In a recent Washington Post article, media and entertainment editor Stephanie Merry suggests that Ricky Gervais' 2016 Golden Globes appearance may have heralded the end of the "cringe comedy" trend. As evidence, she cites a 4 percent drop in the ratings over last year's broadcast hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.
"Are we done with cringe comedy yet?", she says with a verbal eye-roll, accompanied by a link to an Entertainment Weekly article in which an equally exasperated Melissa Maerz writes, “When were the Globes this painful to watch?”
I shouldn't have to explain this to a pair of reasonably intelligent women like Merry and Maerz, but the reason Fey and Poehler attracted slightly higher ratings is fairly obvious: aside from being more well-known than Gervais, Fey and Poehler are a pair of beautiful, blazingly brilliant women. Individually they are irresistible. Together on the same stage, they are incandescent. Who wouldn’t rather watch them?
I concur with Maerz, there were many painful moments during the 2016 Golden Globes Awards--Jonah Hill's idiotic, expletive-laden appearance in a bear's head, for example--however Gervais wasn't one of them. If anything, we desperately needed more of his scabrous wit. Sadly, his fleeting appearances were too few and far between to provide sufficient relief from the endless parade of immaculate self-aggrandizement.
Despite the fact that Gervais was actually less controversial than he has been in the past, Merry somewhat wishfully concludes that Gervais' brand of "cringe comedy" is on the way out, due to changing cultural sensibilities in America.
For a pop culture editor, Merry is surprisingly innocent of her subject.
American sensibilities haven't changed so much as found their niches, due to the increasing specialization of entertainment on cable TV and the "new media." For commercial reasons, content in the past was orchestrated to reach as wide an audience as possible, the result of which was a “something for everyone" approach designed to comfort rather than offend. That began to change in the 1960s, with the advent of stand-up comedians like Lenny Bruce, whose own brand of cringe-inducing comedy actually led to his arrest on an obscenity charge in 1961. Bruce's purpose, in the great tradition of the 18th century French satirists, was to use shock value to attack hypocrisy, pomposity, and the status quo. This subversive new form of comedy eventually bled into the American mainstream with "insult" comedians like Don Rickles, whose extended comic rants on the Tonight Show would leave today's studio executives reaching for their heart pills. (By comparison, Gervais is a bastion of political correctness, Caitlyn Jenner's driving notwithstanding.)
The pinnacle (nadir?) of cringe comedy was arguably Andrew Dice Clay, whose notoriously crude, misogynistic routines didn't stop him from becoming the first comedian ever to sell out Madison Square Garden in 1990. Clay's star eventually faded not because his comedy was cringe-inducing, but because he broke the cardinal rule that says heroes punch up, villains punch down. By building his one-note career around the persona of a sexual bully (i.e., demeaning women), Clay had made himself a villain, and the schtick quickly wore thin.
I love Ricky Gervais, and am an unashamed fan because, unlike Clay, he never punches down. He always punches up--at the rich and famous, and even himself. And that will never go out of fashion.
Ricky Gervais’ official website: http://www.rickygervais.com/