How did Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais Get This Awful?

Monday is about movies and TV. For the first of 2024, what the fuck is with Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle, and Netflix?

Welcome to 2024. I celebrated by following up a drive home from holiday by watching the new Netflix comedy specials by Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais. Back to back.

I once adored both of these comics. Well, Gervais’ work in The Office and Extras, at least. Chappelle’s TV show (Chappelle’s Show) and early comedy specials were amazing.

It’s funny, then, that they are the black and white sides of the same coin. Megastars with giant Netflix deals, dining out on trans and ableist jokes, doubling down and then further down; their material dated, and so desperate to appear as “controversial”.

Gervais a white comedian, with a predominantly white audience tells very white jokes (sorry “jokes”). Chappelle is one of the most important of black comics. It’s Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle. They all had plenty of white fans but they are black comics, representing black experiences and it’s largely intented for a black audience.

It’s weird to see both of these guys scraping so low.

I’m on the record as finding the last two Gervais specials as cringe-worthy, embarrassing, and for the most part so deeply unfunny as for that to almost seem profound, by fluke of course.

And though I haven’t written about Chappelle in ages, I’ve just moved away from finding his specials funny; from connecting in any way with what he is doing or saying.

Both Chappelle and Gervais are playing a role within the role of standup comic. They are hiding behind the idea that they are playing an exaggerated version of themsleves. Chappelle does it by putting on a uniform (a stylised version of a flak jacket with his name on it like he’s reporting for duty) and banging the mic against his knee to signal and punctuate his punchlines. Gervais does it by doing his silly, whiny question-mark voice, and reminding you that it’s just jokes, and a performance within the performance.

Both pretend to not care about criticism, laughing that it couldn’t possibly mean a thing since they’re so wildly succesful. They both double down on this also. Each man has more than one special with several minutes devoted to rebuffing critics, repeating the sentiment of their worst jokes (if not just repeating the jokes) and mocking anyone that can’t get that comics have freedom of speech.

Gervais riffs on Greta Thunberg and Michael Jackson. In 2023. Chappelle circles back on his trans jokes from his previous specials so many times, and always with the same smug sense of weird, hiding-something conviction.

It’s bizarre to see these two comics so desperate to self-mytholgise, to dine out on their success as proof they are better than any criticism, as proof they are working provocatively on purpose as some sort of meta-prank.

It’s bizarre to see them both so bafflingly unfunny.

Late last year Ricky Gervais’ Armageddon droppped on Netlix.

Just yesterday Dave Chappelle’s The Dreamer arrived via the same service.

Two streaming piles of shit.