Skip to content
Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy
Promotional art for Out of England 2
Cover image credit:

Source

Out of England 2

Ricky Gervais

HBO · 2010 · 74 min

A wealthy instigator tests the limits of what audiences will tolerate.

Watch it free on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Ricky Gervais builds his act on calculated misdirection, taking a perverse joy in testing the boundaries of what a crowd will tolerate. He takes a sip from a can of Foster’s beer, lets out a high-pitched cackle, and sees exactly how far he can drag an audience into uncomfortable territory before they recoil. The clearest example is a dark joke about a father pressing his daughter for wildly inappropriate details after an encounter with a stranger. It is a deliberate shock tactic, functioning entirely on the tension he creates by setting a bleak trap with a casual smirk.

Filmed at the Chicago Theatre in 2010, the hour (released as Science in the UK) arrived on HBO at a peak in his American visibility. He had just hosted his first Golden Globes and was turning his hit podcast into an animated series for the same network. That synergy bothered a few critics, who noted that routines about gifting an African family a goat or mocking a Sunday school book of Noah’s Ark were pulled almost verbatim from his audio recordings. Despite the recycled material, his stage persona anchors the set. He leans into the role of an aggressively wealthy instigator, casually dismissing the global recession and delivering riffs on heroin and rescue dogs with absolute detachment.

The set list

6 bits

  1. Reading and commenting on an old Sunday School children's book about Noah's Ark

    Mocks the literal Biblical story and illustrations of God drowning humanity and saving animals.

  2. Charity gifts of livestock to African families

    Rants about the concept of someone buying a goat for an African family at Christmas in his name.

  3. Weight loss and fat people

    Reacts to audience applause for losing 20 pounds by explaining he simply ate less, discussing obesity and how people become overweight.

  4. The Icelandic volcanic ash cloud disrupting global air travel

    Details spending 12,000 pounds to charter a helicopter to a Dublin gig rather than take a ferry, and dissects insurance clauses defining disasters as 'acts of God.'

  5. Reading an illustrated book about homosexuality in animals

    Examines animal behavior and makes explicit sexual jokes based on animal depictions.

  6. DUI public service message

    Frames a safe-driving message that twists abruptly into a shocking tag line.

How it plays

Tone
Satirical, irreverent, provocative, and politically incorrect.
On stage
Provocative, snarky, and casually dressed in a black V-neck, loose black pants, and sneakers, sipping beer from a podium and laughing with his trademark cackles while discussing offensive subjects.
Pace
Conversational cadence with frequent pauses, profanity punctuations, and book readings on stage.
About
God and religion, charity and famine in Africa, obesity and weight loss, taboos and the freedom to offend, homosexuality in animals, the economic recession

What the critics said

Received mixed to negative reviews from television critics; Variety found it bloody disappointing and significantly less funny than his prior special due to disjointed structure and over-reliance on shock value, while other critics noted the heavy recycling of material previously heard on his podcast and animated series.

In the room: Enthusiastic and responsive live theater crowd that laughed at politically incorrect jokes and applauded his weight loss.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: latimes.com, imdb.com, tvguide.com, themoviedb.org, variety.com, blogcritics.org, thecomicscomic.com, en.wikipedia.org.

Backstory

Filmed after Gervais lost approximately 20 pounds; the material is adapted from his UK stand-up tour and special 'Science'.

Details

Released
Taped
Chicago Theatre
Runtime
74 min
Where
HBO
Director
John Moffitt
Honors
2011 Primetime Emmy Nomination - Outstanding Picture Editing for a Special (Single or Multi-Camera)2011 Gold Derby TV Award Nomination - Variety Special
Topics
Before
Out of England (2008)
After
Humanity (2018)

More from Ricky Gervais

If you liked this