Hollywood Hated the Gervais Golden Globes Speech, But New Numbers Show America Loved It
Hollywood might want to start listening to Ricky Gervais – it seems like a lot of Americans are.
The British comedian made himself an enemy of the movie moguls but endeared himself to millions of Americans Sunday night when he used his platform hosting the Golden Globes to lecture the glitterati in front of him on what viewers didn’t want to hear from them.
“If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech,” Gervais said on the ceremony aired by NBC. “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. So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your God and f**k off.”
Those words and others from Gervais’ monologue didn’t make Gervais popular to the crowd inside the Beverly Hilton, but television viewers around the country no doubt appreciated it.
As numbers on social media Tuesday showed, Gervais’ speech was still a hit with millions of viewers in the hours and days after the ceremony ended.
On Monday, The Daily Caller reported, NBC’s YouTube video of Gervais’ speech had 2.6 million views — greater than the 2.3 million registered by all other clips from the event combined.
By Tuesday afternoon, all those numbers had risen, but Gervais’ popularity only kept outpacing the numerous other winners — led by huge names like Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt.
The Gervais YouTube video had 8.6 million views. The rest of the field combined had about 5.2 million.
The numbers were similar on Twitter, according to The Daily Caller. On Monday, Gervais’ speech had been viewed 7.1 million times compared to the 4.1 million views of the other videos combined, the website reported.
By Tuesday, Gervais’ speech had been viewed by 9.6 million Twitter users.
If you’re not one of those 9.6 million, check it out here:
Ricky Gervais kicks off The #GoldenGlobes. pic.twitter.com/ZSdqiWMudx
— NBC Entertainment (@nbc) January 6, 2020
Naturally, Gervais’ speech was panned by the powers that be and their media handmaidens.
At the Los Angeles Times, home turf of the celebrities Gervais roasted, the review was particularly bad for Gervais — and protective of the coddled elites he mocked:
“The last thing anyone needed was for the smirking master of ceremonies to reprimand them for having hope, or taunt the room for trying to use their influence to change things for the better.”
It’s tough to miss a point as widely as that writer did, but there plenty of other Gervais critics:
USA Today called it a “lackluster, lazy parade of jokes.”
At NBCNews.com itself, a writer declared that “perhaps the worst ‘joke’ was his judgmental rant claiming actors shouldn’t make political acceptance speeches.”
Funny, to the vast majority of the viewers, both in real time Sunday night and in recordings since, that line was probably the best, head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest, makes-me-wanna-shout line of the whole Golden Globes ceremony — and could apply to every other entertainment awards show that has ever been and ever will be.
Fortunately, there were many more who thought Gervais was spot on.
Everybody loved Ricky Gervais’ speech criticizing Hollywood, except the mainstream media. Shows how mainstream media has lost its touch with its audience (and reality in general). #goldenglobes2020 pic.twitter.com/FvgkyNiG5O
— LesserMagic (@LesserMagic) January 7, 2020
The veil has been lifted. Hollywood preaches climate change hysteria while they fly on $60 million Jets. They lecture us on #MeToo while enabling Harvey Weinstein for 30 years. Ricky Gervais gets it. The days of virtue signaling, self-serving platitudes are over in Hollywood. pic.twitter.com/XtEpGKm21d
— Eric Matheny? (@EricMMatheny) January 7, 2020
Opinion: @rickygervais didn’t cheapen anything, he reminded people of their vast hypocrisy. They are televangelists with sexy scandals. The vital statements should be about the merits of their craft. Period. https://t.co/PeZpwoM78q
— Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) January 7, 2020
There are millions and millions of Americans who think like those Twitter users.
The willingness of the news media-entertainment industrial complex to ignore them — and ignoring its own blindness — is one reason the world was so shocked by President Donald Trump’s election in 2016.
If Hollywood and the news media really want to understand how the country views them and its political leadership, they could start by listening to people like Ricky Gervais.
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