Splitsider

Gervais is kind of becoming the Kanye West of comedy, as both are prolific, incredibly successful, continuously lauded geniuses with heavy crown issues. So when a few people pointed out that his new character, Derek, might be offensive to the mentally disabled, he puffed out his chest and started railing against his detractors. In an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live he said, “Every single week has been the end of my career if you believe six or seven journalists. It makes no difference to me or my work. I don't care if people like it or not. I'm happy with it.” Listen to the audio [...]

Ricky Gervais' Daily Show appearance last night starts out with a description of a panda as a "big wobbly spunk bomb," and things only get weirder from there. Until Jon calls him out on miming what's either wide-girth masturbation or human-panda rape, that is. It doesn't really weirder than that. That might be the apex of weirdness for us as a species.

Whether Karl Pilkington is the so-called idiot Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant insist on reminding us he is, or he is a brilliant comedic performance artist is pretty irrelevant to the appeal of An Idiot Abroad at this point. Gervais and Merchant made their name and fortune on a hyper-realistic, painfully uncomfortable mockumentary sitcom, it’s only natural they have created a hyper-realistic, at times uncomfortable documentary show. Or is it scripted as well? Best not to trouble yourself over that question too much and just enjoy watching their former radio producer disdainfully grapple with his new role of globe trekker.

Last season they “forced” him to visit the Seven [...]

Ricky Gervais said months ago that this year's Golden Globes would be his last, and now he's confirming it. "It's like a parachute jump. You can only really enjoy it in retrospect when you realise you didn't die and it was quite an amazing thing to do," he said. Yes, I agree, an amazing thing that only needs to be done three times and doesn't need to be talked about ever again.

This lengthy article on Ricky Gervais gets into his attitude towards the controversy he often stirs up, and it also makes the very good point that it's sometimes hard to square Gervais the public figure and Gervais the TV writer:

Gervais’s stand-up act can be difficult to reconcile with his TV work. Attired in a black T-shirt, jeans or black pants and a headset microphone that recalls the aggressive seduction expert played by Tom Cruise in Magnolia, Gervais may variously riff on the first doctor who had to tell a patient he had AIDS, or the differences between Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man and a real-life autistic [...]

Ricky Gervais has a new show premiering on Channel 4 in the UK on Thursday entitled Derek. In it, he plays the titular character, a nursing home employee who sure appears to have some mental disabilities of one kind or another. He's coming under some fire for making fun of the disabled, but he defended himself by saying that “Derek is a fictional character and is defined by his creator. Me. If I say I don’t mean him to be disabled then that’s it. A fictional doctor can’t come along and prove me wrong.” Which is a fair point! But it's also fair for people to assume the [...]

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant would be incomplete without Karl Pilkington, the bread to their peanut butter and jelly, the paprika to their salt and pepper, the reluctant apothecary to their Romeo and Juliet. In this interview with the star of An Idiot Abroad, Pilkington describes the process of becoming friends with Ricky Gervais when producing his radio show:

I was making Ricky a tea, and he hit me on the head with a mobile phone. I said, “What’d you do that for?” And he said, “Ah, I just wanted to see what it sounded like.” I think that was him testing me out, really. That was him [...]

Tweeting a picture of himself dressed as Hitler is kinda bad, but at least Ricky Gervais didn't go ahead with his original plan to come onstage at the Golden Globes dressed as Hitler.

“I was going to get to the podium, let it die down – then go, ‘Too much?’ Then I wanted to look in the crowd and go, ‘It’s the wrong crowd, just the wrong crowd’. Then I was going to say, ‘That’s the last time I borrow a suit from Mel Gibson.’ That would’ve been good, wouldn’t it?”

Nope. It wouldn't've. That would not have been good, at all. Looks like we need to start [...]

Last night was the Golden Globes, hosted by Ricky Gervais, the most self-satisfied insult comic on Earth. As promised, he made fun of celebrities, the awards themselves, and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Thanks to the overhyping of his "danger" by both NBC and Gervais himself, I don't think there was any way that he could live up to the expectations. That's his monologue up there, which contains the lion's share of his material for the night. Unlike the Oscars, the host really just does the monologue and comes back a couple times throughout the ceremony at the Globes.

As for the awards themselves, the show continued it's pattern [...]

Ricky Gervais has thought about it, and decided that he "got it a bit wrong" last time he hosted the Golden Globes. Yeah, okay. I mean, he was pretty insulting to a lot of people, and it's impressive that he's – oh, what? He's not done with that quote?

"I tried too hard with the schtick, the comedy, and I should have just gone out there and done zingers, I think, because the attention span of someone at an award show, particularly the Golden Globe, is about a second." Ah, okay. So we're going in the "less comedy, more insults" direction. Hoo boy.

According to Ricky Gervais, An Idiot Abroad's Karl Pilkington and Warwick Davis of Life's Too Short will star in The Short Way Round, in which the two go on "bike riding adventure together throughout different countries." Poor Karl. When are they gonna let him stay home and have tea?

In which our intrepid traveler never actually swims with marine mammals. I would normally invoke the “spoiler alert” were this plot twist not so brazenly announced by both the Science Channel’s episode guide and the preview. By the end of episode, Karl indeed foregoes the standard bucket list item of swimming with dolphins for the potentially more fatal option of swimming with a Great White Shark. In reality — this is reality television after all — he is lowered into a cage where sharks can swim around him but he remains stationed in one place. Which is fitting, since the entire premise of the series revolves around adventures happening [...]

Whether you know Ricky Gervais best as a writer, an actor, or a brave, envelope-pushing purveyor of Kim Kardashian zingers, it's safe to say you’ve heard of the comedian who turned  the world on its head Sunday with a performance as Golden Globes host that completely delivered on promises to shock and alarm viewers.  The streets are still filled with rioters in the wake of the Golden Globes ceremony, during which Gervais sent the masses into a frenzy by taking aim at sacred cows like Kim Kardashian’s short-lived marriage, Justin Bieber, and the movie Norbit. While you’re barricaded in your home to keep safe from the anti-Ricky Gervais mobs [...]

Ricky Gervais was on Conan last night, and he was kind enough to provide some faux-pornography for all the late-night pervs who stumble upon TBS and aren't sure what's going on. The image of his hairy breast crevice can only be matched in beauty by his deformed Twitpics, and thank the good Lord we get to see some of those too. Really, who needs porn channels when you have this? (You'll be too busy vomiting to look at porn for weeks!)