Ricky Gervais has spoken for the first time about the Will Smith slap - saying he would NOT have joked about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair loss.
The comedian - famous for "roasting" celebrities as the host of the Golden Globes - admitted he would have made jokes about Jada's “boyfriend” instead.
Testing new material at a show in Highgate, north London, Gervais said: “I’ll get it out of the way. I have not got any Will Smith material. I trended when that happened and I was not even there.
“What has it got to do with me? People were going ‘What would have happened if Ricky Gervais had been doing it (hosting Oscars)?’
“Well, nothing as I would not have made a joke about his wife’s hair. I would have made a joke about her boyfriend.”
Will and Jada made headlines in June 2020 when August Alsina claimed that he was in a relationship with Jada, who later confirmed that they had been in an "entanglement".
The annual ceremony was thrown into chaos on Sunday night when Fresh Prince star Smith, 53, slapped host Chris Rock after the comic made a joke about his wife and her alopecia.
Rock had joked on stage about Pinkett Smith's buzzcut, saying: "Jada, can't wait for GI Jane 2."
Many viewers were quick to draw parallels with Gervais who routinely “roasted” celebs while hosting the Golden Globes five times.
And Gervais joked that he might rename his tour in honour of the Oscars spat.
“This new material is going to be for my new show called Armageddon. I might change that to Alopecia,” he said.
Many celebrities have previously found themselves the subject of Gervais’ jokes at the Globes, with clips being watched millions of times on YouTube.
During Gervais’ opening monologue in 2020, he criticised the length of some of that year’s film nominees, including Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which runs nearly three hours.
“Leo DiCaprio attended the premiere (of ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’) and by the end, his date was too old for him,” Gervais joked. “Even Prince Andrew is like, “Come on, mate’.”
Mel Gibson has been Gervais’s recurring victim. In 2010, before introducing the actor, Gervais stood behind the podium with a glass of beer in his hand and said, “Honestly, I like a drink as much as the next man. Unless the next man is Mel Gibson.”
When Gervais introduced Gibson again in 2016, he said he wasn’t judging the actor back in 2010. “Listen, I still feel a bit bad for it,” he told the crowd. “Mel’s forgotten all about it, apparently. That’s what drinking does.”
In 2011, Gervais poked fun at Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, who starred in the romantic thriller The Tourist.
“It seems like everything this year was three-dimensional,” Gervais said. “Except the characters in ‘The Tourist.’”
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Asked whether he would consider returning to hosting duties in a recent interview, Gervais said: “It could be the Golden Globes could offer me £10m for 10 minutes work, you know, and I’d be an idiot, I’d be a liar, to say I wouldn’t consider it.
“But at the moment, given I’ve done it five times, it got better and better for me – I enjoyed them all, but it got better – and I’m planning never to do it again.”
Gervais has previously defended making jokes about subjects deemed to be too taboo or risqué.
He said: “People straight away, particularly with a comedian, if you’re joking about a subject, they think you’re anti it as opposed to pro it. I’ve tried to explain this in Humanity.
“It’s an occupational hazard of being outspoken. I think offence is the collateral damage of free speech, and it’s no reason not to have free speech. That’s what I’d say — it’s the lesser of two evils. Having free speech and some people getting upset by it is the lesser of two evils because not having free speech is horrendous.”
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