I just did what I do.
That was Ricky Gervais’ response to the confected outrage over his hosting of the 2011 Golden Globe awards.
For those of you who want to bone up CLICK HERE for Gervais’ brilliant monologue and HERE for the best bits from last year and this year. Because you’re worth it.
And for those of you who can’t be fagged watching here’s a few of my favorite lines to give you the feel….
“Welcome to the 68ths Golden Globe Awards It’ll be a night of partying and heavy drinking, or as Charlie Sheen calls it, breakfast.”
“It’s been a big year for 3D. Toy Story, Despicable Me, Tron. It seems like everything this year was three dimentional. Apart from the characters in The Tourist.”
“A few shocks. I Love You Philip Morris wasn’t nominated. Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor – two heterosexual actors pretending to be gay, so the complete opposite of some famous Scientologists then. Probably. My lawyers helped me with the wording of that joke.”
“I was sure the award for best special effects should have gone to whoever did the airbrushing on the Sex In The City 2 Poster. Girls, we know how oid you are. I saw one of you in an episode of Bonanza.”
“I like a drink as much as the next man, as long as the next man is not our next presenter, Mel Gibson..”
“Looking at the faces in this room reminds us of how much great work has been done in Hollywood this year. By cosmetic surgeons.”
I also particularly loved and suspected that what was really got the audience off side was how Gervais went the spray about actors being the most important people in the world. “Actors. They’re just better than ordinary people, we all know that.”
Tom Hanks and Tim Allen said ‘We remember a time when Ricky Gervais was a chubby and kinder comedian. Neither of which is he now’. They’re now dead to me.
Gervais’ last line was ‘Thank God for making me an atheist.’
CLICK FOR GREAT ARTICLE GERVAIS ON WHY HE AN ATHEIST
I saw a punk band in Sydney Rd pub on Saturday arvo that finished set simply with ‘thanks cunts’. Gervais could have done same.
I was depressed and liberated in more or less equal proportions by Gervais’ hosting. Everything he said was true. Which every single uptight, hypocritical, backstabbing, navel gazing, narcissitic, meglomanical psychopathic insecure attention seeker in that room knew.
Apparently people were offended. O
ffence is in the sphincter of the uptight white honky who’s convenient answers have been questioned. Offence is an unavoidable and healthy byproduct of free speech. Offence is subjective.
I love this ‘offence’ story about Geoffrey Robertson, Australian QC who now lives in Britain and most well known for being Kathy Lette’s shag…
>When I first got to England, of course, and first made it to the Old Bailey – my very first case – I still had those irritable Australian vowels that… (with accent) ‘France’ and ‘branch’. And I had to defend an Australian. He’d been convicted, I was doing the appeal. And I said, “My Lord, this is a case about a t-shirt, whether it’s indecent.” The logo was “Fuck Art, Let’s Dance.” And there was a terrifying silence. And the judge said, “Fuck Art, Let’s what, Mr Robertson?” And I said, “Dance. ‘Dance’, my Lord.” There was another silence. He said, “Oh, you’re an Australian. What you have to learn in these courts, Mr Robertson, is to say, ‘Fuck Art, Let’s DAHNCE’.” There was lots of sycophantic laughter and I think the judge was so pleased at embarrassing a young barrister that he acquitted my client. But I learnt very quickly to say “dahnce”.
It was George Carlin who said “It’s a comedian’s job to find the line. And cross it.”
In 1973, a father complained to the FCC that his son had heard the George Carlin routine “Filthy Words” broadcast one afternoon over WBAI, a Pacifica Foundation FM radio station. In the ensuing court case FCC v. Pacifica Foundation Justice Willian Brennan findings included this…
It is quite evident that I find the Court’s attempt to unstitch the warp and woof of First Amendment law in an effort to reshape its fabric to cover the patently wrong result the Court reaches in this case dangerous as well as lamentable. Yet there runs throughout the opinions of my Brothers POWELL and STEVENS another vein I find equally disturbing: a depressing inability to appreciate that in our land of cultural pluralism, there are many who think, act, and talk differently from the Members of this Court, and who do not share their fragile sensibilities. It is only an acute ethnocentric myopia that enables the Court to approve the censorship of communications solely because of the words they contain.
I am reminded yet again that Lenny Bruce, considered one of the world’s greatest comedians and social commentators was jailed several times for ‘word crimes’. His 1964 conviction in an obscenity trial was followed by a posthumous pardon, the first in New York state history.
To celebrate Ricky Gervais’ popping of pomposity and exposing what a bunch of uptight white honkies most people are I have posted all the columns I’ve published on the Logies. I can’t say written. Because the column I wrote for the 2010 Logies, despite being commissioned, and advertised on the Monday would run on the Wednesday never made it to print. Because I was sacked on the Tuesday because of “offensive remarks and bad language”.
I just do what I do.
God Bless Ricky Gervais. Let him be an inspiration to us all. I like comedy to make me squirm.
God Is Bullshit, my one woman show is back for the 2011 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Offended or your money back!
Worth a watch
Philip Pullmen, “No one hasthe right not to be offended”
Julian Morrow’s Andrew Olle Lecture on Independence, satire and press freedom