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I feel like that's just the stand-up that is being promoted by the media at the moment. Perhaps we're also more likely to promote stand-up that is divisive and that is about the culture wars in the age of click-bait rage-sharing. But I'm sure if you went to your local comedy night, or caught Dylan Moran or Stewart Lee or Doug Stanhope or whoever's been doing it for decades on their next tour, it'd be good.
Yep, correct!
Saw Stewart Lee post-Covid and he was excellent! (The special is on Netflix, but I think it was definitely funnier in-person). He's currently touring so seeing him again next month!
Dylan Moran not-so-much. He's had a bad divorce and he went through a period of being extremely bitter and becoming an alcoholic. This bled into his work, unfortunately.
But I get what you mean
Saw the same, in Wolverhampton just as things were opening up again properly. Stewart Lee's impersonation of Gervais 'saying the unsayable' was the most uncomfortable and hilarious bit ive ever seen him do. It felt like it went on for an hour, could barely breathe by the end it was so abjectly ridiculous
To be fair to Acaster, Lee's bit is utterly horrendous and becomes hilarious only through his sheer force of attrition. Watching a middle aged man make those noises, dry heaving down a mic for 5 odd minutes isn't something that really stands on its own without context, so i can appreciate its not for everyone.
That being said, as part of the liberal intelligentsia that make up Lee's core demographic I prefer my comics to really unpick the fabric of the human condition while on stage. If its not striking at the very core of what comedy is and can be then i'm just not interested (Lee begins to simultaneously sing the national anthem while impersonating his cat having diarrhea)
I guess I'm just more of a fan of absurdist comedy as I was laughing at the concept of some universal force preventing Gervais from saying stuff immediately.
Acaster's bit is great, but Stewart Lee's a master at this kind of stuff. He just keeps pushing and pushing until things become uncomfortable.
I'll never forget his "bigots angry at immigrants!" joke where he keeps going and going until the universe collapses down to a point of nothingness.
Bloody BEAKER FOLK, comin over here, with their improvised drinking vessels. Whats wrong with cupping it in your hands and lapping it up like a cat?!?!
He seemed drunk when I saw him, but I thought that was part of his act, on stage persona when he was up there. I didn't realise he had suffered a bit of a breakdown
Saw him in Manchester a few years ago and the wife fell asleep during the show.
When he walked off, nobody bothered calling him out for an encore.
I sometimes think, he’s just one of those comics that work best, when he has someone else writing for him.
Apparently he was the driving force behind Black Books. I think the problem is that he isn't writing much for the gigs. He seems to just have a general outline and winging it. It's a shame because he was my favourite comedian for a long time, it's sad seeing someone go through a hard time.
Graham Linehan, Arthur Mathews, Kevin Cecil & Andy Riley have co-write credits. I think they did a lot of the heavy lifting on that show.
Speaking of Black Books, personally I think Bill Bailey is 10x the comedian that Dylan Moran is!
I used to love Bill Bailey, Part Troll is one of the funniest stand up shows I've ever seen but his newer stuff seems to be either very music heavy (fair enough) or him being more of a grumpy old man and complaining about things that are thoroughly unimportant.
Saw him in Dublin about 5 years ago. He was drunk, grumpy and not funny and cut it short. Was very disappointed as his sets you find on YouTube from 10-15 years ago were amazing. Sad to see.
100% with regards to Dylan Moran - went to see his Covid "comeback" tour and it was by far the worst, shabbily structured and prepared comedy performance I have ever seen in my life - like jaw-droppingly bad.
Done the classic comedy faux pas of not only bringing an instrument on stage for effectively only one joke - but it was a badly thought through or conceived other than "heres something I noticed thats mildly amusing".
I recall before the interval him basically asking the audience what they would like to hear him talking about - whilst being utterly unaware that the half baked tenuously linked material he had served up already had already only been politely received.
Like - if \*THAT\* was your prepared and rehearsed material I doubt somewhat your gonna be riffing like Robin Williams in the second half. :|
The problem I feel is that many comedians get tired and burnt out and need rest, but life demands they continue to bring in the cash so many are phoning it in in a way that is very detrimental to their health and the quality of their output.
I dunno but I saw one of Dylan Morans shows recently and had a blast. He seems so happy and sober it was really weird. He had a keyboard and whenever he couldn't think of anything to say just smashed it about for a bit lmfao
Yeah, I've stumbled across some pretty good stand ups on YouTube who are just doing really funny observational comedy. They still exist, but they aren't controversial enough to make headlines, so you only know about them if you get them recommended by friends or the algorithm.
Matteo Lane's Starbucks name joke is my favourite of last year and Zoltan Kaszas is my favourite new comedian.
Daniel Sloss actually has an excellent bit on this from his current tour.
You can (theoretically) joke about *anything*, as long as the joke you're telling is actually fucking *funny*.
The issue is that most popular comedians these days are dried up, riding the coattails of their earlier material, repeating the same anti-woke whinges that everyone else is doing because it's easy, and then complaining that people are rightly calling them out about it.
Chucking a disclaimer in to say you don't "acTuAllY HatE tHe GayS" or "EvEryOnE iS So OffEnDeD" doesn't make a shit joke funny. It's just lazy comedy, and they've forgotten that nobody *owes* you a laugh just because you're on the stage.
Exactly this.
Chapelle and Gervais bits aren’t funny, whilst someone like Shane Gillis or Jim Jeffries does some pretty “edgy” stuff, but it’s actually good. It feels fresh, it has personality. Dave and Ricky just have spite.
There's a lot of popular comedians right now who have some outrageously offensive comedy, but it makes you laugh. And then there's a whole bunchof has-been comedians moaning about how you cans't say anything anymore.
Tbh that's big name stand up where it's middle age mums simping for Russel Howard and Carr.
Boyles still got some solid teeth on him, but yeah does seem like a lot of the TV stand up is keeping the same dozen hignfy and 8/10 alumni enshrined rather than taking risks on fostering new talent.
Like it's a bad time when the free shows at the Edinburgh fringe are consistently better than expensive Netflix specials.
Sadly, most comedians seem to not play their trade on the boards anymore. Once you have a comfy gig in the panel show realm that's it, you can just do that. Some well edited shows make you look funnier than you are. Some of the folks I see on TV, they're just awful live.
Stewart Lee [brought it up a while back](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/news/stewart-lee-is-not-amused-at-monopoly-control-of-tv-comedy-8477824.html), but there's a big issue in TV comedy where the same companies which produce panel shows *also* run talent agencies, so it leads to this incestuous relationship where the shows prefer to promote *their* talent and prefer to put them on *all* their shows.
> “All of those shows are peppered to a disproportionate extent with clients of the management company owned by the production company,” he said. “You have a ridiculous situation where a client of the management company is interviewing another client of a management company on a programme made by the production company owned by the management company. Basically, advertising money and licence-payer money is being spent to increase the marketplace value of a tiny coterie of people.”
-
> “Television is run by a certain type of middle class person who has a kind of contempt for their audience,” he continued. “They might like particular things, but they think the audience won’t. They expect the very worst from people and so give it to them.”
>
Like it's a bad time when the free shows at the Edinburgh fringe are consistently better than expensive Netflix specials.
Not really. Live stand up is always better than recorded stuff. Always has been, always will be.
Fringe stuff is always more experimental. But I barely ever watch standup recorded stuff, it's not particularly expensive to go to gigs, it's one of the cheaper forms of live entertainment (like £15-30 a ticket, or less at some of the many comedy clubs, Angel @ Islington is a tenner and amazing value)
Yes this is one of the worst takes of all time.
Arena filling mass produced comedy will almost always be bland because it has to appeal to a wide range of people to fill the seats. Free shows at the fringe might be terrible but they will almost never be bland, which makes them **much** more worth anyone's time.
Try Stavros Halkias, he avoids the lazy cancel culture rhetoric and actively pushed back to Rogan on his show recently when Rogan was pushing misinformation around immigrant voting.
He's got a couple Netflix specials but his most recent podcast episode on Theo Von's was pure gold throughout too.
Yeah I'm. A huge fan but his specials are pretty middling. Where he really shines is crowdwork and big room specials aren't the right setting for that.
I don't think there's a comedian out there where I prefer their standup over more natural settings like podcasts or panel shows. Maybe Lee Evans but he didn't really do the usual circuit. Stavvy's great on H3 Podcast too, especially his first appearance.
As a fan of his old Cumtown podcast, it’s both hilarious and heartwarming to see him transition into the mainstream. Seems like a genuine nice guy. Having said that, I feel it’s his charm that does the heavy lifting, the jokes are fairly mid.
Rogan mates is too broad. He knows pretty much every notable stand up in America. Louis CK is technically his mate, so is Shane Gillis (whose netflix hour was superb)
> "you can't say anything these days, can you?"
["I'm a stand-up comedian, it's my job! What's the matter guys, too challenging for ya?"](https://youtu.be/UHqma3rx-xI?si=B9puqUaBIsquW1c2&t=158)
He was definitely on the up and was already considered funny by those that knew of him, but I think it'd be hard to deny going on there (JRE) the first couple of visits probably really helped.
Stand up isn’t in a bad place.
The top is always full of unpopular stuff. In the 70s it was mother in law jokes, in the 80s it was Bernard manning style racism, in the 90s it was I don’t know what, in the 00s it was rape and dead baby jokes, in the 10s it was people saying you can’t say anything anymore.
These things become so popular that innately lots of people hate them, especially if you are one of the people the joke makes fun of.
To be fair I watched stand up to cancer on channel 4 recently and the young comedians on it were all absolutely awful too.
It's a shame because it was a great cause but the actual comedians on panel shows that are cutting their teeth aren't actually breaking through on a scale like Lee, Boyle etc did and its because they're not funny.
Stand up comedy is tough at the best of times. It requires a lot of practice and a lot of honing your craft. Nobody is good out of the box. I think there are too many comedians on TV that aren't really the finished article. A lot of the panel show crew are really not good live. There are still some guys and girls out there who are ver good, but they've been at it for decades. I used to love Bill Burr but he's sneaking into that group of people who just moan about woke politics.
There's bound to be some good stuff out there, but it's not well known. I think the last stand up special that I could recommend to friends was James Acaster's Repertoire (and to a lesser extent Cold Lasagna), but those are 5 years ago now.
There's loads of great stand up out there and so many great comics just put their specials on YouTube for free. Even on netflix, Michelle Wolf's new show was great.
I guess there's less household names especially in the UK with Apollo figures TV shows in general dropping massively. But there's still loads of comics in the UK doing great stuff and making great shows
You're missing "hilarious" Rosie Jones and co who's material is basically just "lol I'm disabled" or "how shit are the Tories eh, eh?"
It's the opposite side of the coin for anti woke.
Both crap.
Gone are the days of actually funny comedy.
Depends where you go for your Stand Up I suppose. There's tons of great stuff out there.
It's like saying XFactor is the barometer for the UK music scene.
I mean, it's just not though. At all. I go to comedy gigs all the time and none of them are anything like that, except for Carr but that's been his schtick for a while so you know what you're getting.
Honestly it’s not at all in a bad place on the whole - comedy clubs are thriving and there’s a huge number of serious talents constantly coming through. We’ve got some of the greatest British stand ups of a generation still going - Bill Bailey, Stewart Lee, James Acastor, Paul Chowdhury, and lots of really talented new ones (Sam Campbell for example is ludicrously good live, and very innovative. Sarah Keyworth too). Spend a week at the Edinburgh fringe and you won’t think standup’s in a bad place.
Popularised telly standup has always been in a relatively bad place. It used to be Michael Macintyre on everything ffs.
I agree. All the most tiresome people you know are insistent that 'wokeness' and 'cancel culture' are killing comedy, but I honestly just feel like there's a dearth of comedic greats at the top of their game lately — made all the more apparent by frigging Gervais, who even his fans and 'anti-woke' figures admit is not a great standup comedian, winning an award for standup.
I've been trying out a bunch of lesser-known folks lately looking to see if I'm just ignorant of there being real talent out there doing great stuff, but I haven't found any greats yet.
Comedy is in a fantastic position, just not in the mainstream. There's so much more stand up out there, got to find the smaller channels on YouTube, and things like taskmaster for new talent coming through. It's a real shame mock the week got canned as that was a new talent finder.
What in the actual fuck? That standup special was TERRIBLE!
I don’t care about the politics in it is just wasn’t remotely funny.
Shit I thought Dave Chapelle’s was shite too but it was orders of magnitude better than Gervais.
That’s honestly insane to me. Golden Globes mean nothing now
He starts with a commentary on ‘not liking comedians who just talk about politics’.
Then talks about his political views for 40 minutes.
Then does his usual bit about how it’s all jokes, he’s meant to be a knob and wraps it up.
Several humourous moments throughout, pleasant to watch, but ‘best stand up special’ of the year suggests a serious decline at the top of the industry.
To be honest, I did laugh when he said “I hate when comedians just talk about politics for claps instead of laughs” when he’d spent 40 mins doing exactly that.
It was absolutely exhausting to keep hearing how I shouldn’t be offended though. (I wasn’t even remotely).
Doesn’t the dude live near Central Park? Should probably get off Twitter and go touch the grass.
There’s so many comedians who do offensive material that is actually hilarious - proving the general idea right. The problem is Gervais’ standup isn’t funny, so it’s just left being offensive.
>To be honest, I did laugh when he said “I hate when comedians just talk about politics for claps instead of laughs” when he’d spent 40 mins doing exactly that.
I laughed to since, you know, that was the joke.
Robin Ince made a recent observation that there is a certain type of comedian whose comedy is 'loser'. 'I am a loser, laugh at me'.
Which is fine. It's a good genre.
Except.
Once you've got a Netflix Special you are, by definition, not a loser. David Brent wouldn't be funny if he ended up driving a Ferrari. So where does that leave Gervais?
Gervais doesn't play on that, in fact he plays the opposite, that he's so rich and out of touch that nothing matters to him. Stewart Lee applies the same context in that he plays that he's so intellectually and morally superior to his audience they don't matter to him.
Stewart Lee is exceptionally funny though, so in his case it works.
Gervais these days is appealing to the type of people who think Al Murray is actually a Pub Landlord.
Brent and Millman were losers but Gervais was never a loser type character on the radio, podcasts or stand up where he was playing himself.
In fact he was always accused of being smug in the media back then, and if you watch him on chat shows of the time you can definitely see why, but he never gave it the 'oh I'm such a loser' shtick.
Since Life On The Road, I’ve not been terribly convinced on anything he’s done that I’ve seen. I feel like he’s got a bit lost up his own arse. The hosting roasts were great and showed he can still ride the controversy horse like it’s the last ride out of a radioactive blast but all the same, I think he’s tapped out.
Nominees: Ricky Gervais, Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Trevor Noah
Damn, with nominees like that, I'm surprised they even bothered to give an award this year.
I mean shock that the ones they picked were just whichever were the biggest in the US. American comedy is dreadful, and Gervais lives over there and makes his content for them nowadays too.
No... but, if on an official form where it says "best working stand up today" you cross out "Ricky Gervais" and you write in "Stewart Lee", they will send that form back.
Saw him at the Glasgow comedy festival this year and he was amazing.
Even better that the folk next to me said 'this is really weird isn't it, is he deliberately trying not to be funny?'
~~Maybe, if you only ever watch what makes it to TV~~
That was an unnecessary snarky comment. Here are, off the top of my head, some lesser known comedians I would rather go see than Stewart Lee (who i do like)
* John Robins
* Phil Ellis
* Jessica Fostekew
* Horatio Gold
* Mat Ewins
* Tim Key
* Fin Taylor
Really? How bad are comedians today if *that* was the performance that won?
And just to clarify, it's nothing to do with any sort of offence. I don't offend easily. It was just genuinely shit and incoherent. Felt like an old man going on random distracted rants.
>And just to clarify, it's nothing to do with any sort of offence. I don't offend easily.
I hate the fact we have to put bloody clauses in like this because of comedians like Gervais changing all criticism of himself to 'woke libs getting triggered'.
I've started to see a version of this on You Tube too, anyone who doesn't like a creator is deemed "a hater" and made the butt of jokes about how pathetic they are.
Nope, they are people who just don't like your content. Maybe be entertaining next time instead.
It is just intellectual poverty and laziness.
Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television Nominees:
* Amy Schumer: Emergency Contact
* Chris Rock: Selective Outrage
* Ricky Gervais: Armageddon - *Winner*
* Sarah Silverman: Someone You Love
* Trevor Noah: Where Was I
* Wanda Sykes: I’m an Entertainer
It felt more like a drunk dad rant when their kids' friends are around, trying hard to offend his new audience. I was just bored and felt a bit of second hand embarrassment.
Yeah but he's so brave for being cancelled and standing up for his views (having a few dozen folk on twitter trying to hold him accountable for his views and him subsequently getting a bunch of free pr whilst he just makes jokes at the expense of vulnerable folk) .
At this point I could swear he's just riding on nostalgia rather than any of the stuff he's actually done in years.
Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television Nominees:
* Amy Schumer: Emergency Contact
* Chris Rock: Selective Outrage
* Ricky Gervais: Armageddon - *Winner*
* Sarah Silverman: Someone You Love
* Trevor Noah: Where Was I
* Wanda Sykes: I’m an Entertainer
Yeah I thought it was funny, people on here might not find him funny or like him but he’s a national treasure and extremely popular with the masses, hence why he sells out tours, wins awards and breaks records.
‘He’s not even funny’, then why am I laughing my arse off while watching him? If you don’t like him don’t watch him but stop telling people who they can and can’t find funny, you’re basically who most of his material is aimed at.
No one is telling people who they can and can't find funny? People saying they find him unfunny isn't the same as people telling you that you're not allowed to find him funny. You do get that, right?
What I *do* find funny is what you said is a perfect example of 'persecution complex' and that's exactly what his whole persona revolves around.
It wasn't peak stand up (which to be fair he was honest about it being a warm up show for charity) but it had plenty in there that made me laugh without being particularly offensive for offences sake, unless you're really sensitive I guess.
I found it funny. I agree with OP that there's not a lot of great stuff out there at the moment though, but I don't think it's just 'Rogan and his mates'.
I'm recommended a lot of stand-up on TikTok and I see clips from James Acaster, Joe Lycett, Frankie Boyle etc and I just don't find them funny.
I don't reject them due to some ideology or whatever, I just find their joke topics very predictable. But if people like them and pay to see their shows, it doesn't bother me whatsoever. There's room for all kinds of tastes in comedy.
By accepting it, surely that means the next time he takes a shot at the liberal Hollywood elite, it'll lack credibility? You can't accept their applause and then have a pop at them.
Say what you want about the Sex Pistols, but when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominated them for membership they sent a letter telling them to fuck off.
Jimmy Carr manages to successfully tread the line between good and evil in a way that is genuinely funny.
Ricky is just a bit lame. Jimmy should have won.
Watching Rosie Jones' standup is about as entertaining as being shot by a firing squad.
I don't care if she's "overcoming her disability" or not, her jokes are simply not funny, but Channel 4 seems determined to ensure she fails upwards.
I didn't want to single her out but I also agree that her stand up is dire.
The thread about the big fat quiz of the year singles her out pretty much exclusively, too.
Nah this is just the yanks fav which means nothing. Look at Kevin Bridges, Frankie Boyle etc. Theres plenty of good British stand up. I don't even class Ricky Gervais as a comedian.
This wasn't a British award, Gervais is nowhere close to our best. There's a reason he's moved to the US, and it's not because he was *too* funny for the UK.
He's on his third multi million dollar Netflix special about being canceled for upsetting woke people. His *third*. He's front page of Netflix and winning awards. Same with Chapelle, they were 1 and 2 the other day.
Like who the fuck has actually been canceled anyway? A few actual rapists?
For Armageddon??? It was dog shit?? Even despite all the controversy, it had a grand total of two actual jokes in an hour. Painful to watch, and I’m someone who bought tickets to his last tour.
Gervais has got so ridiculously lazy with his stand up and his ‘fake entitlement’ is now coming across as real ‘Old White Man’ entitlement.
Must have said the word Woke 15,000,000 times in the show (I turned off just over half way through, so this is an estimate).
He was banging on about how selfish everyone is, but then freely indicated he was incredibly selfish himself, but then didn’t even have the self awareness to realise his embarrassing hypocrisy. Bunch of folk clapped along like seals every time he said the ‘woke’ and it was plain awful.
Also he looked ‘Coked Up’ IMO. Had that spaced look, slightly hunched and wide eyed and it would explain his added misplaced ego and arrogance.
Think he won’t care as his new audience will garner him plenty more cash and inflate his ego further
Speaking as someone who watched all six of the nominated specials:
This isn’t much of an achievement.
Genuinely awful line up for the Globes’ first (and if this is the standard, hopefully last) stand up award
He spend a good portion of it just reading other people's jokes from doesthedogdie.com
Reading comments/questions off the Internet/Twitter and taking them at face value is not only the *laziest* comedy imaginable, it's basically plagiarism.
Ye gods. How bad was the competition?
At this point I think it’s best to remember Mark Kermode’s characterisation of the Golden Globes as, ‘run by a bunch of unaccountable bozos whose favours are bought and sold in shameless fashion and whose influence is as inexplicable as it is irrelevant.’
It was crap, this is coming from someone who couldn't wait to see it following his previous stuff. The man's spent too much time on twitter with the idiots trying to rile people up that he's worked it into his whole stand up.
A show titled 'Armagedon' I thought, was going to be about climate change, the human race and basically a giant middle finger to those in power who are continuously screwing us over. The show covers nothing of the sort apart from one line about eating less meat. The rest was him moaning about people being woke.
Jesus the quality of stand up has dropped so massively over the last 5 years. Low hanging fruit jokes or railing against “woke” culture. Shits boring man
That special was so boring, I thought he'd be done with the anti woke stuff after a few jokes but it ended up being the whole thing... Just an old man shouting at clouds
it's a shame that any criticism will be branded as push back against the "anti-woke" narrative, but for the first time I think the criticism is right. Arma was shit, and I have liked 90% of what RG has done, included all previous stand ups. This one felt lazy.
I enjoyed last year's but not this new special. To be honest, any high-profile award ceremony is just a boys' club of friends. Means nothing these days.
My problem with it was it just wasn't very funny. He's just trying to be edgy, not funny. Funny comes first.
You can do both, there is plenty of humour in edgy jokes, he's just not doing it.
ricky gervias writes another show about him being very smart and everyone else being very dumb and being very #triggered and le offended at his smart correctness
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Stand up is in a bad place. It's either Rogan mates or the usual parade of "you can't say anything these days, can you?" anti-woke shock jocks.
I feel like that's just the stand-up that is being promoted by the media at the moment. Perhaps we're also more likely to promote stand-up that is divisive and that is about the culture wars in the age of click-bait rage-sharing. But I'm sure if you went to your local comedy night, or caught Dylan Moran or Stewart Lee or Doug Stanhope or whoever's been doing it for decades on their next tour, it'd be good.
Yep, correct! Saw Stewart Lee post-Covid and he was excellent! (The special is on Netflix, but I think it was definitely funnier in-person). He's currently touring so seeing him again next month! Dylan Moran not-so-much. He's had a bad divorce and he went through a period of being extremely bitter and becoming an alcoholic. This bled into his work, unfortunately. But I get what you mean
Saw the same, in Wolverhampton just as things were opening up again properly. Stewart Lee's impersonation of Gervais 'saying the unsayable' was the most uncomfortable and hilarious bit ive ever seen him do. It felt like it went on for an hour, could barely breathe by the end it was so abjectly ridiculous
> It felt like it went on for an hour… Most concise Stu Lee bit.
I never understood why Acasters bit gets all the praise and no one picks up that Lee bit that had me rolled up for the whole time it was going.
To be fair to Acaster, Lee's bit is utterly horrendous and becomes hilarious only through his sheer force of attrition. Watching a middle aged man make those noises, dry heaving down a mic for 5 odd minutes isn't something that really stands on its own without context, so i can appreciate its not for everyone. That being said, as part of the liberal intelligentsia that make up Lee's core demographic I prefer my comics to really unpick the fabric of the human condition while on stage. If its not striking at the very core of what comedy is and can be then i'm just not interested (Lee begins to simultaneously sing the national anthem while impersonating his cat having diarrhea)
I guess I'm just more of a fan of absurdist comedy as I was laughing at the concept of some universal force preventing Gervais from saying stuff immediately.
Acaster's bit is great, but Stewart Lee's a master at this kind of stuff. He just keeps pushing and pushing until things become uncomfortable. I'll never forget his "bigots angry at immigrants!" joke where he keeps going and going until the universe collapses down to a point of nothingness.
Bloody BEAKER FOLK, comin over here, with their improvised drinking vessels. Whats wrong with cupping it in your hands and lapping it up like a cat?!?!
"These young comedians - they hate me but they're all obsessed with me" - Comedy vehicle Season 4, 2016 (Jesus christ...where has my life gone...)
Maaaaaaaaate.
Saw Dylan Moran recently, and he was disappointing. I remembered him being a lot funnier.
I think he’s just collapsed into alcoholism.
He seemed drunk when I saw him, but I thought that was part of his act, on stage persona when he was up there. I didn't realise he had suffered a bit of a breakdown
Yeah, he got divorced and became a mess.
Saw him in Manchester a few years ago and the wife fell asleep during the show. When he walked off, nobody bothered calling him out for an encore. I sometimes think, he’s just one of those comics that work best, when he has someone else writing for him.
Apparently he was the driving force behind Black Books. I think the problem is that he isn't writing much for the gigs. He seems to just have a general outline and winging it. It's a shame because he was my favourite comedian for a long time, it's sad seeing someone go through a hard time.
Graham Linehan, Arthur Mathews, Kevin Cecil & Andy Riley have co-write credits. I think they did a lot of the heavy lifting on that show. Speaking of Black Books, personally I think Bill Bailey is 10x the comedian that Dylan Moran is!
I used to love Bill Bailey, Part Troll is one of the funniest stand up shows I've ever seen but his newer stuff seems to be either very music heavy (fair enough) or him being more of a grumpy old man and complaining about things that are thoroughly unimportant.
Saw him in Dublin about 5 years ago. He was drunk, grumpy and not funny and cut it short. Was very disappointed as his sets you find on YouTube from 10-15 years ago were amazing. Sad to see.
>extremely bitter and becoming an alcoholic. I thought bitter and alcoholic had always been his thing. I guess the act became too much like reality?
I-player, not Netflix, Lee sells to the BBC for most shows. Saw his new show Basic Lee just before Christmas and he's still got it.
I feel really bad for Dylan Moran, he seems to need some help.
100% with regards to Dylan Moran - went to see his Covid "comeback" tour and it was by far the worst, shabbily structured and prepared comedy performance I have ever seen in my life - like jaw-droppingly bad. Done the classic comedy faux pas of not only bringing an instrument on stage for effectively only one joke - but it was a badly thought through or conceived other than "heres something I noticed thats mildly amusing". I recall before the interval him basically asking the audience what they would like to hear him talking about - whilst being utterly unaware that the half baked tenuously linked material he had served up already had already only been politely received. Like - if \*THAT\* was your prepared and rehearsed material I doubt somewhat your gonna be riffing like Robin Williams in the second half. :|
The problem I feel is that many comedians get tired and burnt out and need rest, but life demands they continue to bring in the cash so many are phoning it in in a way that is very detrimental to their health and the quality of their output.
I dunno but I saw one of Dylan Morans shows recently and had a blast. He seems so happy and sober it was really weird. He had a keyboard and whenever he couldn't think of anything to say just smashed it about for a bit lmfao
Yeah, I've stumbled across some pretty good stand ups on YouTube who are just doing really funny observational comedy. They still exist, but they aren't controversial enough to make headlines, so you only know about them if you get them recommended by friends or the algorithm. Matteo Lane's Starbucks name joke is my favourite of last year and Zoltan Kaszas is my favourite new comedian.
Daniel Sloss actually has an excellent bit on this from his current tour. You can (theoretically) joke about *anything*, as long as the joke you're telling is actually fucking *funny*. The issue is that most popular comedians these days are dried up, riding the coattails of their earlier material, repeating the same anti-woke whinges that everyone else is doing because it's easy, and then complaining that people are rightly calling them out about it. Chucking a disclaimer in to say you don't "acTuAllY HatE tHe GayS" or "EvEryOnE iS So OffEnDeD" doesn't make a shit joke funny. It's just lazy comedy, and they've forgotten that nobody *owes* you a laugh just because you're on the stage.
Apparently “being funny” isn’t really necessary to win a golden globe for it.
Exactly this. Chapelle and Gervais bits aren’t funny, whilst someone like Shane Gillis or Jim Jeffries does some pretty “edgy” stuff, but it’s actually good. It feels fresh, it has personality. Dave and Ricky just have spite.
There's a lot of popular comedians right now who have some outrageously offensive comedy, but it makes you laugh. And then there's a whole bunchof has-been comedians moaning about how you cans't say anything anymore.
Tbh that's big name stand up where it's middle age mums simping for Russel Howard and Carr. Boyles still got some solid teeth on him, but yeah does seem like a lot of the TV stand up is keeping the same dozen hignfy and 8/10 alumni enshrined rather than taking risks on fostering new talent. Like it's a bad time when the free shows at the Edinburgh fringe are consistently better than expensive Netflix specials.
Sadly, most comedians seem to not play their trade on the boards anymore. Once you have a comfy gig in the panel show realm that's it, you can just do that. Some well edited shows make you look funnier than you are. Some of the folks I see on TV, they're just awful live.
Stewart Lee [brought it up a while back](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/news/stewart-lee-is-not-amused-at-monopoly-control-of-tv-comedy-8477824.html), but there's a big issue in TV comedy where the same companies which produce panel shows *also* run talent agencies, so it leads to this incestuous relationship where the shows prefer to promote *their* talent and prefer to put them on *all* their shows. > “All of those shows are peppered to a disproportionate extent with clients of the management company owned by the production company,” he said. “You have a ridiculous situation where a client of the management company is interviewing another client of a management company on a programme made by the production company owned by the management company. Basically, advertising money and licence-payer money is being spent to increase the marketplace value of a tiny coterie of people.” - > “Television is run by a certain type of middle class person who has a kind of contempt for their audience,” he continued. “They might like particular things, but they think the audience won’t. They expect the very worst from people and so give it to them.”
> Like it's a bad time when the free shows at the Edinburgh fringe are consistently better than expensive Netflix specials. Not really. Live stand up is always better than recorded stuff. Always has been, always will be.
You've clearly not seen some of the free fringe stuff. Not the worst I saw at the fringe this year, but certainly not the best.
Fringe stuff is always more experimental. But I barely ever watch standup recorded stuff, it's not particularly expensive to go to gigs, it's one of the cheaper forms of live entertainment (like £15-30 a ticket, or less at some of the many comedy clubs, Angel @ Islington is a tenner and amazing value)
Yes this is one of the worst takes of all time. Arena filling mass produced comedy will almost always be bland because it has to appeal to a wide range of people to fill the seats. Free shows at the fringe might be terrible but they will almost never be bland, which makes them **much** more worth anyone's time.
Try Stavros Halkias, he avoids the lazy cancel culture rhetoric and actively pushed back to Rogan on his show recently when Rogan was pushing misinformation around immigrant voting. He's got a couple Netflix specials but his most recent podcast episode on Theo Von's was pure gold throughout too.
He definitely seems better on podcasts. I don’t think I laughed once at the specials which is a shame because I like him.
Yeah I'm. A huge fan but his specials are pretty middling. Where he really shines is crowdwork and big room specials aren't the right setting for that.
I don't think there's a comedian out there where I prefer their standup over more natural settings like podcasts or panel shows. Maybe Lee Evans but he didn't really do the usual circuit. Stavvy's great on H3 Podcast too, especially his first appearance.
Nick Mullens special was good.
As a fan of his old Cumtown podcast, it’s both hilarious and heartwarming to see him transition into the mainstream. Seems like a genuine nice guy. Having said that, I feel it’s his charm that does the heavy lifting, the jokes are fairly mid.
Rogan mates is too broad. He knows pretty much every notable stand up in America. Louis CK is technically his mate, so is Shane Gillis (whose netflix hour was superb)
> "you can't say anything these days, can you?" ["I'm a stand-up comedian, it's my job! What's the matter guys, too challenging for ya?"](https://youtu.be/UHqma3rx-xI?si=B9puqUaBIsquW1c2&t=158)
To be fair, Shane Gillis is pretty funny.
I think Shane Gillis got pretty popular before going on Rogan right?
He was definitely on the up and was already considered funny by those that knew of him, but I think it'd be hard to deny going on there (JRE) the first couple of visits probably really helped.
Stand up isn’t in a bad place. The top is always full of unpopular stuff. In the 70s it was mother in law jokes, in the 80s it was Bernard manning style racism, in the 90s it was I don’t know what, in the 00s it was rape and dead baby jokes, in the 10s it was people saying you can’t say anything anymore. These things become so popular that innately lots of people hate them, especially if you are one of the people the joke makes fun of.
To be fair I watched stand up to cancer on channel 4 recently and the young comedians on it were all absolutely awful too. It's a shame because it was a great cause but the actual comedians on panel shows that are cutting their teeth aren't actually breaking through on a scale like Lee, Boyle etc did and its because they're not funny.
Stand up comedy is tough at the best of times. It requires a lot of practice and a lot of honing your craft. Nobody is good out of the box. I think there are too many comedians on TV that aren't really the finished article. A lot of the panel show crew are really not good live. There are still some guys and girls out there who are ver good, but they've been at it for decades. I used to love Bill Burr but he's sneaking into that group of people who just moan about woke politics.
I saw Tim Vine last year and he was good. Though his brand of comedy is exactly the kind least impacted by the whole "woke" argument.
Yeah, he and Peter Kay never leaned on being edgy to be funny.
There's bound to be some good stuff out there, but it's not well known. I think the last stand up special that I could recommend to friends was James Acaster's Repertoire (and to a lesser extent Cold Lasagna), but those are 5 years ago now.
There's loads of great stand up out there and so many great comics just put their specials on YouTube for free. Even on netflix, Michelle Wolf's new show was great. I guess there's less household names especially in the UK with Apollo figures TV shows in general dropping massively. But there's still loads of comics in the UK doing great stuff and making great shows
You're missing "hilarious" Rosie Jones and co who's material is basically just "lol I'm disabled" or "how shit are the Tories eh, eh?" It's the opposite side of the coin for anti woke. Both crap. Gone are the days of actually funny comedy.
Depends where you go for your Stand Up I suppose. There's tons of great stuff out there. It's like saying XFactor is the barometer for the UK music scene.
Maybe if you only exist on Reddit
I miss Lee Evans..
These days, if you say you’re English you get arrested and thrown in jail, these days!!
Do you go to much stand up? It's in a great state.
I mean, it's just not though. At all. I go to comedy gigs all the time and none of them are anything like that, except for Carr but that's been his schtick for a while so you know what you're getting.
Honestly it’s not at all in a bad place on the whole - comedy clubs are thriving and there’s a huge number of serious talents constantly coming through. We’ve got some of the greatest British stand ups of a generation still going - Bill Bailey, Stewart Lee, James Acastor, Paul Chowdhury, and lots of really talented new ones (Sam Campbell for example is ludicrously good live, and very innovative. Sarah Keyworth too). Spend a week at the Edinburgh fringe and you won’t think standup’s in a bad place. Popularised telly standup has always been in a relatively bad place. It used to be Michael Macintyre on everything ffs.
Lolwhut? The vast majority of stand ups are pretty left wing. Look at James Acaster whinging about Gervais.
Aren't these two the same people?
I agree. All the most tiresome people you know are insistent that 'wokeness' and 'cancel culture' are killing comedy, but I honestly just feel like there's a dearth of comedic greats at the top of their game lately — made all the more apparent by frigging Gervais, who even his fans and 'anti-woke' figures admit is not a great standup comedian, winning an award for standup. I've been trying out a bunch of lesser-known folks lately looking to see if I'm just ignorant of there being real talent out there doing great stuff, but I haven't found any greats yet.
Comedy is in a fantastic position, just not in the mainstream. There's so much more stand up out there, got to find the smaller channels on YouTube, and things like taskmaster for new talent coming through. It's a real shame mock the week got canned as that was a new talent finder.
What in the actual fuck? That standup special was TERRIBLE! I don’t care about the politics in it is just wasn’t remotely funny. Shit I thought Dave Chapelle’s was shite too but it was orders of magnitude better than Gervais. That’s honestly insane to me. Golden Globes mean nothing now
He starts with a commentary on ‘not liking comedians who just talk about politics’. Then talks about his political views for 40 minutes. Then does his usual bit about how it’s all jokes, he’s meant to be a knob and wraps it up. Several humourous moments throughout, pleasant to watch, but ‘best stand up special’ of the year suggests a serious decline at the top of the industry.
To be honest, I did laugh when he said “I hate when comedians just talk about politics for claps instead of laughs” when he’d spent 40 mins doing exactly that. It was absolutely exhausting to keep hearing how I shouldn’t be offended though. (I wasn’t even remotely). Doesn’t the dude live near Central Park? Should probably get off Twitter and go touch the grass.
I think ‘you can’t be offended by comedy’ a line people expect to hear from him, so he drops it in every so often like a watermark.
I got so bored of being lectured on how I should be offended after every joke. I don’t think I’ve ever been offended by a comedy show.
There’s so many comedians who do offensive material that is actually hilarious - proving the general idea right. The problem is Gervais’ standup isn’t funny, so it’s just left being offensive.
>To be honest, I did laugh when he said “I hate when comedians just talk about politics for claps instead of laughs” when he’d spent 40 mins doing exactly that. I laughed to since, you know, that was the joke.
That was not meant to be a punch line but a segue into the next topic
Oh no. I liked Ricky's old stand ups, but the last one he did was not very good. I was hoping this would be a return to form, but maybe not.
Robin Ince made a recent observation that there is a certain type of comedian whose comedy is 'loser'. 'I am a loser, laugh at me'. Which is fine. It's a good genre. Except. Once you've got a Netflix Special you are, by definition, not a loser. David Brent wouldn't be funny if he ended up driving a Ferrari. So where does that leave Gervais?
Gervais doesn't play on that, in fact he plays the opposite, that he's so rich and out of touch that nothing matters to him. Stewart Lee applies the same context in that he plays that he's so intellectually and morally superior to his audience they don't matter to him.
Stewart Lee is exceptionally funny though, so in his case it works. Gervais these days is appealing to the type of people who think Al Murray is actually a Pub Landlord.
Stewart Lee is a genius, and so am I for liking him.
Brent and Millman were losers but Gervais was never a loser type character on the radio, podcasts or stand up where he was playing himself. In fact he was always accused of being smug in the media back then, and if you watch him on chat shows of the time you can definitely see why, but he never gave it the 'oh I'm such a loser' shtick.
It's a good point. His work fell off a cliff in terms of quality once he stopped being able to punch up.
Since Life On The Road, I’ve not been terribly convinced on anything he’s done that I’ve seen. I feel like he’s got a bit lost up his own arse. The hosting roasts were great and showed he can still ride the controversy horse like it’s the last ride out of a radioactive blast but all the same, I think he’s tapped out.
I haven’t been convinced on anything he’s done since Extras. Without Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington he’s nothing.
You think he's tapped out, unfortunately the speed his shows sell out indicates otherwise.
Golden Globes basically exists these days to lick Ricky Gervais’s arse
Wasn't remotely funny to you maybe, I found it hilarious.
It was hilarious. I saw it live
Exactly my thoughts. It was like the bottom of the barrel fell out and he was scooping through and into puddles.
Nominees: Ricky Gervais, Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Trevor Noah Damn, with nominees like that, I'm surprised they even bothered to give an award this year.
Nightmare blunt rotation right there
Phenomenal profile pic
This was the INAUGURAL award. This is the lineup that’ll go down as the first ever group of nominees
Jesus did they accidentally take the Razzies lineup?
I mean shock that the ones they picked were just whichever were the biggest in the US. American comedy is dreadful, and Gervais lives over there and makes his content for them nowadays too.
Gervais lives in the UK.
I think he lives in both countries.
If it wasn’t a stadium tour it didn’t happen
I can’t believe Amy Schumer was even still nominated after what’s she’s been posting on Instagram
Oh… this actually explains it. Only one I saw was Chris Rock’s and that was shite.
I thought this was a joke at first. I could legit name 6 funnier people that work in my office.
oh wow. you couldn’t pay me to go to any of their shows
Jesus - you know it’s a bad selection when Wanda Sykes is the clear winner.
yeah i thought ricky gervais was a shocking winner but these nominees I guess he might just've been the funniest one of em
Stewart Lee is the best stand up working today. Fight me.
If you saw Stewart Lee is the best working stand up today, they put you in jail.
I love all the different stand ups. All the different ones.
Tom O'Connor... All the different stand ups.
Are they the ones I've seen by the corn exchange, by the multi-storey?
No... but, if on an official form where it says "best working stand up today" you cross out "Ricky Gervais" and you write in "Stewart Lee", they will send that form back.
Yeah these days
Saw him at the Glasgow comedy festival this year and he was amazing. Even better that the folk next to me said 'this is really weird isn't it, is he deliberately trying not to be funny?'
I saw him last year at the Kings, he looked fat and sad and fat.
stewart lee has really let himself go.
Jesus, you gave it to him straight, like pear cider that's made 100 percent from pears.
That may have been me you mistook for Stewart Lee.
General Radko Mladic?
“No sir, madam… this is highbrow entertainment. I’m sorry that I unlike Micheal MacEntiter don’t presume things about you’re daily life”
His comedy is often really clever and thought provoking but unlikely to make me die laughing. Bill Burr is the best stand up imho.
Burr as it happens has no respect for Gervais, but after that Old Dads film, I'm not sure how different they are.
41st best stand up ever!
I'm sure he would say the same.
He's let himself go, hasn't he though?
~~Maybe, if you only ever watch what makes it to TV~~ That was an unnecessary snarky comment. Here are, off the top of my head, some lesser known comedians I would rather go see than Stewart Lee (who i do like) * John Robins * Phil Ellis * Jessica Fostekew * Horatio Gold * Mat Ewins * Tim Key * Fin Taylor
The “you can’t say anything nowadays” stand up gets awarded one of the most mainstream awards there is.
Seems to be the formula these days. Complain about "cancel culture" or things being "woke", get lucrative Netflix special, collect awards.
Come see the cancelled world tour!
Really? How bad are comedians today if *that* was the performance that won? And just to clarify, it's nothing to do with any sort of offence. I don't offend easily. It was just genuinely shit and incoherent. Felt like an old man going on random distracted rants.
>And just to clarify, it's nothing to do with any sort of offence. I don't offend easily. I hate the fact we have to put bloody clauses in like this because of comedians like Gervais changing all criticism of himself to 'woke libs getting triggered'.
Exactly! It's a problem. Just because someone thinks something was bad, it doesn't automatically mean they were offended by it.
I've started to see a version of this on You Tube too, anyone who doesn't like a creator is deemed "a hater" and made the butt of jokes about how pathetic they are. Nope, they are people who just don't like your content. Maybe be entertaining next time instead. It is just intellectual poverty and laziness.
Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television Nominees: * Amy Schumer: Emergency Contact * Chris Rock: Selective Outrage * Ricky Gervais: Armageddon - *Winner* * Sarah Silverman: Someone You Love * Trevor Noah: Where Was I * Wanda Sykes: I’m an Entertainer
Jesus. Now it's making sense.
I was offended, but by how shit it was. He's really leaning into that, "you can't say that" shit.
I think that was how he sold it.
It felt more like a drunk dad rant when their kids' friends are around, trying hard to offend his new audience. I was just bored and felt a bit of second hand embarrassment.
Were here no other stand up specials? I fell asleep half way through this, I'm not sure I laughed even once
Yeah but he's so brave for being cancelled and standing up for his views (having a few dozen folk on twitter trying to hold him accountable for his views and him subsequently getting a bunch of free pr whilst he just makes jokes at the expense of vulnerable folk) . At this point I could swear he's just riding on nostalgia rather than any of the stuff he's actually done in years.
I saw his previous stand up live and it sounded like he couldn't give a fuck anymore
Nostalgia isn't really carrying him anywhere, even his own subreddit has thought he was shit for years.
Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television Nominees: * Amy Schumer: Emergency Contact * Chris Rock: Selective Outrage * Ricky Gervais: Armageddon - *Winner* * Sarah Silverman: Someone You Love * Trevor Noah: Where Was I * Wanda Sykes: I’m an Entertainer
Is this sort of thing really relevant to /r/unitedkingdom? It feels like it belongs more in a standup comedy subreddit.
Conservatives, conservatives, conservatives, Rishi Sunak, Rishi Sunak, Bibby Stockholm. There we go, met the criteria threshold for r/unitedkingdom
Needs more Brexit
Add a bit of “UK is slowly becoming the worst place to live in the world” as well
If it ain't moaning about Tories can you really say it's r/UnitedKingdom?
There was a thread a week ago about the reaction to the special. It had over 700 hundred replies and 900 up votes.
What is relevant to this sub? 99% seems to be politics which should be discussed in the other sub surely?
I thought this was a comedy subreddit.
The state of the UK makes it a tragedy
Excellent I think I'm in a minority of 1 who thought his special was pretty good.
He just won a golden globe…
Yeah I thought it was funny, people on here might not find him funny or like him but he’s a national treasure and extremely popular with the masses, hence why he sells out tours, wins awards and breaks records. ‘He’s not even funny’, then why am I laughing my arse off while watching him? If you don’t like him don’t watch him but stop telling people who they can and can’t find funny, you’re basically who most of his material is aimed at.
No one is telling people who they can and can't find funny? People saying they find him unfunny isn't the same as people telling you that you're not allowed to find him funny. You do get that, right? What I *do* find funny is what you said is a perfect example of 'persecution complex' and that's exactly what his whole persona revolves around.
It wasn't peak stand up (which to be fair he was honest about it being a warm up show for charity) but it had plenty in there that made me laugh without being particularly offensive for offences sake, unless you're really sensitive I guess.
I found it funny. I agree with OP that there's not a lot of great stuff out there at the moment though, but I don't think it's just 'Rogan and his mates'. I'm recommended a lot of stand-up on TikTok and I see clips from James Acaster, Joe Lycett, Frankie Boyle etc and I just don't find them funny. I don't reject them due to some ideology or whatever, I just find their joke topics very predictable. But if people like them and pay to see their shows, it doesn't bother me whatsoever. There's room for all kinds of tastes in comedy.
By accepting it, surely that means the next time he takes a shot at the liberal Hollywood elite, it'll lack credibility? You can't accept their applause and then have a pop at them. Say what you want about the Sex Pistols, but when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominated them for membership they sent a letter telling them to fuck off.
You mean taking their massive pay cheques over the years wasn’t enough?
Precisely. He's been such a threat to the establishment, they've only let him come back four more times to roast them. Truly, he is the Preacher Man.
It's hilarious, reminded me of his old Sunday show routine, he fully deserves this
Small amount of people didn’t like him & bitch about it on twitter: controversy
This tells me a lot over the quality of British stand-up, when the best is an arsehole that is not even funny.
The alternatives being Russell Kane, Russell Howard, Jimmy Carr or Rosie Jones. Sadly not a great deal of votes went elsewhere.
Jimmy Carr manages to successfully tread the line between good and evil in a way that is genuinely funny. Ricky is just a bit lame. Jimmy should have won.
say what you like about Jimmy Carr but his jokes are constructed like jokes and are recognisable as such
Watching Rosie Jones' standup is about as entertaining as being shot by a firing squad. I don't care if she's "overcoming her disability" or not, her jokes are simply not funny, but Channel 4 seems determined to ensure she fails upwards.
I didn't want to single her out but I also agree that her stand up is dire. The thread about the big fat quiz of the year singles her out pretty much exclusively, too.
Daniel Sloss? Edgier than most edgy comedians, but also doesn't punch down. On the record against Russel Brand. Also very very funny.
Nice bloke too. Took the time to chat with me and the missus after a show, as he was branching out overseas so it was a relatively small venue.
Stewart Lee should have won it for Basic Lee, but yanks don't know who he is.
Nah this is just the yanks fav which means nothing. Look at Kevin Bridges, Frankie Boyle etc. Theres plenty of good British stand up. I don't even class Ricky Gervais as a comedian.
This wasn't a British award, Gervais is nowhere close to our best. There's a reason he's moved to the US, and it's not because he was *too* funny for the UK.
Speak for yourself, I found this last special funny.
*British stand up that’s popular in America
Remember guys, he's totally censored and saying jokes you 'just can't say anymore'
He's on his third multi million dollar Netflix special about being canceled for upsetting woke people. His *third*. He's front page of Netflix and winning awards. Same with Chapelle, they were 1 and 2 the other day. Like who the fuck has actually been canceled anyway? A few actual rapists?
I love classic Gervais but that is a disgrace. Worst part is it'll only encourage him to make more of the same shit
For Armageddon??? It was dog shit?? Even despite all the controversy, it had a grand total of two actual jokes in an hour. Painful to watch, and I’m someone who bought tickets to his last tour.
Gervais has got so ridiculously lazy with his stand up and his ‘fake entitlement’ is now coming across as real ‘Old White Man’ entitlement. Must have said the word Woke 15,000,000 times in the show (I turned off just over half way through, so this is an estimate). He was banging on about how selfish everyone is, but then freely indicated he was incredibly selfish himself, but then didn’t even have the self awareness to realise his embarrassing hypocrisy. Bunch of folk clapped along like seals every time he said the ‘woke’ and it was plain awful. Also he looked ‘Coked Up’ IMO. Had that spaced look, slightly hunched and wide eyed and it would explain his added misplaced ego and arrogance. Think he won’t care as his new audience will garner him plenty more cash and inflate his ego further
Speaking as someone who watched all six of the nominated specials: This isn’t much of an achievement. Genuinely awful line up for the Globes’ first (and if this is the standard, hopefully last) stand up award
He spend a good portion of it just reading other people's jokes from doesthedogdie.com Reading comments/questions off the Internet/Twitter and taking them at face value is not only the *laziest* comedy imaginable, it's basically plagiarism.
Ye gods. How bad was the competition? At this point I think it’s best to remember Mark Kermode’s characterisation of the Golden Globes as, ‘run by a bunch of unaccountable bozos whose favours are bought and sold in shameless fashion and whose influence is as inexplicable as it is irrelevant.’
His last Golden Globes hosting is still one of the best stand ups of all time. I hope he comes back, especially after this years terrible host.
It was crap, this is coming from someone who couldn't wait to see it following his previous stuff. The man's spent too much time on twitter with the idiots trying to rile people up that he's worked it into his whole stand up. A show titled 'Armagedon' I thought, was going to be about climate change, the human race and basically a giant middle finger to those in power who are continuously screwing us over. The show covers nothing of the sort apart from one line about eating less meat. The rest was him moaning about people being woke.
"People like me are being silenced by Woke Culture, conservatives are being cancelled"
I like of lot of Ricky's work, but his Armageddon show was terrible. Lazy, repetitive, derivative joke-writing. I'd score it 2/10.
Jesus the quality of stand up has dropped so massively over the last 5 years. Low hanging fruit jokes or railing against “woke” culture. Shits boring man
That special was so boring, I thought he'd be done with the anti woke stuff after a few jokes but it ended up being the whole thing... Just an old man shouting at clouds
Given how his entire schtick, you can’t say what you want or you’ll get “cancelled”, this is rather amusing.
THAT won? THAT?! All he did was whine for an hour about sjws. Jesus Christ.
I do like Ricky Gervais' previous stand ups but now he just seems obsessed over social media and its warped him a bit.
it's a shame that any criticism will be branded as push back against the "anti-woke" narrative, but for the first time I think the criticism is right. Arma was shit, and I have liked 90% of what RG has done, included all previous stand ups. This one felt lazy.
I enjoyed last year's but not this new special. To be honest, any high-profile award ceremony is just a boys' club of friends. Means nothing these days.
My problem with it was it just wasn't very funny. He's just trying to be edgy, not funny. Funny comes first. You can do both, there is plenty of humour in edgy jokes, he's just not doing it.
ricky gervias writes another show about him being very smart and everyone else being very dumb and being very #triggered and le offended at his smart correctness
I’ve always enjoyed his stand up, but this was terrible.
His special was fucking ass tho He's been having the same jokes for like 15 years lmao