Friday, February 19, 2010

The Ricky Gervais Show - A Paean Followed by a Critique

I'm a fan of Ricky Gervais, and have been since a friend of mine lent me a copy of the original British version of The Office on DVD. The Office, which Gervais co-authored with his partner Stephen Merchant, was wildly and hilariously witty, but also showed a surprisingly heartbreaking pathos for the ongoing struggles and fading dreams of ordinary people (this last feat being one that I've never seen the American Office, though hilarious in its own right, fully live up to). Extras followed in a similar vein, at its best hitting a bull's eye with a clever, satirical, and hilariously tragic view of show business. What you can easily see from following The Office and Extras, aside from their wit, is that Merchant and Gervais write very dark comedy, but love their characters too much to ever let it all turn out badly.

Aside from those two shows, Gervais and Merchant have a record-breaking podcast, and Gervais recently hosted the Golden Globes. (I should say, for the interest of balance, that I'm not entirely without reservations: I think that sometimes Gervais takes the darker elements of his work a bit far--where bitterness, insecurity, and misanthropy go beyond comedy and into, well, bitterness, insecurity, and misanthropy.)

So naturally, I was curious about his third show--titled The Ricky Gervais Show and basically an animated version of his podcast--but not curious enough to seek out someplace that carried HBO. Which is why I was happy when HBO posted the first episode for free online here.

And I have to say, it's an odd concept: the entire show is built around derisively laughing at one person.

That person is a bloke named Karl Pilkington--their dim radio producer--who sits, in cartoon form, next to cartoon Gervais and cartoon Merchant. The basic arc of the show is that Gervais and Merchant coax Karl into spouting off nonsense, then find witty ways to call him an idiot for 22 minutes (accompanied by animated visual aides, to provide flavor). It's like being with a group of friends and noticing, with forlorn resignation, the guy who everyone keeps around just to laugh at. Really, after the first 2 minutes, where he's insulted several times before he even has a line, I just kind of felt sorry for the guy. It seemed like a thankless job.

At the very least, it makes clear the link between comedy and schadenfreude. It's an arguably (okay, definitely) mean-spirited conceptual core for a show, though I have to admit I chuckled plenty of times. (Comedy: gaze upon the darkness of the human soul.)

There's certainly more to Gervais's and Merchant's podcast than that, but laughing at Karl is placed upfront as the focus of the TV program. Newcomers will see little else. And I have to wonder if this will be able to solidify into a regular thing. Will people--by which I mean a probably coastal demographic of HBO subscribers--set aside time in their schedule and tune in weekly to make fun of a guy? Is that just what we do with comedy anyway? Or is it different when the object of mockery is a real person (unlike, say, Homer Simpson)? Maybe it's not. Pilkington is an executive producer of the show, so at the very least, he stands to gain from selling himself as a cartoon punching bag. Maybe not such a thankless job after all, but definitely a bizarre dynamic. Perhaps everything latent about comedy is now explicit.

Still, I'm curious where they take it next, and I like the idea of cartoon non-fiction. The stream-of-consciousness potential of animation goes well with the stream-of-consciousness nature of podcasting. Inquiring minds can check it out.

For a more bite-sized taste of the Gervais and Merchant podcast, I would recommend their analysis of James Bond, which involves over-thinking a media property that damn well insists you don't think too hard about it (sort of the moviehound, non-revolutionary equivalent of "truth to power"). No Karl involved.

And if you've never seen the British Office, I'd highly recommend the first series (only six episodes...they do things differently over there) which remains a thing of comic beauty.

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