A guy worth over a hundred million, sitting posh in his fluffy London mansion, tells a Puerto Rican artist whose community is being called “animals” by government officials that he isn’t allowed to use 30 seconds at a microphone to say “we’re human”. That’s not a joke. That’s not comedy or even commentary. That’s an elitist bully punching down with a smirk to try and refocus attention on himself. It’s the petty jealousy of… Ricky Gervais.
He has built a second career out of telling other people not to do the things that he does constantly. The only coherent principle connecting such behavior is that his own causes apparently deserve all the platform, because he says other people don’t matter. As one of his followers put it:
So you can use your platform against cruelty to animals, but you draw the line on cruelty to people?
It’s not a principle at all, it’s just an old white guy with a big bruised ego riding a Netflix deal. To put it plainly, the man who loudly begs for credit as if he “confronts dogma that oppresses people”, in reality is the man yelling at oppressed people to shut TF up about their oppression.
His hypocrisy is damning, obviously, but he’s actually an even worse human than that. Plenty of people are hypocrites. It’s that he knows it and milks it too. He deleted an Emmys post after being called out for it, and then just reposted the same thing after the Grammys, telling others they don’t listen enough to him.
Principle? No.
After the 2025 Emmys, when Hannah Einbender said “fuck ICE,” Gervais came out storming her with criticism and then deleted it after backlash. His sudden repost now is the opposite to a spontaneous provocation, it’s him A/B testing his chances of reengagement. He knows his clip generates extremist hate group adoration (morally and financially bankrupt Gateway Pundit ran it immediately) and public outrage cycles. The deletion after the Emmys is how he’s been calibrating to help political extremists: not principled enough to leave it up as what he believes, not principled enough to stop doing it and accept accountability as an elitist white male ICE apologist.
He has also in this time systematically replaced creative output with divisive bait for controversy as his product. The SuperNature trans material, the Golden Globes recycling, the Grammy responses, and so forth aren’t comedy because they’re so obviously shallow engagement farming.
He is exactly the kind of disconnected celebrity that his entire 2020 monologue was ostensibly mocking. It’s like he wants to be as popular as Trump calling himself popular. The 2020 bit worked because it targeted everyone else who flew a private jet to accept their environmental awards. Recycling that against anyone condemning deportation operations affecting their own families and communities isn’t the same joke. It’s a totally different political act and the comedy mask falls right off.
“If you’re successful in showbiz you aren’t allowed to be political” flies like a lead balloon, especially from this Mr. Showbiz the Politician himself.
Gervais lives in a £14.5 million London mansion when he’s not hobnobbing in his $3.75 million Manhattan apartment. He earns over $100 million from old reruns alone. He claimed a single stand-up show at the Hollywood Bowl made him nearly $2 million. And he boasts of endorsement deals with Microsoft, Audi, and Pepsi.
And what does he do with all that wealth and insulation from humanity?
Politics.
The guy telling Americans they can’t complain about Kristi Noem, who notoriously executed her puppy, was the PETA Person of the Year (2013). He received the Humane Society’s Cecil Award (2018). He wrote letters to the UK government demanding fur import bans. He campaigned against Turkey’s stray animal law. Yet when Trump calls women and non-whites dogs, says their lives don’t matter, and sends his personal stormtroopers to publicly execute them, Gervais is the political mouthpiece who backs these killers.
Square that circle.
His “don’t be political” finger-wagging comes after he overtly campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 UK election. He very flagrantly used award shows, social media, Netflix specials, and every available media channel to push hard on his views on atheism, animal rights, hunting, veganism, and free speech.
His own stated philosophy for the past decade or more has been this:
Other celebrities try to use their voice to stop suffering. And Gervais suddenly jumps in front of them as if to say “you listen to me, these non-white people being called dogs and executed don’t get a voice, certainly not yours.”
So his position isn’t “celebrities shouldn’t use platforms for political speech.” His position is “celebrities shouldn’t use platforms for political speech I don’t care about.” When it’s fox hunting or Turkish dog culls, the platform is righteous. When it’s Bad Bunny saying his community isn’t animals, suddenly celebrities “know nothing about the real world.”
Bad Bunny, notably, is actually from the community being targeted. Shaboozey is a child of immigrants. Olivia Dean is a granddaughter of an immigrant. These aren’t Hollywood actors pontificating about supply chains in developing countries they visited once for a photo op. These are people with direct stakes in what they’re talking about.
Gervais delegitimizes non-white people’s speech about their own oppression. He gives his audience, and the right-wing media outlets that amplify his political rhetoric, a framework to dismiss what these artists said without engaging with it, while using his own platform to advocate for whatever he likes. That’s not an accident and it’s not ideologically neutral. His very selective pattern tracks along racial lines when it comes to immigration speech specifically.
His 2011 behavior perhaps predicted who we see now more clearly. He repeatedly tweeted a slur derived from “Mongoloid” — a term rooted in racial pseudoscience applied to people with Down syndrome — while posting photos of himself making mocking faces. Disability groups said the harm was comparable to a racial slur.
He was so indifferent to the origins and impact of the word that he used it casually for laughs, then dismissed critics as jealous of his wealth. Eventually he claimed to mothers of the children he was hurting that his detached and cruel mockery of them was “naïve” and therefore blameless.
…while he tries to avoid poking fun at disadvantaged people nowadays, he doesn’t regret his past. “You’re a product of your time, and you do make things for people of your time. I’d put trigger warnings on things, but I wouldn’t go back and change something,” he said. “Do I regret anything? No.
No regrets. Just following others.
He says he won’t do it again, while he leaves the harmful Tweets up literally doing it again and again now.
Or look at the summer of 2020. His response to the torture and public execution of George Floyd was to mock an “I Take Responsibility” anti-racism PSA by tweeting he was upset by “Terrible lack of diversity in this video.” That was it. No statement of his own. No support. No donation. No advocacy. He used the moment to ridicule those who speak out against racism, the identical move he’s doing now to shame protests against oppression.
This cynical playbook of provoke, defend, dismiss, half-concede all the way to the radical right-wing bank, is what he’s doing. He demands the entire platform so he can speak on behalf of dogs, and then uses it to silence the people being called dogs. It’s not a coincidence. Show me any evidence of anti-racism.
