Boremageddon

Ricky Gervais’s new comedy special recently launched on Netflix. Entitled Armageddon, it is, in his own words, about “how the human race is destroying itself”. It reaches for a tradition of bleakly existential and absurdist British comedy that can be found in Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and the Pythons. Gervais seeks to marry this with shocking material, and ends up producing a darkly cynical, consciously offensive hour of jokes about disabled children, the holocaust, pedophilia, transgenderism, homosexuality and illegal immigration (etc).