Ricky Gervais’s ‘SuperNature’: Less Edgy, More Hedgy.

The jokes are decent. It’s the constant stream of caveats that ruins it.

You might hear about the “edgy” transgender jokes in Ricky Gervais’s new stand-up special on Netflix. Pay the “critics” little mind – the anti-woke elements of the latest Gervais (The Office, Extras, Derek, After Life, etc) outing are probably the funniest. Even if they feel a little Chappelle-lite.

But it’s the hedging and the associated fluff which let the hour-long performance down. Gervais, like all comics, is funniest when authentic-est.

But a lot of what he ends up explaining about his jokes undermines even the flirtatious incredulity, let alone the outright camaraderie much of the audience wants in his indignation. Maybe he’s just too comfortable, now. He certainly feels a need to express it, with decent gags about his own wealth sprinkled into the set.

Gervais even enters to the instrumental version of his own character David Brent’s Freelove Freeway. Some of what he expresses feels like he is struggling with that line of becoming Brent, and resisting the pull of his own parody. Steve Coogan displays similar tendencies with his Alan Partridge character, who he recently played while interviewing himself (as Coogan) for a Guardian article that gazes so far into both the actor and the character’s own navels that it’s unclear how meta this all needs to be in order to make someone laugh. It feels non-canon as a result.

Perhaps most frustratingly is I’ve been waiting for SuperNature for weeks, expecting a victory lap of sorts after Gervais wowed us with After Life. In some ways, the set is classic Gervais. But classic Gervais may be tired.

During the special, he talks about the evolution of comedy. Things change, blah blah blah. But they don’t seem to have changed in much of a positive way for Gervais in his stand-up routine. For instance, he recycles some old material about (not) killing baby Hitler, but loses the best part – as seen in his interview with Seth Meyers from 2018 (below) – about his Apple Watch popping up pictures of baby Hitler on his wrist during meetings.

In fact, the entire premise of the special feels “off” to me. A lot of the “intellectual” wiggle room he builds for himself between gags feels like a conscious attempt to create room for maneuver - perhaps to excuse himself. It shouldn’t be necessary.

The “evolution” he speaks understandingly of may be the entire problem. Change for change’s sake. Like a lot of the topics he covers. There was nothing wrong with normal women. Why do we need women with “beards and cocks,” as Gervais puts it?

Some things are timeless and require no excuse. Gervais knows this. Which is why he feels comfortable concluding on a joke about a school classmate offering to finger a teacher. It’s puerile, it’s authentic, and it works. Those moments are the best part of Gervais, which are now lost between explainers.

Yes, the 60-year-old’s willingness to assail the unassailable – transgenderism, Islam, his money (a near-taboo in a country dominated by the politics of envy: Britain) is laudable, welcome, and required. But because of the constant caveats, it feels forced and kayfabey.

SuperNature feels like a special for an audience of one: Ricky Gervais. In fact, in his own introduction of himself, he calls himself a man who “doesn’t need to do this.” More often than not over the course of the hour, it felt precisely that way. He didn’t need to do it.