You’ll realise this is great satire when I’m dead,” Ricky Gervais, purveyor of increasingly cheap comic shocks, announces, in the twilight moments of his new Netflix special, Armageddon.
He’s being ironic: even by Gervais’s own estimation, the show is not a piercing satire. In fact, it is almost an anti-satire, a list of unsayable things for which Gervais invites his audience to provide meaning. The problem is that, unlike “great satire” – which is provocative, incendiary and takes the abuses of the establishment to task – Gervais has become trapped in the web of political correctness.
