Ricky Gervais only cares about getting laughs with his comedy.
Ricky Gervais only cares about making people laugh
The creator of ‘The Office’ wants people - of all political stripes - to laugh at his comedy as he loves the “buzz” of it.
The 60-year-old funnyman told Closer: “You hone the jokes to them bulletproof - it’s not like I go out there and say, ‘I’m going to say the first thing that comes into my head, I don’t care what people think.’ I do care, but shouldn’t worry about what people think of the politics of the joke.”
He continued: “I’ll pretend to be right wing, left wing, clever, stupid - I just want everyone to laugh at the joke, whatever their politics, whatever their real beliefs. I want to be more honest, that’s all I care about. It gives me an adrenaline rush. I think, ‘Can I say that?’ Of course, I can, I’ve just got to say it right. And that’s the buzz for me.”
The ‘After Life’ creator is moved by the response to the Netflix series - that he also stars in alongside Diane Morgan, Kerry Godliman, Penelope Wilton and Tony Way- which focus on Tony Johnson, a local newspaper journalist dealing with the loss of his wife.
Ricky said: “I think the important thing about the show is that it deals with grief more openly. Even therapists will come to me and say they use this in their grief counselling sometimes. One grief counsellor said to me, ‘Please don’t let Tony commit suicide and I took that on.”
The five-time Golden Globe host - whose jokes held nothing back with the star-studded guest list as the punchlines - added that he was “worried” about the reaction to things he gets Tony to do but it has been positive.
He said: “I was worried about the bit where I threatened a little bully with a hammer, but all these posh middle-class people come up to me and they go, ‘I’ve wanted to do that because someone was bullying my son.”
The avowed atheist - who has never gotten married to his partner of over
40 years, the novelist Jane Fallon, 60, due to his lack of religious belief - argued that creating fiction is so great because “it's the closest thing to being God”.
Ricky said: “All I want to do is get my point of view across, be honest and make people think about stuff. It’s never been about viewing figures, awards or money. It’s always, ‘I can get this off my chest, I can say this, can I do this? And I love creating characters and their worlds. It’s the closest thing to being God.”
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