Why can’t successful comedians like Gervais take criticism?

Roisin O’Connor, The Independent

You can set your watch by how long it takes Ricky Gervais to react to criticism. Just hours after an old clip of comedian Stewart Lee mocking his Netflix show After Life was circulated again on social media, Gervais was boasting about the series’ viewing figures from his X/Twitter account.

Then he tweeted about the millions of people who watched his comedy specials. Then another about his huge new house. You’d think he was making up for something.

If you missed the clip of Lee the first time around, he was being interviewed for Rob Brydon’s podcast in 2022 when he called After Life, Gervais’s maudlin comedy about a widower, “one of the worst things ever made by a human being.”

It may seem like a casual comment, but Lee was speaking out of genuine concern for the state of British culture. She thought the Gervais series that made her a star, The Office, was “brilliant.” But her later work bordered on “awful,” she said. Lee felt sorry for those drama and creative writing professors who tried to defend what makes something “good,” when After Life is a hit.

“Thank you to the 160 million people who made After Life the most-watched British comedy in the world,” Gervais boasted yesterday, shortly after Lee’s clip went viral again, sharing “one of (his) favourite scenes from the show.”

Gervais has never been good at handling criticism. For all his talk about reserving the right to be offensive (I suppose it’s a coincidence that the people he addresses tend to be the most vulnerable in our society), he clearly hates being laughed at.

When things don’t go his way, he breaks down, the most infamous case being a disastrous and painful interview with his hero, the late Garry Shandling.

Gervais is visibly nervous, his body tensing as a terse Shandling describes their first meeting as “awkward”. After being told off for telling the older comedian how to put in his contact lenses, Gervais looks away and asks desperately: “It’s a nice house. Is it council?” There are other moments when he seems close to tears. Arguably one of the most revealing moments comes just after this, when the conversation turns to comedy and the role of ego. “Do you think it[ego]stops you from being funny?” Gervais asks.

His, certainly, does. You can sense Gervais’s insecurity from miles away, in the way he delights in insulting a child in After Life; in how he launches into those ever-moving numbers as proof of how much he is adored. “See?! How can 160 million people be wrong?” After the “proof” comes the platitudes: “The more successful you are, the more criticism you get,” he wrote. “The more criticism you get, the harder you work. The harder you work, the more successful you are.”

We’ve seen similar behavior, to varying degrees, from figures like Ed Sheeran and James Blunt. Both have frequently spoken out about the criticism they receive from critics: Blunt’s documentary, One Brit Wonder, recently hit Netflix and is dedicated exclusively to how he overcame the struggles of a private school, a glittering military career, and a record deal to beat those evil music critics.

Although his album sales never seemed to be affected by what critics had to say, Blunt did manage to sway public opinion in his favour around 2014 by proving himself to be quite funny on Twitter. “Why isn’t James Blunt touring Scotland?” asked one fan. “Scots have taste,” he replied. I myself was left with my jaw dropped after reviewing one of his shows.

I compared his pain to rhyming without ibuprofen, but I also thought he was a great artist capable of poking fun at himself. “Looks like you sent a smug PMS-ridden idiot to an otherwise GREAT gig,” Blunt wrote in response. Oops.

In the documentary, Blunt and his friends argue that the media turned against him because of his privileged background or simply because he was successful. Maybe they did have something to do with it, but it’s astonishing that he won’t even come close to admitting that maybe, just maybe, it was because of the music. Because there’s no way anyone could find anything to hate in “You’re Beautiful,” right?

Longtime fan and labelmate Sheeran was interviewed for the documentary, and saw what Blunt had been through reflected in his own experiences. The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter has admitted several times that he is obsessed with his own sales figures.

With albums named + (Plus) or x (Multiply), it’s no wonder he has numbers in his head. At a Cardiff stadium gig, he mentioned not once but twice that it was Wales’ biggest ever show. But what’s behind this compulsion to keep repeating those statistics, if not as a message to detractors?

This seems to be the driving factor behind Gervais’s latest posts, and indeed those that have preceded them whenever a fellow comedian, journalist or anyone else criticises him. If you take his posts at face value, you’d think his success lay in breaking records or the many, many zeros in his bank account balance. But I’m sure that deep down he knows it’s all a bluff.