Ricky Gervais knows he won’t be cancelled by his jokes – his lazy new special is proof of that

You’ll realise this is great satire when I’m dead,” Ricky Gervais, purveyor of increasingly cheap comic shocks, announces, in the twilight moments of his new Netflix special, Armageddon.

He’s being ironic: even by Gervais’s own estimation, the show is not a piercing satire. In fact, it is almost an anti-satire, a list of unsayable things for which Gervais invites his audience to provide meaning. The problem is that, unlike “great satire” – which is provocative, incendiary and takes the abuses of the establishment to task – Gervais has become trapped