How The Internet Ruined Ricky Gervais's Comedy

As the comic returns with his new stand-up tour Mortality, Louis Chilton says he needs a break from social media

- Louis Chilton

Here’s a hypothetical for you. What would a Ricky Gervais stand-up set look like if he had existed before the internet?

Few comedians have been altered so drastically by the sickly mirror of social media than Gervais, the man who was once comedy’s great televisual innovator. What makes Gervais such a curious case is that little of his work feels particularly modern: there is nothing really about any of his TV projects – brilliantly biting The Office and Extras; mawkish care home dramedy Derek; Warwick Davis-fronted cringe sitcom Life’s Too Short; award-winning grief comedy After Life – that really situates it in the era of Twitter feeds and Instagram filters.