I just watched a trailer for the new Ricky Gervais stand-up special on Netflix. Netflix, the wokest outfit on the planet and Ricky Gervais. If they thought Dave Chappelle was pushing boundaries, were they asleep when they let Ricky loose? And Bill Burr. And Tom Segura. And Joe Rogan – yes he does offensive stand-up as well. It’s possible Netflix were just pretending to be woke with their offensive kids programs that nobody watches and their Megan Markle whatevers that don’t seem to be getting made, let alone seen, while letting their stable of comedians rip. I’m surprised it’s taken this long for the cry-babies on their staff to leave. Maybe they were hoping for a job at Twitter but Elon’s thrown a spanner in those particular (renewable electricity powered) works.

But back to Ricky. The trailer is all about the scarcity of funny female stand-ups. There are plenty of them, even on Netflix, but their ability to make you laugh varies. I guess it depends on your taste. There’s Nikki Glazer who talks about her vagina and blow-jobs, there’s Ali Wong who talks about her vagina and anal, there’s Christina P who talks about her vagina and childbirth. See, a veritable plethora of vag…. sorry, variety. Oh and there’s Ilisa Shlesinger who, as best I can make out is impersonating a spider. And there’s Taylor Tomlinson with the girl-next-door looks who likes to talk about sex, presumably to piss off her ultra-religious family. There appears to be a pattern emerging here, apart from the spider. Did you notice?

Having said that, I actually like (and laugh at) the above-mentioned female comedians (remember when they were comediennes). Maybe its the attractive females talking dirty thing. Most red-blooded heterosexual males (certainly the ones I know) are okay with this. And they do make me titter (sorry, couldn’t help it).

It’s now a couple of days later and I’ve watched SuperNature (that’s the new Ricky Gervais special) all the way through. Now Ricky’s got a reputation for causing offence, mostly unjustified in my humble opinion (actually, that should be by my standards) but there are some people who insist on being offended no matter what. Unfortunately we seem to have here, in this special, a situation where instead of the comedy causing offence, the offence is meant to make you laugh. It’s a subtle nuance I know, like punching a disabled baby, but think about it or better still watch the show. But of all the funniest people (see, I included women) on the planet, he is still one of the funniest, try-hard offending notwithstanding.

Ricky also seems to be on a one-man crusade to elevate the word “cunt” to “fuck” status. “Fuck” is in the process of vacating its position as the second most offensive word in the English language through continuous usage (by almost everyone except my mother), and now challenges “shit” as an almost acceptable word in polite society. It’ll be a “bloody” or a “bugger” before we know it.

One more thing Rick. Lose “right”. Saying “right” three times in every sentence makes you sound like a young female (I’m being a traditionalist here – call me old fashioned). I may have mentioned this previously but if the word “like” was excised from the English language millions of young women and girls all over the world would be struck dumb.. If you had not said the completely extraneous “right” so often your 1 hour 4 minutes performance would have been over in 45 minutes.

I gave this piece the title “Funny Girls” after writing the first three paragraphs. For those younger readers with a, like, recent education and therefore not well versed in English grammar (or anything else for that matter), the first three paragraphs are the chunks of words above the third line space, right. After getting to this point I thought I should probably change it. But then I realized that the dominant theme in SuperNature, or at least the one most people are talking about is “trans” and, having thought about the title some more, it somehow fits.