Keywords

Introduction

Ricky Gervais (1961–) is a British comedian who studied philosophy at the University of London. Gervais’ early comedy television series, such as The Office and Extras, were initially applauded as cutting-edge examples of the so-called “cringe comedy,” alongside Curb Your Enthusiasm and Da Ali G Show. Even though most comedy finds its roots in humiliation or discomfort (whether it is slapstick or satire), this new comedy genre plays on the darkness and anxieties of living in the modern world, which range from avoiding political incorrectness to acceptance of our own mortality. However, Gervais’s comedy is becoming increasingly described as “alienating” for such characters as the intellectually challenged Derek of the television series of the same name, or for Gervais’ critique of the audience during his 2020 Golden Globes hosting. For example, at the Golden Globes, Gervais gave an opening speech in which he lampooned individual members of the audience, and he also – and this was where the accusations of alienation came in – burst the pretensions of those award winners who use their acceptance speech as a platform for a political speech: “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg” (Golden Globes, Monologue).

There is certainly no doubt that Gervais’s comedy is becoming more painful to watch; Derek (in which the main character appears to be developmentally disabled) and After Life (in which the protagonist Tony copes with the death of his spouse) are not standard television fodder, and these two series will be explored further later. But is the viewer being alienated, whether intentionally or unintentionally? Or, rather, is Gervais’s comedy instead about alienation, specifically alienation under capitalism? To ask the question another way: Is Gervais alienating his audience, or is he using his comedy to show us how we are alienated in the political sense of the nineteenth-century philosopher Karl Marx? I will argue that it is the latter. Moreover, unlike most of the other chapters here on comedians, I am going to focus on the shows Gervais helped write and produce (as opposed to his standup) as their format – long narrative buildup and character development – allows for an analysis of alienation.

Gervais’ Comedy

In order to answer this question, we need first to disentangle and define what is meant by “alienation.” In non-philosophical terms, alienation is often used to signal a lack of sympathy or estrangement. This is not the case for Gervais; surely, it is quite the opposite. In bringing down Hollywood royalty, Gervais is speaking sympathetically to us: the majority, the people who purchase the cinema tickets. Gervais is instead addressing the Marxist concept of alienation in its different aspects throughout his work. In essence, alienation is the problematic separation of a subject (in this case a self or person) and an object that should belong together. In the case of Marxist alienation – as will be seen in the next section – it has four interconnected aspects.

There have been commentaries on Ricky Gervais’s work – especially the television series The Office and Derek – that identify them as critiques of capitalism; for example, Tony McKenna claims that Derek provides “a trenchant critique of capitalism from the purview of a revolutionary humanism” (McKenna 2015, p. 201). However, such commentaries do little to explain why Gervais’s work is simultaneously both funny and philosophical. Instead, Gervais’s major works – The Office, Extras, Derek, and After Life – can all be seen as illustrative exemplars of Karl Marx’s “theory of alienation.” (The focus in this article is only on work written by Gervais.) Moreover, once framed within an understanding of this theory, we can comprehend just why Gervais is so bitterly funny and why his work continues to push accepted social boundaries for comedy.

According to Norman Malcolm in his biography of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein once said that “a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes” (Malcolm 1984, pp. 27–28). This comment has often been misunderstood as an encouragement to hunt for jokes about philosophy or to analyze Wittgenstein’s view of humor; however, Wittgenstein’s comment should instead be framed within the context of his philosophical work on understanding: if you laugh (get the joke), then you have understood the philosophical issue. Similarly, if you laugh at Gervais’ comedy, then you have understood the philosophical issue. Contemporary Marxist philosopher Bertell Ollman’s comments on “radical jokes” may help here. To paraphrase Ollman, “radical” means to get at the roots of our capitalist society and thus “radical jokes” are those that uncover previously unrecognized effects of capitalist society on our lives. In this way, Gervais’ comedy is not just cringe comedy but “the comedy of alienation”: it works to illustrate Marx’s account of alienation under capitalism, but also Marx’s account of alienation, in its turn, explains why Gervais’ works are so funny or – more accurately – tragicomic: a blend of the funny with tragedy. To understand why, we need to first understand what Marx said about alienation, before we go on to see how Gervais’ work expresses it.

Marx on Alienation

Many of us have experienced the subjective feeling of alienation: a sense of estrangement from the world we live in. For families, ritualistic shopping at mega-stores has become a substitution for other forms of social behavior and interaction, with consumers often able to purchase guns, liquor, and patio sets around the clock. During the Covid-19 pandemic, social distancing, quarantines, and remote meetings all but guaranteed this feeling of estrangement. However, alienation for the political philosopher Marx is more than a subjective feeling; for Marx, alienation is a specific kind of social ill that we suffer from under capitalism, in essence, the estrangement of subject and object when they should belong together.

“Alienation,” in Marx’s writings, is the most familiar of the standard English translations of both Entfremdung and Entäußerung. Sean Sayers, a twentieth-century interpreter of Marx, states that, according to the Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács, “these terms were originally the German translations of the English eighteenth century word ‘alienation’ used in an economic or legal sense to mean the sale of a commodity or relinquishment of freedom” (Sayers 2011, p. ix).

The term alienation has become part of our own modern discourse, but more often than not it is used interchangeably with a general sense of meaninglessness or disaffection; for example, “alienation” is used to describe punk rock or other youth movements in Thatcherite Britain. Yet, as Sean Sayers notes, Marx’s own theoretical use of the term is “precise and specific” (Sayers 2011, p. x).

We typically think of Marx as focusing on nonhuman elements of life under capitalism, such as mode of production, for the organization of his theory; however, as Bertell Ollman notes in Alienation: Marx’s conception of man in capitalist society, Marx’s “theory of alienation places the acting and acted upon individual in the center of this account” (Ollman 1976, p. xi). Ollman elaborates further in Chapter 18 of Alienation that “The theory of alienation is the intellectual construct in which Marx displays the devastating effect of capitalist production on human beings, on their physical and mental states and on the social processes of which they are a part” (Ollman 1976, p. 131). (Although Marx’s focus is on the proletariat, the capitalist – as human being – is also subject to alienation, albeit differently from the worker)

Under capitalist production, man is separated from his work and its products. Man works for wages to survive; he does not choose what he does or what happens to the product of his labor. He is also separated from his fellow men, experiencing his relationship to them as one of competition (for wage-work) and hostility (due to that competition). Thus, estranged from these elements of his material world, alienated man becomes little more than an abstraction: “Alienated man is an abstraction because he has lost touch with all human specificity. He has been reduced to performing undifferentiated work on humanly indistinguishable objects among people deprived of their human variety and compassion” (Ollman 1976, p. 134).

In this way, alienation, according to Marx, is not simply a generalized concept or feeling. Rather, alienation is the rupture and separation of human nature. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx identifies four main, interconnected, aspects of alienation experienced within capitalist society that extend to cover the whole of human existence: man’s relations to product, to productive activity, to our species-essence/human essence, and to others. It should be noted that even though alienation is a concept associated with Marx’s early work (1840s and 1850s), the concept did not disappear from his philosophy in later years; rather, it became reconceptualized into the themes of commodity fetishism and machine-labor. Alienation is part of capitalism, even if Marx no longer explicitly discusses it in later works.

Aspect One: Alienation from the Product of Labor

The Office (first broadcast in 2001) is perhaps the best known of Gervais’ television series. It is a day-to-day “mockumentary” sitcom set in the Wernham Hogg paper company run by David Brent (played by Gervais), a breathtakingly clueless manager desperate for validation from his employees. Even though not all of Gervais’s Wernham Hogg workers produce commodities in the classical sense, much of what Marx has to say about production and labor is appropriate and thus the series can be analyzed through the lens of Marxist alienation. The Office provides an illustrative example of the first aspect of Marxist alienation: alienation from the product of labor.

Under the capitalist system workers only own their own ability to labor. They do not own the tools, the products, or the materials from the which the products are formed. Indeed, according to Marx, the worker becomes a commodity themselves: “the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities” (Marx 1959, p. 28). Labor produces commodities, but under capitalism it produces both itself and the worker as commodities. The more the worker produces and the more effort they put into this work, the more powerful the alien world of commodities becomes. In tandem, the inner world of the worker becomes increasingly impoverished as they have fewer things they can call their own. “The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him…It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien” (Marx 1959, p. 29). In this way the worker experiences the product of his/her labor as “something alien” (Marx 1959, p. 29).

Most of the main workers at Wernham Hogg sell paper or assist with selling paper (for example, the accountants); they do not actually make the paper. As wage-laborers, they are further alienated from their product in that they cannot use paper to survive (they cannot eat it or wear it) or to generate their own product. In doing this work they are commodified, ultimately reduced to the amount of the sales they generate. In fact, it is no surprise that the top salesman – Chris Finch – is grossly sexist, treating women as trophies and objectifying them, in a reflection of a commodified and competitive world that is all he knows.

The character of David Brent would like to believe he is a (somehow) beloved part of the owner class and that he is also an entertainer-artist, but his internal world is perhaps the most impoverished, with his dreams of being a pop star and his banal attempts at dispensing philosophical wisdom. The character of Tim lives with his parents and is often the butt of the cruel humor of people like alpha male salesman Chris Finch. Tim recognizes how impoverished his own existence is; something brought home to him on his 30th birthday when he receives only two presents, both useless: a hat-radio from his mother and a giant inflatable penis from his fellow workers. Tim works to earn money to spend socializing with the other workers (who are not really friends) in tacky nightclubs in Slough in order to cope with his pointless job. However, Tim does not have the courage to leave Wernham Hogg and change his life. In many ways, Tim is the most crushed by the system, whereas David Brent is so self-deluding that he does not understand how crushed he is.

In this way, The Office provides a way of illustrating and explaining one aspect of Marx’s account of alienation. But what makes The Office so funny? Certainly, the cringe-comedy aspects and the slapstick moments are enjoyable (in a sense!). But Gervais is also encouraging us to laugh at alienated labor under capitalism. In any other show, whether drama or comedy, the character of Tim would simply be portrayed as sweetly endearing, with his unrequited crush on the receptionist Dawn. However, Tim also provides a gently sarcastic “Greek Chorus” of commentary on the alienation of life at Wernham Hogg, mainly for the documentary camera, but sometimes for the private amusement of Dawn and himself. Frequently, Tim functions as a provocateur, encouraging David Brent to go to extremes or taunting his co-worker Gareth Keenan. In so doing, Tim is a puppeteer for our amusement, but it is the alienation of Brent’s and Gareth’s lives that he is showcasing for our amusement. Tim hides Gareth’s desk equipment, a harmless practical joke, but Tim knows that the joke will reinforce Gareth’s sense of powerlessness over his work and Gareth’s secret concern that he cannot actually do the work. In encouraging Brent to live out his entertainer-artist fantasies, Tim shows us how much Brent needs these fantasies to avoid recognition of his own alienation.

Aspect Two: Alienation from the Activity of Labor

Marx states in the 1844 Manuscripts:

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it’s forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. (Marx 1959, p. 30)

Labor under capitalism is external to or separate from the worker: it does not belong to his essential being. We are alienated from the product of our labor and thus the production itself is alienation. This second aspect of alienation is the alienation from the activity of labor, more specifically, this is the activity of labor under capitalism; however, work in itself can be a self-realizing activity. Under capitalism we work for wages; we do not do it to directly meet our own human needs (for food, shelter, etc.) or for its own satisfaction. Working for wages entails that we work for another and this work is not controlled by ourselves. We are denying out nature and limiting both our bodies and our intellects. “The external character of labor for the worker is demonstrated by the fact that it belongs not to him but to another, and that in it he belongs not to himself but to another…. The activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. It belongs to another, it is a loss of his self” (Marx 1959, p. 30). The results of such stultifying labor can be seen in The Office, with the misshapen “desk-bound” bodies of the workers and the boring conversations in the break room about what they watched on “telly” the night before (with Keith, the accountant, being the main culprit in this regard).

However, the alienation from the activity of our labor is best illustrated using Gervais’ television series Extras (first broadcast in 2005). Filmed in a more traditional sitcom style, Extras takes the audience on the journey of Andy Millman’s rise from “background artist” to producer/writer of his own lowest-common-denominator comedy driven by catch phrases: When the Whistle Blows. (So Extras is about a sitcom within a sitcom.) When we first meet Andy he is an aspiring actor who is supporting himself through working as an “extra,” although Andy himself prefers the term “background artist” as it seemingly gives more human dignity to his work. In reality, extras are hired and fired at the whims of the directors or celebrity actors, and they are treated much like the props on the set; indeed, in one instance Andy is simply addressed as “background” by a production worker (S.1 Ep. 4). In one particularly humiliating and dehumanizing scene, Andy’s best friend, Maggie, is rejected as not being suitably attractive enough to be in a scene with actor Clive Owen (S.2 Ep.7). (She is supposed to play a prostitute Clive’s character hired.) Owen says to the director he is not happy with “this,” with “this” meaning Maggie, indicating that he would not pay for such an unattractive prostitute. The director apologizes and says he was sent “an absolute truckload of hogs” and Maggie was the best one. The director and Owen then soothe Owen’s ego by having him throw dung in Maggie’s face in the scene as a display of contempt at her unattractiveness (instead of paying her). Maggie leaves the set to preserve her pride. She then takes a cleaning job, although it means she has to leave her cozy apartment and live in a grim studio apartment. As for Andy, he eventually finds that success does not give him freedom. His own sitcom is so controlled and rewritten by its main producer that it becomes the dregs of sitcoms much like the real-life series Are You Being Served? Whether as an extra or a sitcom star, Andy is just a cog or a tool in the vast machine of cultural production and is dehumanized accordingly.

What makes Extras funny? On the surface level, the fact that Gervais persuaded so many famous actors (Patrick Stewart, Kate Winslet, etc.) to laugh at themselves indicates that these actors recognize either their past experiences as struggling actors or are breathing a sigh of relief that they do not share Andy’s fate. On a darker, Marxist level, Gervais is showing us how the background artists are shaped by their need for work and the work itself. These performers are not recognized as individuals, but put on costumes to play types – indeed, at one stage Andy is dressed as a SS storm trooper. They often wear uncomfortable, physically restraining costumes and make-up, but remain in the “background”; and they do not get rewarded – either financially or personally – with a speaking part. How far are Andy’s and Maggie’s experiences from our own work experiences? How much are we stultified and restrained? Gervais is showing that it is a case of degree, not kind. And that is what make Extras so painfully funny.

Aspect Three: Alienation from the Self or Species

While humans share certain fundamental aspects of their life with animals, such as the need for food, as a species we have a more complex relationship to the natural objects around us. Bertell Ollman explains this aspect in Alienation: Marx’s conception of man in capitalist society: “This shows in production where…[man]…is able to create things which are not objects of immediate need, a greater range of things, more beautiful things; [man]…can also reproduce the objects he finds in nature” (Ollman 1976, p. 151). Work is the “species activity” or essential activity of humans, it is what distinguishes us from other animals: we are creative beings who can only fulfill ourselves through productive activity. However, estranged labor under capitalism warps what Marx conceptualizes as our “species life.” “In tearing away from man the object of his production…estranged labor tears from him his species life…in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labor makes man's species life a means to his physical existence” (Marx 1959, p. 32).

Thus, alienation from both product and activity interconnect with and underpin the third aspect of alienation: an alienation from the self or from the human essence, a loss of self. In pre-capitalist conditions, work directly satisfies our needs: it is “natural.” Under capitalism this connection is broken. Thus productive work (our species activity or essential activity) becomes the mere means to earn a wage. And – as such – we become alienated from it and ourselves. Selling our labor as a commodity means that we are estranged from our very self; we become alienated from our human “species-being.” Work becomes a means to stay alive instead of life being the opportunity to do work. Estranged from species activity under capitalism, man becomes – what Marx calls – an “abstraction.” Our life – separated from the characteristics of our species – has simply become the purpose of work, a reversal of our relation to work that makes us what we are not.

This estrangement from our individual humanity runs throughout Gervais’ central works: The Office, Extras, Derek, and After Life. Tim and Dawn in The Office experience a loss of self at Wernham Hogg, with both of them unable to follow their dreams yet accepting of their narrow lot in life. Tim still lives with his parents and appears to have no friends outside work, while Dawn lives with the cloddish Lee, who thinks her dream of being an illustrator will evaporate once she has “squeezed out a couple of kiddies” and she will be content with a part-time cleaning job. In Extras, Andy’s loss of self is symbolized by the talking plastic “Andy” doll, a useless consumer good made to cash in on the success of his sitcom, that swiftly ends up in bargain bins in stores (S. 2 Ep. 4). However, Gervais does seem to offer the viewers hope through the fate of these characters. Andy eventually seems to recognize that fame and fortune lead to loss of self and the series ends with him walking out of a publicity event with Maggie, while Tim and Dawn finally admit to caring for each other and leave the Wernham Hogg Christmas party together in the final episode of the series.

Alienation from self is not just a central theme in the television series After Life, it is often the driving force of the narrative. The series, which Gervais has described as a love story, is about Tony (played by Gervais), a journalist for a free local newspaper: The Tambury Gazette. Essentially a vehicle for advertisers of consumer goods and services, the newspaper features laughable and fatuous local news such as the man who got the same birthday card five times (S.1, Ep.1). Most of the people Tony interviews are retired or unemployed, and they are lonely and alienated from themselves, such as the woman who claims that her cat speaks to her.

Tony’s wife of 25 years has recently died of cancer, leaving Tony depressed and at a loss. His work, such as it is, does not sustain him; indeed, in the first episode, Tony denies that he is a journalist, that he has actual work. Tony claims that it is only the fact that he needs to feed the dog that prevents him from killing himself (S1. Ep.2). Without his wife, Tony has decided to deliberately alienate others, saying outrageous and hurtful things to keep them at arm’s length and to make them feel a fraction of his pain. In Season 2, Episode 3, Tony’s co-workers are shocked to find out that the newspaper will close. Sandy, the new reporter, in particular, is devastated, as she says it is the only job she has ever loved. His co-workers are not just working to earn a living, they are working (to paraphrase Marx) as an expression of their own human nature. There is a human relationship to the labor process, best exemplified by the fact that they work together to tell local, human, stories (however silly). Tony promises Sandy that he will find a way to keep the newspaper open. Even though he may not share her feelings, Tony understands how meaningful the work of The Tambury Gazette is to her. Eventually, Tony meets the newspaper owner in private and persuades him not to close the paper, and – in fact – the owner of the paper envisions himself in future working in collaboration with the workers to build the newspaper and to make it a meaningful publication.

Tony’s snarky comments to and about others are amusing, but what makes a whole television series about death, suicide ideation, and depression a comedy? Gervais himself says “I never doubted a comedy about a suicidal man whose wife dies of cancer could be anything other than hilarious” (Gervais 2019). In many ways, After Life is not a comedy series at all, certainly not in any traditional sense of belly laughs or slapstick or catch phrases. However, it is a character-driven series about human life, more satisfying – perhaps – to philosophers who study the human condition. When he is at home, Tony endlessly watches videos of his deceased wife, and here we can see Tony’s gentle, kind side. It is that side of Tony that makes him good at interviewing people and writing their stories, fundamentally affirming the importance of these people. And as the series progresses, it is that side of Tony that is brought out by his work at the newspaper. While it would be untrue to say that Tony’s work and the people at his work can ever replace Lisa, his wife, the newspaper and his co-workers do fulfill his need to care for someone or something to a great extent: to care about what he does and find it meaningful. When he was married to Lisa, Tony says all he wanted to do was finish work and return home. As the series develops, Tony begins to find meaning in his work, and he matures: through his work he becomes less estranged from his sense of self, although obviously he is still grieving. It is in this way that the series is amusing: a rueful “feel-good” experience like the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life, without that film’s maudlin message of self-sacrifice.

Aspect Four: Alienation from Others

Just as we are estranged from our own species-nature, so we are also estranged from each other as humans: the fourth aspect of Marx’s account of alienation: “An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man” (Marx 1959, p. 32). Like alienation from self, alienation from others comes out of the worker’s alienation from productive activity: “Every self-estrangement of man from himself and from nature appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from himself” (Marx 1959, p. 33). Under capitalism we are working for wages, estranged from our essential nature and thus from one another: “What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor. In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature” (Marx 1959, p. 32).

The worker is alienated from the capitalist, but, more importantly, in Marx’s account of social alienation, the worker is alienated from, and hostile to, those in his own class. According to Sayers, Marx explicitly describes in his later work, Das Kapital, this alienation from others as specific to capitalism and commodity production. Under capitalism we are working for wages: working for ourselves independent of others. Under the conditions of alienated labor, therefore, we experience others as well as ourselves as atomistic individuals. The (expected) hostility between workers and capitalists plays out throughout society. We do not recognize the needs of others, nor do we understand how others can help us satisfy our own needs.

This alienation from and hostility to others is demonstrated throughout Gervais’ work. There are two particularly telling examples of this experience from The Office. In Season 1, Episode 5 David Brent meets some women in a nightclub and says “Anyone of them will do.” For Brent, the women are interchangeable – atomistic individuals – just like we think of other workers under capitalism. In Season 2, Episode 5, the workers at The Office are collecting money to relieve world hunger. Their supposedly funny – but typically cruel – acts demonstrate how charity is framed under alienation and capitalism; for example, Chris Finch takes the opportunity to sexually harass the receptionist Dawn, treating his interaction with her as one of purchase and commodity, while the others “debag” one of the accountants (supposedly) for the viewing public. As Brent proclaims proudly, “Who says famine has to be depressing?”

As we have seen, Gervais’ commentary on the alienation of man from man underpins all his comedy, especially Extras, The Office, and After Life. His work is not simply “cringe comedy,” but “the comedy of alienation”: the comedy of estranged individuals who do not recognize how others can help with their needs and their sense of isolation. Gervais’ comedy is – following Ollman – radical in that it reveals something about the capitalist relations in our society and criticizes the effects of these relations on our lives. While Marx’s account of alienation may dovetail with three of Gervais’s major works – The Office, Extras, and After Life – the television series Derek (2013–2014) appears to be an apparent anomaly. Derek requires a closer inspection, as – ultimately – its titular character (Derek) transcends alienation and appears untouched by capitalist society.

Derek – Transcendence of Alienation

Derek is another mockumentary series, this time set in a nursing home, with Gervais starring in the title role as a helper in the home. Gervais has been criticized for creating the role of Derek, who is apparently intellectually impaired or perhaps autistic, although Gervais denies that he is mocking disability. However, Gervais may instead be bringing to our attention a phenomenon that is increasing in Britain: that of the individual who cannot cope well in our increasingly fast-paced and cruel capitalist society. Viewers of Michael Apted’s 7 Up documentary series can see a real-life example of this type of individual in Neil, an intelligent but overly sensitive man, who drifts into homelessness. Such individuals may be designated as mentally ill, but more often they are too vulnerable and are now broken. Certainly it would appear true, as McKenna states, that, “Even the helpers in the care home – such as Derek himself – are people, for the most part, who would struggle to secure conventional employment” (McKenna 2015, p. 201). (Thank you to Tony McKenna for supplying the article on request.)

McKenna claims that Derek functions as a critique of capitalism. McKenna writes that the residents of the home in Derek live in a capitalist world that is growing ever more ruthless: “This is capitalism mark II: a sleek, refined, steely sharp model that in the pursuit of capital expansion, more and more eliminates from its remit any extraneous, ‘unproductive’ baggage” (McKenna 2015, p. 201). In this world, it is the elderly who are the most vulnerable as they are no longer “productive” laborers and thus have no value: “In other words, by focusing on a group of elderly people living in a retirement home, Derek is drawing attention to those who fall outside the remit of the cycle of capital expansion and are therefore outsiders by the very fact of their social being” (McKenna 2015, p. 201).

McKenna’s claims about Derek and capitalism are cogent. In addition, McKenna’s work leads us to see how Derek does, in fact, tie in with the theme of Marxist alienation that runs through Gervais’ other work. Both the workers and the residents – as McKenna says – are alienated from the social system. We can see that the secondary characters of Dougie and Kev are estranged from themselves. Kev is unemployed and spends his days at the care home drinking, while Dougie is actively employed at the home. Confined to his windowless workshop, Dougie does not appear to have social connections with anyone but Derek, and he explicitly states he has no interest in a romantic relationship.

However, in contrast, Derek and Hannah (the care home manager) do not experience alienation from their own self or from others. Both of them are happy and fulfilled working at the home; indeed, the line between their own homelife and their work is blurred into nonexistence. Despite the best efforts of the local council to cut costs, Hannah and Derek create a place where the elderly residents can be (to paraphrase Marx) at home like a fish in water. Hannah achieves this through her running of the home and attention to the residents. Derek achieves it through entertaining the residents, in many ways he is like an eternal child, giving them someone to care about and helping to satisfy their emotional needs.

What makes Derek funny? Critics are divided as to whether the series is funny at all, but most of the humor in the first season comes from Derek and the care home residents defying the societal expectations of the elderly and social misfits (like Derek). According to the council, Hannah spends too much on staff, without realizing that the staff are not employed just for the work skills they bring. Dougie, the jack-of-all-trades, is underqualified, but he cares about the residents and Hannah. The care workers are a (dysfunctional) family for the residents, who – typically – have been placed in the home because their own families cannot be bothered to look after them. While there are plenty of quirky moments of humor, Derek offers the viewer gentle pleasure through seeing the happiness of marginalized others. Even the deaths of residents are surprisingly upbeat without plunging into sentimentality.

What is also interesting is that in Season 2 of Derek the show loses its originality and humor while simultaneously losing its account of alienation. Overall, in the second season, there is less emphasis on finding fulfillment through their work and more emphasis on self-awareness and happiness through having Derek as a friend. Moreover, there is an increase in a cloying sentimentality and a decrease in incisive political critique from the first season. The comedy follows suit; for example, Dougie gets electrocuted in a tired slapstick move, while Derek’s long-lost father appears, and we are supposed to find humor in the fact that he is the stereotypical drunken lazy Irishman.

Alienation and Religion

Alienated man is therefore alienated from his product, activity, his species-self, and others. Marx calls this being an abstraction: a being estranged from the social mode of human existence. In this way, alienation is “a disease of the entire social body,” which “demands a total social cure” (Ollman 1976, p. 226). As we splinter into abstraction, “alienated life elements,” notably property and religion, take on an independent life as they develop away from their original foundation in humans (Marx and Engels 1956, p. 157). Eventually, these elements become “‘needs,’ which the individual is forced to satisfy, and the original connection is all but obliterated” (Ollman 1976, p. 135).

According to traditional Christian theology, humankind is made in the image of their god. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), in contrast, held that it was humans who created their gods in their own image. Marx followed Feuerbach’s inverted picture of the relationship of man and God. Yet Marx also saw that, in projecting their own powers onto an abstract object, religion becomes a form of alienation for humans, as it separates humans from their “species-essence.” Marx was able to show why humans fall into this religious alienation. Unlike Feuerbach, who held that religious belief was an intellectual mistake that could therefore admit of resolution, Marx recognized that religion is a created need in response to the alienation of material life. With the transcendence of alienation (and only with this transcendence), however, the “needs” apparently satisfied by religion will disappear.

Gervais is famous (or notorious) for being an outspoken atheist, and his philosophical background clearly shows in his logical discussions of religious belief; take, for example, his discussion with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show about the existence of the Judeo/Christian god (2/2/2017). As David Kyle Johnson points out, Gervais does offer some strong responses to Colbert, but, ultimately, Gervais does not respond fully to Colbert’s original question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (Johnson 2017). Unfortunately, as much as philosophers enjoy an argumentative fray, Gervais’ critique of religion and religious belief on The Late Show does not initially appear to tie in particularly well with Marx’s account of religious alienation, but we shall see later that the nonexistence of a god underpins Gervais’ demonstration of religion as a lie in the film The Invention of Lying.

In Gervais’ 2009 film, The Invention of Lying, there is a more interesting perspective. Here Gervais is not entering the battle armed with arguments; instead, the film is offering an account of what social life would be like once the notion of a happy afterlife and “the man in the sky” are introduced. In The Invention of Lying, the world is just like the modern Anglo-American world, except nobody lies. Indeed, people can be quite brutally honest, such as when the woman Gervais’ character loves tells him she has no romantic interest in him because he has no money and is not genetically a good prospect as a father.

The main character – Mark Bellison, played by Gervais – is described as a “chubby, little loser,” who works as a screenwriter for “Lecture Films.” Given that everyone tells the truth, only historical films are made, and, unfortunately, Mark has been assigned to write on the fourteenth century, a century that is dominated by the plague, a highly unpopular subject. Mark finds his work dull. Moreover, he is unpopular at work, which may be partially due to a more successful screenwriter encouraging others to despise him. Perhaps expectedly, Mark is fired from his miserable job. In order to avoid eviction for non-payment of rent, he goes to the bank to withdraw his savings: $300. He is told the system is down, and the bank teller asks him how much money he has. Mark has an epiphany that honesty is not in his favor and claims that he has $800 (the exact amount he is behind on rent). This is mankind’s first lie. Mark then experiments with the power of lying, finding that he is able, for example, to make money at the casino.

Mark’s mother is dying, and she tells him she is frightened to die and to go to “an eternity of nothingness.” To make her happy, Mark tells her that there is an afterlife where she will be happy and surrounded by the ones she loves. The hospital staff overhear, and when Mark returns home he is mobbed by news crews and people anxious to know more. He is convinced to share “his knowledge” of what “the man in the sky who controls everything” has planned for humans in the afterlife and why this man allows bad things to happen to good people (two central questions debated in philosophy of religion).

The notion of this man does bring a measure of happiness to some people; indeed, some of Mark’s “loser” friends become content with their miserable existence now that they believe they will be happy in the afterlife. Here the movie illustrates Marx’s best-known dictum on religion from A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people” (Marx 1844b). While Marx is critical of the illusions of religion, he also recognizes the necessity of religious belief in a “heartless” – capitalist and oppressive – world. Despite his recognition of the psychological need for religion, Marx understands that religion is the symptom of the cancer of capitalism and thus both cancer and symptom must be excised: “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions” (Marx 1844b). In The Invention of Lying Gervais offers an illustration of both the need for and a critique of religion in a capitalist society.

What is fascinating about Gervais’ illustration of religion is that belief in the existence of this entity does not make people kinder or more compassionate, as religions in all their diverse forms usually claim. In the movie, society itself does not change, as people continue to view each other in terms of socioeconomic worth (not as having human worth) and in terms of their genetic potential to produce children who are good physical and intellectual specimens. Indeed, the woman Mark loves asks him if the fact that he is now rich and famous can alter his genes so that any children they have will not be chubby with a button nose. (He tells her the truth and says it won’t.) Women still choose partners for their genetic potential to father children and their ability to support them financially. Successful men still choose partners for their looks, even though these will eventually fade. Then, presumably, these men will be able to move on to a younger, newer model.

Thus, The Invention of Lying, while providing an amusing critique of religious belief, also provides an explanation of why capitalist society requires a complete overhaul. Most of the people in the film are alienated from their work, especially as there is no room for creativity in this work. Anna, the woman Mark loves, says she enjoys her job, but that is because she earns a lot of money for minimal effort, while, in one repeated vignette, there is a woman who stands outside Mark’s job saying she cannot bear to go in to work. The characters portrayed in the film are alienated from their individual species-being as they lack fulfillment from productive activity and only view their worlds through the measure of socioeconomic success. Most of the characters portrayed in the film are isolated, atomistic individuals alienated from each other, treating each other like commodities on the marriage market. Indeed, Anna nearly marries the handsome and successful Brad, even though she has grown to love Mark and value their friendship, as Brad is a “win” in this market.

But what of Mark himself? He becomes rich and famous because of his ability to tell lies (writing fantasy history and creating the cult of “the man in the sky”). And here Gervais is certainly tweaking the noses of Christians who believe it is wrong to tell lies; however, there is also a deeper message. If we are uncomfortable in our bourgeois morality in accepting Mark’s success, then we need to upend our entire belief system. Moreover, Gervais is telling us that – in lying – Mark has not acted differently from the church. Just like Mark, no matter how well intentioned it is, the church is telling a lie about the existence of its god. And here we can see the relevance of Gervais’ atheism to the film. According to Gervais, there is no god and thus church and religion are founded on a lie.

Conclusion

In these ways, Ricky Gervais’ television series and the film, The Invention of Lying, provide illustrative examples of Karl Marx’s account of human alienation under capitalism. In its turn, Marx’s theory of alienation gives insight into the laughing discomfort we feel watching Gervais’ work. Gervais does push the accepted social boundaries for comedy, but that is not so much because it fits the category of “cringe-comedy,” but rather because he is offering what is best called “the comedy of alienation.” Following Ollman’s account of “radical” humor, Gervais uncovers the capitalist roots of our society, and he reveals the alienation within that society and criticizes the effects alienation has on our lives.