Less than two minutes into his new Netflix special, Ricky Gervais warns the audience that he will be deploying irony throughout his set. “That’s when I say something I don’t really mean for comic effect,” he explains and you laugh at the wrong thing because you know what the right thing is, as a way of satirising attitudes.
He then suggests that the “worst thing you can say today, [to] get you cancelled on Twitter, death threats... is ‘Women don’t have penises,’ right? Now, no one saw that coming. You won’t find a 10-year-old tweet of someone saying, ‘Women don’t have penises.’ You know why? We didn’t think we f**king had to!”
