'Ricky Gervais' Brings the Funny

In mid-February, “The Ricky Gervais Show” premiered to little fanfare on HBO. It has only three characters, all of whom are animated—one is British comedian Ricky Gervais and another is his long-time collaborator Stephen Merchant. The third is a man named Karl Pilkington, whose brain is different from yours and mine.

Despite the show’s title, Gervais is hardly its focus. Instead, it is Karl, whom—despite his utter lack of stand-up, writing, or acting experience—Gervais has called “the funniest man alive in Britain today.” Over the last decade, Pilkington has become Gervais’s pet project, if not his pet. He is a fool, and also a genius.

Karl’s brilliance is a blend of questionable social theories (the elderly never eat Twix bars, and Chinese people age more quickly than any other race), erroneously recounted news stories he read on the Internet, neologisms (“foodage,” for example, and “squoze”—Karl’s past tense conjugation of “squeeze”), and Yogi Berra-esque aphorisms.

It’s difficult to convey how funny this is. A reliably fruitful gag consists of Ricky and Steve asking Karl to explain proverbs. For instance, Karl’s interpretation of the saying “Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” is this: “If you live in a glass house, don’t be chucking stuff about.” It’s not that he just says things that make no sense—there’s an atom of plausibility to the inanity, which implicates the listener in every ridiculous convolution of his thought process. On average, any sentence out of Karl’s mouth is more amusing than the cumulative value of most twenty-two minute sitcoms.

Gervais and Merchant’s acquaintance with Pilkington is the comedic equivalent of the discovery of penicillin. Before the success of “The Office,” the two had co-presented a radio show on Xfm London. Upon their return to the station in 2001, they were serendipitously assigned Pilkington as their producer. Little by little, Gervais and Merchant realized the volume of the wondrous iceberg of Karl’s weirdness, and his airtime steadily increased.

Since then, their collaboration has resurfaced in confusingly myriad forms, but suffice to say that I have over 60 non-repetitive hours of Gervais-Merchant-Pilkington audio downloaded on my computer. (This, admittedly, may be more a demonstration of my own nerdiness than anything else.) Their most recent release is a series of 10 one-hour “The Ricky Gervais Guide To...” episodes, with installments ranging in subject matter from “The Arts” to “The Future.”

When Karl isn’t actively spouting drivel, Ricky and Steve still have plenty to mock him for, including his Mancunian monotone and remarkably spherical bald head (like “a fucking orange,” Gervais frequently claims). A 2006 New York Times article claimed that Pilkington was a master of “comic deadpan”—indeed, the humor derived from Karl’s way of thinking is so exquisitely consistent that it can be hard to believe it’s organic.

In the U.K., Karl Pilkington has a cult following of Jonestownian proportions, which he has wisely parlayed into three book deals and a multitude of hosting gigs. He, Gervais, and Merchant were even awarded the Guinness World Record for the most downloaded podcast in 2006. But this tremendous popularity has yet to make its way across the Atlantic.

This is where HBO comes in. The new TV series recycles audio from the early series of the podcast, setting it to animation of the three men chatting within a recording studio and cartoon vignettes that demonstrate whatever madness Karl happens to be espousing at the moment.

To some extent, the hilariously disparate body types of Gervais, Merchant, and Pilkington lend themselves to caricature. They are a strange tableau: the lumbering six-foot-seven Merchant, the squat Gervais, the round-headed Pilkington. Most reviews liken Gervais’s avatar to Fred Flintstone, but I believe the real similarity here is to Comedy Central’s mercifully short-lived “Shorties Watchin’ Shorties” (you know a show’s good when its title prescriptively drops the gerund “g”), which animated clips of stand-up comedy routines. That’s not the greatest of legacies.

Overall, I think, the animation only distracts us from Karl’s surreal, systematically incorrect worldview. The comedy of the podcasts is minimalist and mean-spirited; Pilkington requires neither bells nor whistles. Regardless, TV’s “The Ricky Gervais Show” has been renewed for a second season—and despite its issues, I’m delighted. The format in which Karl is presented is almost beside the point, so long as Karl is presented.

After the overwhelming—and overwhelmingly deserved—success of “The Office” and “Extras,” both co-created with Merchant, I can’t imagine Gervais is looking to make a quick buck. He believes in “The Ricky Gervais Show,” because he believes that the world needs to meet Karl Pilkington and probe his brain. And it does—my own fanaticism stops just short of distributing religious tracts honoring Karl in the Times Square subway station. If a spoonful of TV sugar is necessary to make this medicine go down, then so be it.

—Columnist Molly O. Fitzpatrick can be reached at fitzpat@fas.harvard.edu.