“It couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people,” was the thought going through my head during the opening monologue of the Golden Globes. Ricky Gervais was stripping the room full of self-important blowhards fully naked, exposing every mole and hypocrisy for the people at home to see, and it was glorious.
Naturally, the affluent asses in the audience didn’t like being exposed as frauds, grousing and growling through their skewering as best they could, while undoubtedly unleashing their publicists to do damage control. Like a good dog, all too eager to appease entertainment media snapped to attention, ready with Nazi-like efficiency to do the bidding of their patrons.
If you think political press is corrupt, and they are, they can’t hold a candle to the backroom dealings and near-bribery that takes place in the entertainment press.
The political media protects their own too. Take, for example, how two Russian comedians are described as being “widely suspected of having ties to the Russian government” because they pranked Maxine Waters into believing something my 2-year-old could’ve seen through. It couldn’t be that Waters is so dumb that she mistook a Russian accent for Swedish, or that she believed President Trump had cornered Greta at the UN to confess he’d pressured the Ukrainians to investigate Joe Biden while simultaneously promising to squash her dreams (seriously, it’s hilarious. Listen to the whole thing for yourself), it had to be Putin trolls!
The truth exposes Maxine as a gullible moron, the spin paints her as a victim; a target of Russian aggression. When given the choice between reporting the truth and protecting the left-wing’s narrative, reporters make sure the narrative is safer than an easily picked chastity belt lock at the Media Matters holiday party. No one involved would have any idea what to do with the contents anyway, so they choose to pretend they don’t exist.
As bad as the political press is, the entertainment press is worse. Access is the currency of the day, and to get it “reporters” have to write sufficiently glowing puff pieces and reviews, vetted by publicists, of course. Being on the “right side” of a studio or talent agency will get you junkets to exotic locales, visits to the set, and access to the stars – all of which translates into cash. Stray, refuse to toe the line, and you get nothing. Report about cheating, drug use, abuse, whatever, and you’re out. How do you think Harvey Weinstein was able to be the worst kept secret in Hollywood for decades? Everyone knew what he was, he wasn’t even unique, but the press was willing to let him do it for the private jet rides, vacation junkets, and everything else you can image a normal person would view as a bribe.
Gervais is hilarious. Do yourself a favor and watch the British version of “The Office.” It’ll take about 3 episodes, then you’ll be hooked. It’s better in every way than the US reboot, which is hilarious in its own right, but it knew when to stop and does so perfectly.
Gervais is also fearless when it comes to his comedy. He, or the characters he plays, are often the butt of the jokes. No cows are sacred – if it’s funny, it’s funny, no matter who it upsets.
And that last bit is the problem for participants in the “Woke Olympics” of the left. Victimhood is a desired status. It also comes with membership in what they declare is a “protected class,” people who can’t be made fun of, who can only be praised for the “courage” and/or “bravery.” How it’s either of those words to hide behind an irrelevant part of your existence to shield yourself from any or all criticism has never been fully explained, deflected instead by words like “marginalized” or “at risk communities.”
Everyone in the audience at the Golden Globes considers themselves either a member of one of those “marginalized communities” or an ally of them. Realistically, they’re a bunch of self-important pampered douchebags looking to make as much money as possible. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make as much money as possible, we all try to do that, but there is something wrong with doing that while condemning people who’ve been more successful at it as “greedy” people and wanting to empower the government to punish them.
It’s also hypocritical to champion left-wing “social justice” causes while hammering checks from companies using slave labor in China and jetting off the Caribbean on your Gulfstream to spend a week on a 200-foot yacht while narrating documentaries about how Americans have to stop eating meat and ride their bikes to work to limit their carbon footprint.
Those are the people Gervais went after. (If you haven’t seen his opening monologue yet, seek it out and watch it.)
The TV critic for the LA Times, hearing the cries of elites, answered with a piece attacking Gervais. Lorraine Ali declared Gervais delivered “a gloom-and-doom monologue so cynical it made the effervescent Tom Hanks scowl.”
I suspect Tom Hanks will survive the telling of jokes, the media may not.
Over at Forbes, Toni Fitzgerald advocated for a hostless show because Ricky was “mean.” Bless her heart.
Because the left is a hive-mind ready to destroy anyone who won’t conform, they’d already prepared for the worst. Vox, the activist anti-corporate blog funded by major corporate investors (making it as genuine as just about every other aspect of the left), preemptively wrote a piece titled, “How to tell a Ricky Gervais joke: Offend, defend, repeat.”
In it, a joyless basement-dweller deems everything funny to be “problematic” because Gervais has made jokes about Caitlyn Jenner, daring to use the “deadname” Bruce, and a bunch of other whiny complaints about things normal people laugh at. It was a last minute attempt to get him fired, running the day before the ceremony.
It didn’t work. Nor did it work to get Gervais to apologize for his “offenses.” As he said during his monologue, he doesn’t care.
Back at the Times, Ali ended her screed by lamenting that Gervais didn’t “read the room” with his rips on the Hollywood elite’s hypocrisy. He did, actually. Not the posh dining room filled with rich, entitled narcissistic perverts and their enablers, but the living rooms of the people watching.
One night of having the curtain pulled back, one night of the public hearing the truth, a truth they pay good money to avoid being heard, made the other 364 days of their preening and judging all worth it. If they don’t want the world to know what flaming hypocrites they really are on the issues they lecture everyone else on, they probably shouldn’t be that way.
Like I said, it couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.
Derek is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show on WCBM in Maryland, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.