[imagesource: Twitter / @rickygervais]

Over on Twitter, Ricky Gervais has spent the past 24 hours retweeting countless people praising his new stand-up show, Armageddon.

The show is up and running and fans are speaking about belly laughs, almost pissing themselves, and non-stop chuckles from start to finish.

Critics, on the other hand, have been less kind.

Before somebody cries out that it’s just the liberal media that can’t handle his anti-PC approach, let’s check in with the conservative outlet The Telegraph.

Two stars and “a tiresome cocktail of neediness and tastelessness”:

Gervais’s imagination circles around a very small pool of tropes. As in previous shows, he imagines how God designed genitals, mocks prayer’s medical inefficacy, mimes masturbating and namedrops Hitler, with little flair for phrasing, and largely unvaried delivery…

He complains about “virtue-signalling”, yet moralises about the environmental case for eating less meat, humble-brags about video-calls he’s done for terminally ill children, and reminds us his ticket-sales support animal charities…

Gervais is competent enough – I chuckled once or twice – but there’s nothing to surprise anyone here.

I have no doubt the stand-up show will still be sold to Netflix for a massive amount of dough.

Ricky, who I still love from days of old in The Office and other classics, will be sure to point this out.

He’s less likely to feature anything from The Guardian’s review, which is also a two-star affair:

It’s all a bit sad. Gervais is a clever chap, and a compassionate one, towards animals at least. But he’s convinced himself that anti-woke is a rebellious pose to strike – then convinced himself again that juvenile bants represents the best way to stage that rebellion.

And so for punchlines we get African babies with Aids, sweatshop children whose mums get raped… [and] if we don’t laugh, we’re “fragile” and “scared of words”…

Throw in a few gags about his penis size from the 61-year-old, and the descent from the salad days of The Office is near-complete.

Look, it’s always going to be downhill after The Office. You can’t reproduce that magic again.

All in all, it sounds like the kind of stand-up that Helen Zille might enjoy in between bouts of ranting about the ‘woke agenda’.

I did manage to find one favourable review in The Times. Four stars, pal, although we can’t elaborate as it’s behind a paywall. Ricky did share that review on Twitter.

Now we wait for the special to hit Netflix and the ensuing and inevitable outrage.

For now, relive a classic:

[sources:tele&guardian]