Ricky Gervais took on the thought police and became a global phenomenon. Now that wokeism is on its knees, the comedian must find a new rival.

Life's failures are art's returns. Shame, for example, is one of the more nasty social emotions, and even though it has a civilizational value, it torments the individual to the core. Ricky Gervais, 63, has turned shame and its variations—from embarrassment to humiliation—into an artistic resource like no comedian before him. There is so much shame and embarrassment in Gervais's films, television series, and stand-up shows that the beams bend, with the beams representing both the social and the inner framework that provides support and orientation to modern man.

Watching Ricky Gervais is therefore always a form of self-harm. You stare into the abysses the comedian opens with his punchlines and performances, and eventually you recognize yourself in the humiliations of this humor. There are supposedly people who can't watch Gervais's series "The Office" and "Extras" for long, precisely because they find them so great. Too much shame, embarrassment, and humiliation.

Comedians putting themselves on trial with their humor was nothing new when Gervais burst onto the scene in 2001 with "The Office," a public consciousness that had been numbed for years by dull sitcoms and even duller film comedies. The two-season series about the head of a paper manufacturing company was shot in the style of a mockumentary, a fictional documentation of everyday office life in which the boss is vain, incompetent, and pushy, while the rest of the staff parries off this embarrassing narcissism with ignorance. The in-camera extemporization that Kevin Spacey would later take to Shakespearean heights in the role of the scheming puppet master in "House of Cards" is already pre-formulated in the acting here. Gervais, an office fool of classic caliber.

In "Extras" (2005 to 2007), Gervais explored the idea that embarrassment provides the spark for comedy, combining psychological acumen with social critique. The series was a stroke of luck because major stars from Kate Winslet to Ian McKellen to Ben Stiller played themselves. Each episode chronicled a film set, and Gervais, in the role of the ambitious yet unsuccessful extra, witnessed the character lapses of his idols. Stiller as a ruthless show-off, McKellen as a vain artsy twit, Kate Winslet as a lascivious diva without tact.

Gervais's sociopolitical stance was even clearer here than in "The Office." He himself had grown up as the son of a working-class father and a housewife, was the first in his family to attend college, and made the leap from the lower to the middle class. But his perspective remained shaped by the experience of the underdog, by his skepticism towards the established circles. The minor extras and the big stars: this was the constellation that shook up the idea of ​​fame as self-worth in episode after episode, and even though Gervais didn't hold back in his portrayal of the upstart, the moral emphasis was clear. The rich and famous were depraved at the top – common sense existed at the bottom, at the grassroots.

Gervais continually expanded this frontline; it is the dramatic bastion from which he began his global conquest of all media sectors—film, television, stand-up comedy, and presenting. As a representative of the so-called common man, whose awareness of social imbalances was sharpened by the marginalization of the past two decades, especially in England, he attacked the elite of the media and cultural industry.

"The Office" and "Extras" were merely the prelude to Gervais's breathtaking career as a stand-up comedian and presenter; only on stage did he gain the intellectual scope to take on a grand scale those thought police who, depending on their persuasion and influence, narrowed the discourse. He rained down punchlines against the church, against politicians and activists, and repeatedly against his colleagues. Stars, and above all the Hollywood establishment, were the enemy to be savaged with at times brutal cynicism, and when Gervais hosted the Golden Globes for the first time in 2010, the humorous battle zone expanded into the global sphere.

The hosting not only marked a paradigm shift in the perception of Gervais as a comedian—the performance transformed him into a global phenomenon, on par with the stars he denigrated—but also the beginning of a cultural shift in the entertainment industry. Until then, Hollywood had been considered a potentially toxic, but ideologically correct, environment.

Amidst all the scandals and squabbles, stars were the representatives of the right life in the wrong one; they voted left, supported good causes from environmental protection to LGBTQ, and protested for equal rights and against sexism. Gervais tore the mask of decency from the faces of these privileged people, attacking their bigotry and lack of principles. The gags from his opening monologues at the Globes are now part of the canon of stand-up comedy; taken as a whole, they constitute a reckoning with the opportunism of a profession that believes itself to be on the safe side ideologically, even if it is morally shattered.

"You say you're woke, but the companies you work for produce in China. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS launched a streaming service, you'd immediately call your agent." This was no longer a joke at the expense of individual stars and their professional deformation. This humor aimed at the moral center of the industry and exposed its emptiness. "You have no right to lecture the public in any way," Gervais explained to his visibly disturbed audience. "You know nothing about the real world. Most of you have spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg."

Gervais hosted the Golden Globes four more times. The ratings were simply too good, and the stars grew accustomed to being ridiculed as the beneficiaries of a corrupt business. But the scratches on Hollywood's veneer were here to stay, and no amount of zeal and lofty acceptance speeches would gloss them over.

At the same time, Gervais toured the continents with his stand-up shows, garnered media awards—he reportedly uses his BAFTA, Emmy, and Golden Globe trophies as doorstops at home—released the dramedy series "After Life," which fluctuates between sentimentality and fatalism, and, like most excellent comedians, encountered a few shitstorms. And not everything that glittered as a punchline was comedy gold.

Jokes about terminally ill children—"Your last wish is for me to visit you in the hospital? Why don't you wish you could get better?"—undercut the level of humor that Gervais had brilliantly and subtly defined in his shows. And the ritualistic bashing of the woke movement also acquired a patina of resentment over time. "Old-fashioned women, meaning those with a uterus"—a gag like that might be acceptable to a novice stand-up on a rehearsal stage, but not to a world-class comedian.

And that will be the challenge going forward: whether Gervais can respond to the dynamics of the zeitgeist in his shows and perhaps anticipate it with punchline-capable analyses. Because the cultural situation has changed. Trump's policies are also reshaping the consciousness industries, and wokeism today, unlike five years ago, appears to be an opponent already on the ground. A great comedian won't backstab, but will seek out the next powerful rival. One should expect nothing less from Ricky Gervais.

Ricky Gervais will perform his show “Mortality” at the Hallenstadion in Zurich on Saturday.