Ricky Gervais – Science
Sheffield City Hall
02/12/09
For some people, Ricky Gervais will only ever be about the sitcoms. The Office and Extras genuinely changed the face of comedy forever, perfecting the cringeworthy pause and exasperated expresssion as comedy gold and relegating the laughter track to the history books.
For those people, his subsequent projects and stand-up tours – Politics, Animals and Fame – have paled in comparison, merely allowing him to spin an extra buck from him fame by retelling jokes and anecdotes from his pre-Office XFM days and post-Office podcasts. They may be right, and Ricky lovers hoping for new material every year will be disappointed.
But the perfection of his sitcom work should not preclude him from getting a fair hearing, and, unsurprisingly for such a talented writer and actor, Gervais is brilliantly funny in the flesh. Crude and offensive at every turn, Gervais is a high-octane performer who knows what works. While Science is barely mentioned, religion, obesity and Karl Pilkington provide familiar targets for his vitriol, while anyone who has ever received a Christmas present of an Oxfam goat for Africa and would prefer the goat themselves would have sympathy with his unsurprisingly critical take on the subject.
Electric may be the wrong word to describe a performer whose belly seems to inflate during every lager-fuelled performance, but his apparently unending ability to laugh at anything, including himself and other fat people, never fails to please – who knew self-depracation could be so brilliantly arrogant? Some say the latest tour and forays into Hollywood have shown the wheels to be falling off the Gervais juggernaut. Those people probably despised him from the start. What is undeniably true is that Gervais is still funny, and if you are immature enough (like me) to find jokes about sex fluids funny, the next tourful of them can’t come soon enough.