Ricky Gervais: Humanity

Ricky Gervais: Humanity (2018)

Streaming on Netflix. 

It's a hilarious take on how people take offence for anything and everything, often without understanding the context and the intention. He talks about how people won't laugh at a joke, which has the word 'rape' in it and there's a difference between having the word in a joke, and making jokes on the act itself. He also talks about how sometimes, it's not even punching up and down - it could be plain, witty word play or pun. His entire humor is punching down, and yet it makes us laugh because his way of telling the story is so good and in a way empathetic that we forget our problems, our own lives, our tolerance to pain and go into his shoes and look at things from his perspective. Doesn't mean our lives are trivial - it's just that for a life you forget stuff and just enjoy the jokes. The ordinary 'scum'. The jokes on the posters offering guitar lessons. Why he won't have kids. All of these are hilarious. And he even has jokes in between narrating, for example - he narrates two long stories about why he won't have children, and then he says, 'my third reason is...' and that's funny because we wouldn't expect he'd have more. It's very interesting how he has this special full of jokes. It's entirely unpredictable. I'm really enjoying the way trying to understand how jokes work - and that's the best part - understanding comedy doesn't make jokes any less fun, just like how people say - when you study cinema, how do you enjoy it? It's the same here too, knowing more about the form makes it more fun to appreciate and engage with it. Absolutely loved this one.