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Ricky Gervais is a skilful comedian. He could have been a great comedian. TV producers still talk about how important The Office was. After Life provoked as many tears as laughs. And his stand-up can be good. Or at least, has been. Mortality, his latest, follows two Netflix specials that excited Twitter storms and went to number one. So he’s got the formula – edgy jokes in the first 15 minutes for the social fury then coast to the end of the hour. Thus, he riffs on slavery, disabled children and Sharia law for the outrage before settling into mildly amusing tales of getting annoyed in restaurants and being a working-class man showing builders around his house. He’s good enough to make those pieces really sing – Larry David can make an episode out of a good restaurant story and Mickey Flanagan built his career on the awkwardness of working-class success. But for Gervais, 15 minutes of outrage and 45 minutes of material that needs work is good enough, so why bother?
