the times | Thursday May 26 2022 3
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COVER AND BELOW: JAY BROOKS FOR THE TIMESThese are muddy waters, and you
might argue that the last thing
anyone needs is Gervais splashing
them with his big galoshes. Yet that’s
precisely why it’s funny, why it’s
refreshing. (OK: why I found it
funny, why I found it refreshing.)
You don’t even have to disagree
with self-identification to be able to
acknowledge, surely, that it brings
with it problems, paradoxes,
challenges, nonsenses. Lots of things
do. Yet there is a wing of trans
activism that treats anyone
questioning it as beyond the pale.
Trans people are not the butt of these
jokes: rigid thinking is.
Gervais told The Spectator
recently: “My target wasn’t trans
folk, but trans activist ideology. I’ve
always confronted dogma that
oppresses people and limits freedom
of expression.” That doesn’t preclude
trans people from being oppressed
themselves. It just notes that
prejudice is something that the
supposedly weak can have towards
the supposedly powerful as well as
the other way around.
The Irish stand-up and Derry Girls
star Tommy Tiernan, in his
sensationally good touring show,
notes that the comedian’s mindset is
that “you take neither strength nor
weakness seriously”. This isn’t the
real world: this is somewhere ideas
come to play. Gervais says several
similar things.
Now, hey, “only joking” isn’t always
a Get Out of Jail Free card, on stage
any more than it is in life. But while
I do so hate to give an arrogant
multimillionaire his due, the best
moments in SuperNature cut to the
chase in a way that is exhilarating.
As well as being silly and snappy
and nobody’s idea of the last word on
the matter. The rest of the show,
including an overlong routine about
Aids, veers between the sublime and
the so-so. But hateful or phobic, as
has been suggested? I can’t agree.
Like Jimmy Carr, Gervais is
drawn to rationality and the
limits of self-expression in pursuit
of what’s funny. Sometimes it
won’t be funny.
I’ll admit I reacted against a
routine about Caitlyn
Jenner in Gervais’s
previous show, a routine
whose sense of irony —
depending on how you
look at it — I either
failed to pick up on or
he failed to make
clear. I still think
anything can be fair
game for comedy, that
good people can —
and should — laugh
about awful things. It’s
just that the more
contentious or capable
of being misunderstood
it is, the clearer the
context and the better
the aim has to be.which she asks anorexic patients to
walk through doors that are wide and
narrow. Many perceive themselves as
fatter, it seems, as they often turn to
get through the narrow ones even
though turning is unnecessary.
They couldn’t see themselves but
had an inner feeling and concept of
their size — which they
overestimated. Giel says
that it is less a problem of
perception, more one of
cognition and evaluation.
At her Lincoln lab Irvine
puts me under the
microscope to find out just
how out of kilter my
cognition and evaluation
are about myself.
The first experiment
involves a VR headset
and a lifesize CGI female
body popping up in front
of me 45 times, in varying
states of weightiness,
one after the other. I
categorise them as either fat or thin.
People with “high body concerns” like
me categorise the shapes less leniently,
shall we say, than those with lesser
concerns. The aim of the program is,
over time, to move their thin/fat
boundary towards larger bodies and to
lower body image concerns.
Another experiment is a slider task
on a computer. Irvine takes a 3D body
scan of her subject that she turns into
a personalised 3D model in VR. For
me she used a standardised 2D image
of a faceless CGI woman.
The CGI model appears on screen
and I move the mouse to make her
shape and size increase or decrease to
match my own, 20 times. She predicts
I will overestimate my size and the
results confirm as much. I “see” my
BMI as 24.65 when in fact it is 19.47
Candida Crewe and,
below, using a VR
headsetThis dim
view of my
body shape
has a label:
normative
discontent
(which is at the very bottom of the
“normal” scale for my 5ft 5in height).
Giel is trying to disentangle
perception and evaluation in
experiments such as these. Her work
with biometric avatars — which are
based on real 3D data from a
participant’s body turned into a digital
artificial body model — has had some
surprising results. “Anorexic
patients are quite good at not
identifying their bodies as fatter,”
she says, “which is not in line with
previous evidence.”
Irvine agrees that preliminary
data suggests that people are in
fact accurate at estimating their
size, “but then the attitudinal body
image kicks in and scuppers their
thoughts about themselves”, though
the methods of assessing something
so intangible with absolute
precision need to be developed.
Irvine and Giel are still working
on refining their methods of seeing
what we “see”. “Here we’re not
doing intervention with our
participants,” Irvine says. “It’s way too
soon to incorporate my findings into
treatment; we have five years or so to
go before that.”
This approach is novel, Giel agrees.
“It’s too early to say if it’s working and
we have a long way to go,” she says,
“but the idea is to tackle people’s fear
of weight gain with state of the art
therapy by shining a light on their
perceptions.” Even at this early stage,
she adds, “We are hopeful, convinced,
that it is going to be helpful.”
For now, to keep my size as close as
possible to reality and acceptance, I’m
embracing the altogether lower-tech
hack suggested by Irvine: I’m putting
Post-it Notes on my mirror to remind
me to challenge my unconscious with
a more positive assessment.‘A
m I a bad person for
laughing at this?” It’s
a question that used to
spin around my head —
perhaps not till after
I’d got my breath back — when
watching the splenetically
outrageous Glaswegian comic Jerry
Sadowitz say things about sex and
race (and people from Aberdeen)
that nobody else could get away with.
Or, in most cases, should try to get
away with.
The question returned last year
when I first saw Ricky Gervais do the
cheerfully contentious series of jokes
about trans activist ideology and
woke comedy — with a side order of
imagined violence towards disabled
toddlers and the comedic value of a
fart at a child’s funeral — with which
he starts his latest stand-up show,
SuperNature.
Sitting in a packed London
Palladium, I couldn’t quite believe
my ears as he bashed away at taboos
that most comics don’t go near. The
show had dips in quality as it went
along, but the opening stuff, the most
contemporary, contentious stuff,
really, really made me laugh. “About
as daringly contrarian and just plain
funny as Gervais has been on stage,”
as I said of the first half in my review.
Now that show is out for all to see
in the cold light of day: which is to
say, out for Netflix subscribers to see.
And, perhaps inevitably given the
nature of the jokes, the nature of the
taboos they are tickling, some people
aren’t happy. Stonewall has accused
him of using his “global platform to
make fun of trans people”; Twitter,
or at least my largely liberal wing of
Twitter, ain’t happy.
So I turned on the Netflix special
wondering if what happened in the
Palladium should have stayed in the
Palladium... but, nope, I still think
that opening salvo is incredibly
funny. Seeing it a second time you
can see how swiftly Gervais
swerves from a joke about a
woman at her child’s funeral
(I know, I know, it shouldn’t
work) to addressing
contemporary definitions of
gender: “an old-fashioned
woman... you know, the
ones with wombs...
those f***ing
dinosaurs”.
He goes on to a
routine about
transgender rapists
that does not suggest
significant numbers of
transgender women are
rapists, merely mocks the
dogma that comes with
gender self-identification,
the vicious way that
people, often women, are
rebuffed if they try to
question that dogma:
“F***ing Terf whore!”jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjs
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