Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ricky Gervais: Armageddon’ On Netflix, A Christmas Release Where The Comedian Doesn’t Aim To Bring Anyone Peace

Despite Netlix not making screeners available, the Golden Globes felt ready to pre-approve Ricky Gervais (a five-time former host of the Globes) as one of their inaugural nominees for Best Stand-Up Comedian on Television for his newest Netflix special, Armageddon, out this Christmas morning. What did they know that we didn’t? Or do they merely believe in Christmas miracles?

RICKY GERVAIS: ARMAGEDDON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Gervais has claimed that his previous Netflix comedy special, May 2022’s SuperNature, was the platform’s most-watched of last year (in an October post on X/Twitter, he even boasted 60 million viewers, which doesn’t correspond with any public Netflix data or somehow even make the cut for Netflix’s own 10 Years of Stand-Up, By The Numbers). But the bigger issue, Gervais says in his new hour, is that his comedy has produced a “big backlash.”

So he has decided to address the backlash by telling us how words have changed and how much the world has changed, and perhaps it the end of the world is near, but it’s not going to be because of jokes.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Bloomberg had reported in 2021 that Dave Chappelle’s 2019 special, Sticks & Stones, had reached 24 million people, and that aforementioned Netflix 10 years of stand-up report claimed that was their most-watched special of all, further clouding Gervais’s claims. But the two comedians have been following similar PR arcs, for better and for worse.

Memorable Jokes: Taken at face value, Armageddon‘s through line finds Gervais checking off a list of the ways humanity might end on planet Earth, and while he’s wondering how the world evolves and whether we’ll evolve with it, he keeps pointing out how the meanings of words have evolved, too, and whether we need to keep up with the changing definitions.

On the former front, then, he’s got jokes about global warming, about recent scientific advancements allowing us to live perhaps 100 years longer than ever before and whether that’s a good thing (it’s not, he’ll tell you), and about the threats posed by AI. But you’ll likely be thinking or talking much more about his asides and tangents, in which he repeatedly insinuates that he’s decided to go woke only to mock the whole concept, offer his own theories on cultural appropriation and critical race theory, imagine sick, dying or abused kids in Africa, China or England just for kicks, and yes, imagine how much fun it might be to mock Make-A-Wish kids in his video messages to them.

Our Take: The folks who pushed a petition in the wake of Gervais releasing this teaser about Make-A-Wish are really just playing into his hands. Netflix already liked what they saw enough to put this special out on Christmas morning, so Ted Sarandos and company were never going to excise this particular bit or anything else from his hour.

But the broader issue here is that Gervais is engaging in straw-man arguments to fuel his own backlash and propel his infamy for further viewership statistics, Netflix contracts and ticket sales on the road.

He has some interesting ideas worth exploring in this hour about whether we as humans are ready to keep up with a changing planet, and yet he keeps sidetracking himself unnecessarily to indulge in these imaginary scenarios obviously structured to at once offend our sensibilities and then provide ready-made defenses for himself why we’re making too much out of words which are harmless. Sticks and stones, indeed.

“It’s like they protest too much,” he says, talking about the supposed need to identify as anti-fascist at the end of 2023. “Now the word ‘fascist’ can mean, ‘liked a Joe Rogan Tweet.’”Yeah, that’s not true. Funny. But not true.

But what’s he after when he’s imagining waving boatloads of illegal immigrants ashore at Dover (it’s also a very British hour, by the way, full of local references to Gary Lineker, and Scousers and more)? Or when he makes a crack about an African baby born with AIDS and then imagines a real-life African couple with a newborn with AIDS watching his special? Or when he engages in an extended act-out where he’s a young child miming a hand job to a pedophile who promised him a puppy? Or when he tries to turn cultural appropriation on its head by claiming black people appropriated “the n-word,” saying “we invented that!”? Or when he chastises imaginary Chinese kids working in a sweatshop for the lack of quality in the tracksuit he bought off of Amazon? Or when he creates a fictional father with two sons, one of whom is a 6-year-old named Timmy who just wants a motorized wheelchair and a ramp for Christmas? Wait, what kind of father was letting Timmy live without these things for six years?

His definitions of woke, critical race theory and cultural appropriation are all off-base. His jokes about a supposed backlash against Eddie Redmayne focus on his Stephen Hawking biopic and not somehow not somehow not the one where he played a trans woman. His jokes about Michael Jackson are actually moot because Jackson did stand trial and won in court.

But I suppose I’m the bad guy for pointing all of this out.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Why does anyone at Netflix think this is Christmas programming? If it’s instead merely another cheeky decision meant to offend, or a somehow deviously clever bit of holiday counterprogramming, it’s still arriving on the yuletide table a bit half-baked. Sometimes fast and loose plays really well in the room, but this material was not ready to serve up to a global audience.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.