nut kills you, do we really want that in the gene pool? I’ve never wanted nuts more. I felt that she was infringing on my human right to eat nuts.’

A member of the public tweeted him directly to complain after hearing him tell this story on The Tonight Show, but instead of apologising Ricky wrote a routine about it. As he points out, when someone is needlessly offended, ‘it makes it funnier’. Contrary to those who argue that political correctness is killing comedy, he insists that it is driving it.

I meet Ricky at an editing suite in central London where he’s putting the finishing touches to the second series of After Life, his Netflix comedy drama about a man struggling to come to terms with the death of his wife. I’m particularly interested to hear his thoughts on our culture of offence-taking, a phenomenon that appears to have been galvanised by social media.

‘Everyone’s thing is the worst thing in the world,’ he tells me. ‘We all do it. We go to a show and say “I wish he hadn’t joked about that. That’s the thing I care about”.’ He recalls playing in New York for the first time and receiving a letter from a Jewish society upset about his Anne Frank material. ‘I said to them, “You laughed at the jokes about famine, Aids and cancer. You knew I was joking there, didn’t you?” I’m playing the idiot. That’s what irony is. It’s the opposite of what you actually think. You wouldn’t satirise an idea that you fundamentally agreed with and get excited about it as an artist.