On Tuesday, Netflix released a new comedy special from Ricky Gervais, SuperNature. And like clockwork, hours later, headlines about Gervais’s transphobic material began to pour in.
“The old-fashioned women – oh, God. You know, the ones with wombs? Those fucking dinosaurs,” chirps Gervais not five minutes into SuperNature. “I love the new women. They’re great. The new ones we’ve been seeing lately – the ones with beards and cocks.”
This type of blatant, no-holds-barred anti-trans content has become rather easy to find on Netflix—which, under the guise of free speech, continues to platform comedians who seem particularly obsessed with making fun of the trans community. Look no further than Dave Chappelle, the legendary US comedian who keeps finding himself in hot water with the LGBTQ+ community over transphobic jokes he’s told in multiple Netflix specials.
In October of last year, Chappelle’s jokes inspired a mass walkout at Netflix led by LGBTQ+ employees. But if anything, in the months since, Chappelle has doubled down on his stance. Earlier this month, Chappelle headlined four performances at the Hollywood Bowl for the inaugural Netflix Is a Joke festival, where he added even more transphobic material to his repertoire—despite promising to stop telling trans jokes at the end of his last Netflix special, The Closer. (The fourth and final show ended with him getting assaulted by an audience member who later told the New York Post that he had reached his “breaking point” while watching Chappelle make jokes about the LGBTQ+ community and the unhoused, and found the new set “triggering.”)
While Gervais and Chappelle have both been flogged in public for their transphobic jokes, their anti-trans sentiment seems to come from two very different places. For Chappelle, it’s become personal. For Gervais, though, it seems to be merely business.
For those familiar with Gervais’s work, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The star of the original British version of The Office has always fancied himself something of a provocateur, throwing out barbs at Hollywood’s elite during his multiple stints hosting the Golden Globes and revelling in his “edgy,” envelope-pushing humour. In every way, SuperNature is exactly what you would expect from the comedian, who tells equally stale, eye-roll inducing jokes about a whole host of marginalised communities and “sensitive topics” – going beyond the trans community to take shots at the Chinese, AIDS, and disabled children, among many others.
Gervais sees himself as an equal opportunity offender, and even uses that to justify why he targets the trans community in his special. “I talk about AIDS, famine, cancer, the Holocaust, rape, pedophilia. But no, the one thing you mustn’t joke about is identity politics,” Gervais says toward the end of SuperNature. “The one thing you should never joke about is the trans issue. They just want to be treated equally. I agree. That’s why I include them.”
Throughout SuperNature, Gervais tries to play both sides, opening with a convoluted Merriam–Webster–esque definition of “irony” as a vague defence for everything he’s about to say. The concept, according to Gervais, means, “When I say something I don’t really mean for comedic effect, and you, as an audience, you laugh at the wrong thing ’cause you know what the right thing is. It’s a way of satirising attitudes.” His true beliefs, he claims, are not in line with the jokes he tells. At one point—in a line sandwiched between transphobic jokes—Gervais admits what by this point seems somewhat obvious: that he doesn’t actually hate or fear trans people.
“Okay, full disclosure: In real life, of course I support trans rights,” he says in his special. “I support all human rights, and trans rights are human rights.” But Gervais will also try on any hat in order to get a laugh. “I’ll take on any view to make the joke funniest,” he says. “I’ll pretend to be right wing. I’ll pretend to be left wing. I’ll pretend to be clever. I’ll pretend to be stupid. Whatever makes the joke funnier, without prejudice.”
Gervais’s big problem, however, is that none of his jokes are funny. He has, in effect, become the physical manifestation of a “dead-baby joke,” à la his fellow British comedian Jimmy Carr—dealing in humour that could only be considered shocking or edgy to anyone who hasn’t yet finished middle school. (For the record, he literally tells a dead-baby joke in SuperNature.)
Whether you find his material funny is, I guess, subjective. But objectively, the vast majority of it – basically everything that doesn’t have to do with the trans community – is old hat. Gervais eschews socially relevant topics and current events to focus on ideas that were taboo in the late ’90s. The coronavirus is brought up only as a thinly veiled segue to get into jokes about AIDS and Africa, the sort that you can find in any rerun of South Park. Gervais spends no less than 20 minutes stumping away about the absurdity of religion, something he’s been talking about for well over a decade now. His best joke, if you can call it that, pertains to the age-old concept of whether it’s ethically responsible to go back in time and kill baby Hitler – an idea that has been played out since about 2003. (By the way, Gervais has been telling some version of this joke for at least four years now.)
It’s abundantly clear from SuperNature that Gervais has nothing new to add to the cultural conversation. His only novel material, the only relevant topic he can muster any willpower to comment on, targets trans people. He tells these jokes in an attempt to stay relevant to a comedy community that has outgrown him; seeing him go through the motions is like watching a silent-movie star give her all in a talkie, to no avail.
In some ways, the opposite is true of Chappelle. Unlike Gervais, Chappelle appears to feel that he – like Gervais, a successful, multimillionaire comedian – is the real victim in the ongoing culture wars between himself and his critics, a war that places trans people and Black people in opposition to one another. (Never mind, of course, that it’s possible to be both at once.) In The Closer, Chappelle makes clear that he believes society values Black men less than it values the queer community. “In our country, you can shoot and kill a n-gga, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings,” he says.
In his Hollywood Bowl show, which I attended, Chappelle seemed goaded by the criticism he’s received to double down on that worldview. While phones and recording devices were strictly prohibited from capturing the set, it would be impossible to forget his rant about the Netflix walkout – how he felt the entire LGBTQ+ community was trying to rob him of his livelihood by protesting his jokes.
Like Gervais, Chappelle attempted to persuade the audience into believing that he isn’t really homophobic, telling a story about meeting Lil Nas X at the Met Gala and claiming to be a fan of the young, Black, queer artist before telling jokes at his expense. But rather than leaving the queer community alone, Chappelle dug his heels in, describing his frustration – his hurt – about what had “happened to him” because of the queer community. His air throughout the night was one of triumph – of a knight who had vanquished the dragon and come up on top. For Chappelle, that dragon is the LGBTQ+ community. Even after his assault, Chappelle maintained a certain level of smugness, incorrectly joking “it was a trans man” who had tackled him.
Ultimately, the depressing thing about Chappelle is how talented he is – how he maintains the ability to craft a funny, relevant joke. When he turns the lens away from the queer community and onto himself – as he did in a riff about filing an order of protection against a racist intruder on his property – he’s still intelligent, irreverent, groundbreaking. But with every special and surprise set, he seems to stray further away, driven not by comedic impulse but by vendetta. It feels like he’s been radicalised.
This is not to say that Chappelle and Gervais’s comedy doesn’t overlap at all. Both of them really enjoy talking about how rich they are, with Chappelle describing the length of his driveway to great comedic effect and Gervais casually dropping that he lives in a 17-room mansion. In a medium where relatability is, if not paramount, then at least a large part of the equation, that might explain why these two middle-aged multimillionaires have turned to punching down on the trans community, albeit for different reasons. Some members of their audience connect to this type of material because it taps into provocative, “edgelord”-style humour. Others seem to believe that they, too, have been silenced and pushed aside by “cancel culture,” and long for the old world. Gervais’s connection to this crowd seems motivated by a mercenary calculation. For Chappelle, it seems motivated by anger.
“Good evening ladies and gentlemen,” says Ricky Gervais at the beginning of SuperNature. “Please welcome to the stage a man who really doesn’t need to do this.” In Gervais’s case, that couldn’t feel further from the truth. But in Chappelle’s? It’s spot on.
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