Ricky Gervais strikes a blow at cancel culture

Gervais previously went viral for his scathing words at the latest Golden Globe Awards, at which he was the designated host for that year. He boldly and famously stared down his audience of the Hollywood elite and told them, “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.”

“You shouldn’t have to go to court for telling a joke” said Gervais.

He continued, “I did a tweet a month ago about freedom of speech, quoting Winston Churchill. Someone came back with, ‘You know he was a white supremacist?’ And I wrote back, ‘Not in that tweet he isn’t’. It’s like if someone did something once that’s wrong, everything they did was wrong.”

Gervais went on to say that he was a vegetarian and loved dogs, just like Hitler, and that it’s perfectly OK to separate the good from the bad in somebody, and to have good things in common with them. “the only thing I have in common with Hitler are the good bits!” quipped Gervais.

Perhaps the most important point Gervais made during his latest discourse is that if you feel offended by a comedian (or anybody else), you have every right to call them names, stop watching them, burn their materials (assuming you have bought them, of course), and generally boycott that person. But nobody should have to “shouldn’t have to go to court for saying a joke that someone didn’t like.”

“If you don’t agree to someone’s right to say something you don’t agree with, you don’t agree with freedom of speech,” Gervais stated. Lately, freedom of speech has been under attack and been questioned from many different angles, and Gervais’s forceful words can be seen as a counter-balance to those attacks.