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London,
Not on a roll: Ricky Gervais’s new show Science was disappointing
What you see: there was an impressive laboratory settin
Edinburgh comedy: Could this be the point where a wheel falls off the Ricky Gervais bandwagon? Umpteen Baftas and Emmy Awards might be clogging up the Reading-born star’s shelves but it is hard to see his new tour bringing home many baubles.
While there were plenty of punchlines and the obligatory tasteless quips last night, this is undoubtedly his weakest stage show yet.
The set is the most impressive thing — a Frankensteinian lab of bubbling test tubes and a brain in a jar. Which is appropriate, because the script feels distinctly bolted together out of anecdotal off-cuts. The title is Science, though even the 48-year-old show-off, sporting his trademark black jeans and T-shirt, joked this was fairly tenuous.
Things started very unscientifically with some barely topical banter about Britain’s Got Talent. The judges should surely be the country’s most talented people, so why is Amanda Holden there? A routine about giving animals to Africa as Christmas gifts followed. He was good at conjuring up an image of a goat gambolling through the Cotswolds before being abducted and taken to Africa, “like Roots in reverse”.
He unpicked the story of Noah’s Ark, reading from a children’s book given to him as a Sunday School prize when he was four. He is not the first person to be sceptical about how so many enemies shared a boat, but he revealed his chum Karl Pilkington had a brilliantly stupid solution: “In a crisis you all pull together.”
Despite the laughs, however, there was something missing. It was certainly not Gervais’s smutty schoolboyish side. The usual politically incorrect gags about homosexuality, rape and the elderly were present. Yet this still felt puzzlingly like a work-in-progress.
The answer could be found in the pre-gig onscreen plugs for two forthcoming movies, Cemetery Junction and The Invention of Lying. The all-conquering comedian has certainly been busy, but maybe he has not spent enough time on his stand-up. For now, more Science homework is required.
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I had the misfortune of sitting through this show at the previews in London. Afterwards I said to the person I was with that there really wasn't any kind of show there at all. I couldn't believe he would stick with the same routines without a major overhaul but it seems like he is running with exactly the same act. The first section (amanda holden) is predictable but benefits from gervais delivering it in the style of Stewart Lee (ie repetition, repetition, repetition until it becomes compellingly amusing/irritating) but this just shows that Gervais has no real stand-up skills of his own. There is no structure to the show, no themes, no riffs... no actual jokes except the opportunity to "laugh" at the idea of being the kind of person who laughs at rape jokes/ disabled jokes/ jokes about terrorists/ paedophile jokes etc Delivered with all the panache of Jim Davidson in his prime.
- Stephen Jinks, London
