God help me. I’ve truly turned some sort of dangerous corner and I need to seek professional help. And it’s all Ricky Gervais’ fault.
Not only did I enjoy the upcoming “The Ricky Gervais Show,” which is an insane animated version of his equally insane podcasts, but I laughed so loud that I practically had to be restrained in the office.
The show — in which Gervais, collaborator Stephen Merchant and their radio producer and friend Karl Pilkington start out talking to each other in a studio and become animated — seems at first to only consist of Merchant and Gervais telling Pilkington what a moron he is.
“He’s an experiment for me,” Gervais says. “I’ve seen him blossom from an idiot into an imbecile.”
Then once the show starts you realize that, well, maybe Pilkington is an imbecile. Or maybe he’s just so outside-the-box that there is no box invented that fits his brain.
Whatever it is, he’s hilarious. For example, he postulates that since we already have everything we need, they should just stop inventing stuff, except perhaps a contraption in which you can pop out a small version of yourself when you die.
“It’s the ramblings of someone you’d find by themselves in a hospital eating flies,” Gervais answers.
Pilkington does a segment each show called “Monkey News,” which consists of insane monkey stories, but he’s happy to cover other animals like a story about a lion who killed “28 Cambodian midget fighters” in 12 minutes.
A news item about nudist colonies devolves into Pilkington asking, “Are [nudist] blokes with small knobs happy to wander about showing off what they haven’t got?,” which leads into a discussion about looking at naked men in the gym locker room.
When Merchant laughs at Pilkington for admitting that he looks at other men to see if their moving parts are “normal,” Pilkington defends himself saying it’s normal to stare, “. . .when you see a person who’s a bit odd — with two heads or whatever.” Now I know that next time I see a two-headed naked man, I have his permission to look at his nether “bits” as Gervais might say. And does.
Speculation runs high that Pilkington is just a Gervais-inspired character and not a real-life oddball at all. HBO swears he’s real.
But, then again, I’m talking about a guy who’s turned into an animated character anyway! Like I said, I need to seek professional help.