Entertainment
Ricky Gervais hopes to live long enough to see ‘woke’ generation cancelled by the next one
Ricky wants to see some comeuppance (Picture: NBCUniversal)
Ricky Gervais has shared his hopes to live long enough to see the current generation ‘cancelled’ by a generation more ‘woke’ than it.
The comedian, who has long been open about his distaste for so-called cancel culture, believed such a thing was ‘inevitable’.
In a recent episode of his podcast with neuroscientist Sam Harris, Absolutely Mental, the two discussed why we care about the future with Ricky sharing his musings that ‘woke’ people won’t be ‘woke’ enough and that they’ll be cancelled for the things they’re targetting people on now.
He told Harris in the episode Why do we care about the future of humanity?: ‘I want to live long enough to see the younger generation not be woke enough for the next generation. It’s going to happen. Don’t they realise that, it’s like, they’re next. That’s what’s funny about this weird generation.
‘We kicked out the old guard. We did it. There’s only so woke and liberal you can get and then you start going the other way. But it’s inevitable.’
The scientist, who said it would be ‘exquisitely satisfying’ to see, noted ‘you can see it happen among the wokesters now’, but conceded ‘wokeness’ isn’t necessarily generational.
The star has long called our cancel culture (Picture: Timmsy/Backgrid)
He added ‘no matter how left you are on this continuum’ there’s bound to be someone ‘further left than you’ who will treat you ‘like a Nazi’.
Ricky replied: ‘Virtue signalling is literally people saying “If I’m picking on you for this minutia, think how good I must be, think how good I am if I care about these things that don’t matter” and that’s why everything gets elevated.’
Comedian Ricky previously shared his belief people were too scared to take risks in his industry anymore, over fears they’ll be targeted.
Speaking to Times Radio about his series The Office, he doubted it would be made today, saying: ‘Now it would suffer because people would take things literally.
‘There are these outrage mobs who take things out of context.
‘This was a show about everything. It was about difference, it was about sex, race, all the things that people fear to even be discussed or talked about now, in case they say the wrong thing and they are cancelled.’
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He later added to Metro on the subject: ‘Everyone’s got a different definition of cancel culture.
‘If it is choosing not to watch a comedian because you don’t like them, that’s everyone’s right. But when people are trying to get someone fired because they don’t like their opinion about something that’s nothing to do with their job, that’s what I call cancel culture and that’s not cool.’
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