Is getting pudding on your bum funny?
I ask because I've just seen pudding on Ricky Gervais's bum. He was playing his new character Derek (Thursday, Channel 4, 10pm) and, in one scene, put a bowl of pudding on his chair and then accidentally sat down on it. It's a gag that was first done about 150 years ago in the music halls and even then people said: oh no, not the pudding gag again. And yet here it is once more, in 2012.
So what on earth is Ricky Gervais thinking? This is the man who took comedy forward to the next phase when he made The Office 10 years ago, and yet now here he is doing pudding-bum jokes. Perhaps he's sitting on the pudding ironically; perhaps he's doing a gag he knows is not funny which makes it funny. But here's another theory: it is not funny.
And what about the teeth? Derek, who works in a care home, has learning difficulties so Gervais demonstrates this by sticking out his bottom teeth like a horse nibbling a carrot. He also shuffles instead of walks. And he has greasy hair. He may have observed all of these things in someone with learning difficulties but in the case of Derek they are stuck on like a mask bought in a joke shop – they are not part of a character that feels real, or subtle, or likely. Behind them all you can see Gervais mugging.
This does not mean he was wrong to play someone with learning difficulties. Quite the opposite: he absolutely should have the right to do so. We should also have the right to laugh at comedy about, or aimed at, disabled people, or black people, or gay people. Total comedic freedom is the only logical position in a democracy. The only test is: does it make us laugh?
Derek fails this test unfortunately, just as Gervais's recent 'mong' tweets did. In Derek, he tries to get round the problem by making the character sympathetic and, towards the end of the episode, has some success when one of the residents in the care home, Joan, dies.
"I hate it when anyone dies," says Derek. "But Joan is the worstest one ever. She was my favourite." And then Gervais spoils it by having this supposedly gauche man explain his character. "I'm not clever or good looking," he says, "but I'm kind."
It's the kind of line that clangs and bangs in a script because it's explaining the moral to us like a primary-school teacher with a copy of Aesop's Fables. Good comedy is more subtle than that.
There are a few subtler moments – there's a nice sub-plot when one of the care home nurses tries to work out if a man she fancies is gay or not – but, on the whole, Derek never gets over the problem of the central character. The fact that someone with learning difficulties is the star of a comedy could have been a step forward, a courageous act in the name of comedic freedom.
A book like Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time with its autistic hero proves you can combine disability and humour without it being crass. But Derek just gives us jutting teeth and pudding clinging to a bum. It wasn't funny 150 years ago, it's not funny now.
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