British comedian Ricky Gervais hosted the Golden Globe Awards for the fifth time last night and came loaded with take downs for the mightier-than-thou Hollywood elite. The liberal media was not pleased.
Glammed-up celebrities packed into the Beverly Hilton, nervously chuckling and shifting in their seats as Gervais unloaded nearly eight minutes of jokes all aimed at the darlings of Tinseltown.
“You’ll be pleased to know this is the last time I’m hosting these awards,” Gervais said to the crowd’s whimper of uncertain chuckling. “So I don’t care anymore.”
“Let’s have a laugh at your expense,” he warned, sipping from a pint of beer. Gervais began with some fairly mild ribbing about Hollywood’s insistence on more diversity in nominees and winners: “We were going to do an ‘in memoriam’ this year, but when I looked at the list of people who died, it wasn’t diverse enough.”
There was a joke about Felicity Huffman’s prison stint, suggesting the convicted actress was spending her time hammering license plates. Gervais also took aim at the critically panned “Cats,” ribbing actors Dame Judi Dench and James Corden for their participation in the film. “The world got to see James Corden as a fat p-ssy this year. He was also in the movie ‘Cats.’”
Gervais poked fun at Leonardo DiCaprio for dating younger women and joked about the excessive length of “The Irishman.” He suggested “Leaving Neverland,” “Surviving R. Kelly,” and “Two Popes” were about pedophilia, and even took a jab at the disgraced Prince Andrew—all par for the course and expected mockery from an evening with Gervais.
But the end of his monologue included a condemnation that went past joking, causing the once smiling celebrity faces to grimace and glance around anxiously at their peers.
“Apple roared into the TV game with ‘Morning Show,’” Gervais said as NBC panned to a stoic looking Tim Cook in the audience. “A superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing—made by a company that runs sweatshops in China.”
#goldenglobes2020
Tim Cook:
"Don't mention the sweatshops.
Don't mention the sweatshops.
Don't mention the sweatshops."
Ricky Gervais: pic.twitter.com/4q0BHDsA1N— Jim Worrisome (@ultradesign_be) January 6, 2020
Gervais didn’t stop there, making a clear departure from his comedic monologue to an extremely valid point. “Well, you say you’re ‘woke’ but the companies you work for…Apple, Amazon, Disney…if ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?” he said to a shocked crowd. “So, if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. Come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God, and f-ck off, okay?”
While the reaction of audience was apparent immediately, thanks to on-camera reactions like this gem from Tom Hanks, it wasn’t until after the show that liberal members of the media expressed their disgust that Gervais would dare criticize Hollywood millionaires for being uninformed hypocrites.
Tom Hanks with the Jim face at the #GoldenGlobes 😂 pic.twitter.com/bovxyZdnp1
— Neesin The Kid (@StayFlyLife) January 6, 2020
“Good Riddance to Ricky Gervais, the Sneering, Purposefully Intolerable Golden Globes Host,” said a strongly worded headline in The Ringer. “Nobody’s better at being intolerable on purpose,” the author conceded. “And nobody better embodied the chaotic-evil energy of a somehow already intolerable 2020 in general and the world-historically wacky Golden Globes in particular. You go to war with the award-show host you have, especially when the world itself is on the brink of it,” he suggested.
“Gervais lost his shock and awe,” said USA Today in a review of the show that panned the comedian’s performance and lack of political sensitivity. “Was Golden Globes host Ricky Gervais even trying in his fifth time at the Globes microphone?” the review questioned. “There weren’t many barbs to his supposedly sharp humor, merely a few weak jabs at Apple and political celebrities,” the author said, dismissing the bold implications of Gervais’s criticisms.
Los Angeles Times television critic Lorraine Ali skewered Gervais for his opinion that celebrities shouldn’t weigh into politics during an awards show. “At the Beverly Hilton, where the three-hour-plus ceremony took place, the mood was already sober thanks to an impeachment, the threat of war with Iran and devastating bush fires in Australia. The last thing anyone needed was for the smirking master of ceremonies to reprimand them for having hope, or taunt the room for trying to use their influence to change things for the better,” she wrote.
The #GoldenGlobes mood was already sober thanks to an impeachment, threat of war with Iran and Australian bush fires. The last thing anyone needed was Ricky Gervais there, telling them they sucked. https://t.co/58PAMOikhu
— Lorraine Ali (@LorraineAli) January 6, 2020
Vulture suggested the show could only have been enjoyable if you “could get past Ricky Gervais,” whom they likened to “a predestined ride on a jam-packed subway car, where your nose has nowhere to park but inside a fellow commuter’s stanky armpit.”
The New York Times decried Gervais as the “worst host,” while celebrating the most popular cause of the night: climate change, which was dutifully championed by award winners like Patricia Arquette, Joaquin Phoenix, and Russell Crowe, who wasn’t even present for the ceremony but spoke through Jennifer Aniston. The Times also singled out and applauded Michelle Williams’ pro-abortion speech as the “most potent thank-you.”
Slate didn’t even wait until the ceremony wrapped up before slamming Gervais. “Just how big a jerk was Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes?” A tweet from the magazine queried with a link to an article ranking his opening jokes in terms of “dickishness.” The magazine said many of his jokes, including one that compared Joe Pesci to Baby Yoda, were “Just plain mean.”
If the Monday morning analyses of Gervais’s hosting gig are to be believed, we really ought to be more sensitive to those poor celebrities and not be so “just plain mean” to them simply for “having hope.” Entertainment writer and self-proclaimed ‘neoliberal shill coastal elitist’ Bob Chipman even suggested that celebrities are a marginalized people who don’t deserve to be skewered this way.
The fake self-flagellating "let's have Gervais 'roast' people LOL" thing has turned into THE grossest faux-populist spectacle outside The Razzies (and Razzies are shit.)
Posh Brit reheating leftover 4chan dunks on marginalized people whose wealth is supposed to make it "okay"
— Like Kurosawa, I Make Mad (@the_moviebob) January 6, 2020
Those poor celebrities. Ricky was just too mean when he called them out for taking huge amounts of money from companies who carry on shady relationships with communist nations. He should have been more sensitive for pointing out the hypocrisy of the Hollywood Foreign Press for insisting on a climate-friendly all vegan menu while flying floral arrangements in from all over the world. When will Ricky ever learn?
