Exclusive Interview: Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant were complete nobodies when they walked into the BBC and pitched their idea for a mock documentary about a workplace. The Office premiered in July of 2001 and is considered one of the most perfectly crafted comedy series in British television. Gervais’ comedy of embarrassment, exposing everyday faux pas, gaffes and prejudices, found an eager audience in the U.S. as well where NBC created its own version of The Office and HBO is home to his series Extras and The Ricky Gervais Show, as well as his stand-up specials. In this exclusive interview, he talks about upcoming projects and his view of life in his inimitable way.

WS: You will be in Curb Your Enthusiasm; how did that come about?
GERVAIS: I’m appearing as myself in an episode and I’m very excited. Larry David and I had been in contact, e-mailing each other over various things. When I did The Marriage Ref, I had lunch with him. I had met him before. I actually interviewed him for a thing I did for Channel 4 in England, meeting my comedy heroes. I did my three biggest influences who are alive, which are Christopher Guest, Larry David and Garry Shandling. I really hit it off with Larry. I feel that we’re similar in a lot of our sensibilities with comedy. I can see the same influences in his work as mine [from Laurel and Hardy and Woody Allen. We’ve been credited for this comedy of embarrassment and he’s such a funny, funny guy. It’s real modern observational comedy that he did with Seinfeld. I was a huge fan of Seinfeld, as was everyone, but I liked that it was the first time stand-up observations were rendered well in a narrative piece. Usually, you saw stand-up comedians get their own TV show and they’d go into a room and do some shtick, whereas on Seinfeld, they got the shtick done in the first few seconds showing that it was a stand-up, and then they acted out the observations and took it to its logical conclusion. It was real comedy for comedians as well as being very broad and mainstream, which I’m not so good at. I can’t get my head around to doing a live studio audience and all that. If you’re going to do a broad mainstream studio audience show, Seinfeld’s the one. They set the bar—it’s never been improved upon. So it’s an honor to work with Larry.

WS: What sort of comedy do you prefer doing?
GERVAIS: I’m obsessed with realism because I think it resonates more. I also like nonverbal stuff, body language, and that has to be very intimate, so I like the camera getting in there. In TV, you don’t need to sit back and play for the gallery. You don’t need to shout lines. You don’t need exposition. The camera gets right in there, closer than real life can, and you can be really subtle. People feel body language, they don’t need things spelled out for them.

We came to The Office with a much bigger list of don’ts than dos. We hated exposition, those people who come into a room and say, “Sarah, you know your brother, the doctor,” “Yea, of course I do.” That’s just lazy script writing. Likewise, you don’t need to be very big. Comedy has gone through this phase of people acting in a funny way. If they’re in a sitcom, they have to act funny and I’m thinking, why are they acting like that? You laugh at people who are normal everyday or so-called normal people. So The Office was about a lot of nonverbal communication.

WS: And it wasn’t only about the joke, it was also the setting?
GERVAIS: The Office was probably the first out-and-out comedy about comedy. There was so much about comedy: David Brent thought he was a comedian. It was about people being less funny than they wanted. We weren’t laughing at funny jokes, we were laughing at bad jokes and we were laughing at the aftermath of a bad joke. Not everyone is the wittiest person in the world in an office. A lot of people make a joke, and a bad joke is the most embarrassing thing in the world, so we studied the aftermath. We studied this guy who thought he was a comedian, but clearly wasn’t. We had a go at broad comedy, just catchphrases, people shouting catchphrases. We had a go at people doing impressions of comedians, which I’ve never understood. The impressionist comes out and does an impression of a comedy character and I think, that doesn’t count, what are you doing with that?

The reason The Office worked was because of the realism. If you take away the fact that it’s a fake documentary, it’s just a slow sitcom without many jokes in it. As soon as you explain to people this is a fake documentary, they say, “Ah, I realize why he’s acting like that. He wants to be famous. He wants to be loved. He wants to gain respect through popularity as opposed to doing all of these honorable things. I know what sort of man he is. He is a man of our generation, who wants to be part of this new class called celebrity, which is all-forgiving and accepting.”

WS: The difference between classes has been a theme in British television, hasn’t it?
GERVAIS: British sitcoms have always been about class, really, from Dad’s Army, which was about the middle-class person being of lower rank to the working-class person but the working-class person still felt threatened by him because he was educated and had the social graces, to Fawlty Towers. Basil Fawlty wanted to move up a class. He didn’t want the riffraff, as he said. He wanted to mix with lords and ladies, and that’s true of British society. Before people aspired to be invited to Buckingham Palace. Now they want to go to Beckingham Palace. We invented class, and now we’re inventing new classes, and the latest one is this insatiable need to be famous or a celebrity. They did a survey in England amongst 10-year-olds and asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up, and they said famous. That’s terrible, and it’s getting worse. Andy Warhol couldn’t have known how prophetic his statement was, people do want their 15 minutes of fame. But now they plan it and they know when their 15 minutes is going to be. They get an agent. They go to Big Brother or much, much worse reality shows. They’ve been watered down so much. When I first watched Big Brother I thought it was an amazing social experiment. Now it’s 12 Ypsilon minors wanting to go in, wanting to show as much flesh as they can, sell their story when they come out quickly and capitalize on it. And it’s eating itself, it’s being watered down, now there are celebrity shows with siblings of celebrities or next-door neighbors of celebrities. I don’t know when it’s going to stop. It’s a sort of a homeopathic approach to fame. [Laughs] It’s extraordinary.

There’s something quite sad about it, but I don’t know whom to blame. Shame on all of us, shame on the people who are so shallow and ignorant, shame on the people who exploit them, shame on us for watching, shame on the papers who drag them over the coals. But I don’t know what to do really, because these people want to live their life like an open wound, and they’ll never be famous enough. I don’t think there is a difference between fame and infamy. People bring up awful things if they think the paper will be interested or get them column inches. They tell the most awful things about themselves. If I see a celebrity telling their deepest, darkest secret, I want to go, “Don’t print it. Don’t print it. Don’t pander to it.” Because the more you do the more people want to read about it. And it’s lifting the toilet seat of life. There’s nothing wrong with being famous, as long as you’re famous for something or as long as it’s an upshot of something you do, but not the aim. It really does seem like a strange thing to reach for the symptom.

WS: Even in your “comedy of embarrassment,” you’re always going for some fundamental truth about how we behave or how we think.
GERVAIS: Absolutely, truth is a theme for many reasons. Even if the truth is ugly, it doesn’t mean it’s not true. And I say things that put me at risk for being very unpopular. Just not saying something doesn’t make it not true. I have always gone to taboo areas as well as discomfort, but hopefully for comic effect, not to just make people feel uncomfortable. I hone in on the excruciating social faux pas, the minutia of human behavior that everyone identifies with.

I was always brought up being told to write about what you know. I’ve always done that. I’m on surer footing. If you write about what you know and it’s a labor of love and you’re passionate about it and it’s a single vision, you’re probably going to create something that hasn’t been done quite like that before. And if you do it for yourself, there are six billion people on the planet, enough of them are going to go, “Aha, that’s my favorite program.” Whereas if you second-guess people and go for a huge audience and make it anodyne, safe and populist, sure, you might get more viewers for a while, but it’s white bread. All my favorite things have been acquired taste. I’ve had to work at them; they didn’t hit me like bubble-gum pop. Things like The Wire on TV, the most audacious piece of programming ever. Radiohead. That lasts a long time. There are a million songs and one could be a hit, but you could replace them with a thousand other songs. It’s just filling a gap. And an awful lot of TV is filling a gap in the schedule.

WS: They say TV is what happens in between the commercials.
GERVAIS: Well, that’s exactly right. People get promoted in TV if they make a program. Doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, if they made a program, they get to make another one! And that’s not putting down the state of TV. It’s always been that, really. Now there’s more time to fill. But let’s get this straight—in anything, art, technology, commerce, anything you’re doing or creating—by definition, 90 percent of it is okay to bad. But you’ve got to say, “I want to be in that top 10 percent,” even though you might even lose the 90 percent of people that like the other stuff.

WS: Where do you tend to get your ideas?
GERVAIS: I get ideas from real life and people. It’s a fundamental rule of comedy and drama that there has to be a human aspect. You can’t find anything funny or interesting unless it’s personified in some way, because comedy and drama are about empathy. It’s about understanding what that person you’re watching feels, and you’ve got to care about them. Specifically comedy is a branch of drama—they’re the same thing, really. The dictionary definition is one ends in a wedding and one ends in death. [Laughs]

You can’t really laugh at people you don’t like. Comedy is strange because the mechanics of comedy have to be intellectual, they can’t be emotional. You can’t laugh at someone if you don’t like them, you don’t trust them and you don’t find them funny. But again it’s about where you’re at in the story. I think if a comedian comes out and tells you a thousand of the best one-liners, that are great puns, that play on words, beautiful piece of mechanics, you laugh as a reflex action. He could throw in a false punch line and I think you’d still laugh because you’d be in the rhythm and it would wrong-foot you. As good as those comics are, you’ll look at your watch after 20 minutes. Instead, if someone shambles out and says, “I’ve had a terrible day,” You’ll say, go on. It’s our job as comedians to let the audience know we have had as bad a day as they’ve had and let’s laugh about it. You mustn’t be above the audience. You mustn’t go out there and be macho or sexy or better. That’s boring. There is nothing remotely funny about an unfeasibly handsome brilliant person doing things well and having a great life. It’s instantly not funny. And I play on that. I play out the card that I am better than the audience. But they clearly know this is a character and it’s satirical because I always end up being the butt of the joke. I always end up getting something wrong. They’re laughing at my total misinformation. Empathy is important in comedy. So a lot of my ideas come from, “There but for the grace of God go I.” There’s a little bit of [David] Brent [Gervais’s character in The Office] in all of us. We’re all a putz now and again. We all worry about how we come across. And that’s funny. But in real life it shouldn’t be like that. Because reputation is what people think of you. Character is what you really are. And it’s difficult. If someone says something about me in the press that’s not true, the first thing I want is to stand up and go, “No, you’re wrong.” But then you think, Who cares? Why am I worried? It’s difficult.

WS: Because you get caught up.
GERVAIS: Well, of course. Someone could say, “He’s not funny. I’ve never found him funny. His face makes me want to smash the TV in. He revolts me.” All those things are fine. But they can’t say, “I saw him eating squirrel at The Ivy.” I go, “No, no, no, that’s a lie.” You can have your own opinions but you can’t have your own facts. Because there’s a total injustice with lying. It’s awful. In the film The Invention of Lying we put forward the case of the white lie, the good lie. But let’s all know that it’s a lie. I suppose the most controversial and poignant bit in the film is when I discovered that I can lie in a world where no one else has ever been able to lie and I use it for good. Where my mother is dying and I tell her there is a heaven.

WS: To comfort her.
GERVAIS: Yes. A belief in an all-powerful being that is good and fair, omnipotent, omniscient, is a beautiful idea. Greatest superhero ever invented. But let’s be clear, he was invented. And it’s a lovely way to live your life, by all those values. I was brought up a Christian, and they are great values: Treat everyone equally, do as you would be done by, forgiveness, great. Then you get to religion and people begin to cherry-pick a little bit. Then they start to decide what the Bible means. Then they start to be able to vote on what bits they live their life by. Then it gets into all sorts of difficult territories. If you do this you go to hell, unless you say sorry. Say sorry once a week if you want. Then start again. I mean, really? That’s okay, is it? And I think that as an atheist, I probably live my life better than most Christians and there’s a big statement.

WS: What can you tell us about your new show,
GERVAIS: It’s the third in the trilogy of the Gervais/Merchant narrative comedy: The Office, Extras, Life’s Too Short. It’s still about the excruciating social faux pas, taboo, middle-class angst, dealing with difference. The Office had a huge emotional strand; it was a romantic comedy, really. People tuned in for David Brent and stayed tuned in for Tim and Dawn. Extras moved into dramatic territory with a quite poignant similar satire. It was continuing to study fame. This guy had these ambitions and they changed him and now he wanted to redeem himself. Redemption—a good Christian value—is not only a wonderful thing in real life but an amazing dramatic vehicle. It’s just great. If you look at what I’ve done there’s always been that sort of strand: feel a little bit sorry for him, bit of a putz, underdog, does well, becomes an asshole, says sorry, back to square one. You know, that’s life. That happens all the time.

But Life’s Too Short is different. If The Office was 50/50 comedy/emotion, Extras was 70/30 comedy/poignancy-drama and Life’s Too Short is 100-percent comedy. It’s just about what’s the funniest thing that can happen. It’s about the life of a showbiz dwarf played by Warwick Davis who really is a showbiz dwarf, obviously. And it’s not just funny because of the situations he gets himself into—an alternative title could’ve been, Hoist with His Own Petard—it’s funny because he’s got small-man complex. He brings it on himself. He’s manipulative, jealous and ambitious and the world hits him harder than he hits the world. But we have to let people know they can laugh at him. We don’t want people to think it’s funny because he’s short. It’s funny because he’s pretentious and manipulative and has a huge blind spot. That’s why it’s funny.

WS: Do you ultimately work to please yourself?
GERVAIS: Only, only to please myself. That way you’re bulletproof. If you start trying to please other people, then you can fail. If you’re only trying to please yourself you can’t fail. It’s impossible [to fail] if you get your own way. So for me, success is getting my own way, having the show turn out like I want it. Then anything else that happens doesn’t matter. Selling out is one thing, but selling out and still failing, I couldn’t get over that.