The glorious history of Ricky Gervais’s Golden Globes insults

The sound of dropping jaws was deafening as Ricky Gervais stood behind the podium at the 2011 Golden Globes and let fly. “I Love You Phillip Morris: two heterosexual actors pretending to be gay,” he began.

“So the complete opposite of some famous Scientologists, then. Probably. My lawyers helped me with the wording of that joke.”

This was Gervais’s second stint hosting the Globes – to his deep shock he’d been invited back after an equally acidic innings the previous year – and he was clearly in no mood to take prisoners.

That same evening he would introduce Robert Downey Jnr not as the greatest actor to ever squeeze into a superhero costume but as a former substance abuse cautionary tale. (“Many of you in this room probably know him best from such facilities as the Betty Ford Clinic and Los Angeles County Jail...”)

And he would reduce Saint Paul McCartney – seated up front and well within eye-contact distance – to trembling grumpiness by referencing the ex-Beatle's expensive divorce from Heather Mills. “We came over on the same flight. I didn't get to speak to him because I was up the front in first-class. He was behind me in coach. Saving money. He spent an awful lot last year.”

Last year’s Oscars, of course, was better known for Will Smith’s improv fisticuffs than its comedy. And the 2022 iteration of the Golden Globes were a muted, behind-closed-doors affair after its organising body, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), were accused of ethical lapses and a lack of diversity among the 87-strong awarding body.

Comedian Jerrod Carmichael is hosting the 2023 Golden Globes ceremony on January 10. But Gervais’s five stints hosting the Globes (he tweeted “F--- that,” when asked on Twitter whether he would take it on again) were a masterclass in Tinseltown ego-pricking. Can Carmichael match him?

Regardless of what you think of his comedy, as an awards show host Gervais is incomparable. His cruelty is just the right side of spiteful, his one-liners crackle with wit and malevolence and he never once sports the hedgehog-in-the-headlights look that is the giveaway of a host losing the room.

Gervais has also achieved the apparently impossible during his five stints hosting the Golden Globes – from 2010 to 2012 and again in 2016 and 2020 – in making the world care, if only vaguely, about the Golden Globes.

That he was rewriting the rules was obvious the moment he took to the stage in 2010 – he was the first Globes presenter since 1995 – and sipped playfully from a beer glass. “I like a drink as much as the next man,” he said, “unless the next man is Mel Gibson.”

This was a fearless tearing down of Hollywood omertà – which decreed Tinseltown's foibles and freakishness to be a comedy honeypot award show hosts were duty-bound to keep their paws out of. Gervais was saying out loud what everyone at home was thinking. For all his celebrity and estimated £130 million fortune, up there on the plinth he was one of us, calling the industry to account for its hypocrisies, its vanity, its fakeness.

“Do I pander to the 200 billionaires in the room or the 200 million people at home sitting in their [underwear] drinking beer who aren’t winning awards, who aren’t billionaires?” he explained in 2021. “It’s a no-brainer for a comedian. I’m a jester. I play to the other peasants in the mud. I wasn’t going in terrible. Think of the things I could have said… Think of the f---ing terrible things I could have joked about. It’s off the charts – It’s. Off. The. Charts – the terrible things I could say.”

Just as tellingly Gervais was prepared to take on sacred cows who in the #MeToo era have become fair game but just a few years ago were regarded as untouchable – certainly un-mockable.

Recall the hushed shock as he cracked a gag about Roman Polanski’s sexual misdemeanours at the 2016 awards. “The excellent Spotlight has been nominated,” he said. “The Catholic Church are furious about the film as it exposes that five percent of all their priests have repeatedly molested children and been allowed to continue to work without punishment. Roman Polanski called it ‘the best date movie ever’.”

Twelve months on, Hollywood would trip over itself in its rush to condemn the predators in its midst. But there and then Gervais’s was a lone voice, speaking truth to the powerful. Later in the same ceremony the camera cut from Gervais roasting another Tinseltown grandee to the Jabba the Hut-esque eminence of Harvey Weinstein. The gatling-gun jokes were not at all to his liking.

Given the merciless with which he skewered the industry, why did the HFPA invite him back over and over? That seemed a mystery – not least to Gervais. There were even rumours that during the 2011 Globes – the one with the Macca and Downey Jnr gags – that the HFPA prevented him from going on stage for a full hour during the broadcast (denied by all sides).

That the association was displeased was never a secret, however.  “He pushed the envelope and occasionally went too far,” its then president, Philip Berk said in 2011 (Berk would later be accused of sexual assault by actor Brendan Fraser). “The HFPA would never condone some of his personal remarks.”

Gervais had a take on the uproar too: “I probably won't be here next year,” he told USA Today. Yet would be asked back on three further occasions – suggesting that, for all the outrage, the HFPA understood his worth.

The Polanski joke also offered a glimpse at the anger that simmered behind Gervais’s best lines. He used the Globes to call out Hollywood’s track record of unequal pay, as well. “I’m getting paid the same amount as Tina and Amy last year,” he said in 2016, referring to 2015 gong-givers Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. “I know there were two of them, but it’s not my fault if they want to share the money, is it? That’s their stupid fault. It’s funny because it’s true.”

It is this blend of irreverence and righteous anger that would make him the perfect zinger-delivery-mechanism in the #MeToo era. James Corden, it is true, copped a world of flak for making a Harvey Weinstein joke at a 2017 charity gala. The difference is that Gervais would have put the boot in and kept it there. And unlike Corden he wouldn’t have apologised afterwards. Gervais comes across as genuinely of the belief that, when required, it is his duty to give offence.

“There’s nothing you shouldn’t joke about, there’s no subject you shouldn’t joke about. It depends on the actual joke and the target,” he told Stephen Colbert in 2019, confirming that, had he continued to host the Globes, he would have squeezed bittersweet chuckles out of the Hollywood sexual harassment scandal.

“People get offended when they mistake the subject of a joke for the actual target and they’re not necessarily the same.”

Yet the case for Gervais hosting the Oscars goes beyond his willingness to say the unsayable – joking about Johnny Depp’s substance intake or Mel Gibson’s anti-semitism (“from me and Mel, shalom”). What sets him apart is that his presentation of the Globes was simply fall-down hilarious.

As he has since confirmed, he didn’t care whose surgically-altered nose he left out of joint. Contrast his twinkling cruelty with the toxic cuddliness of Jimmy Fallon, the unspeakably upbeat talk show host who succeeded him in 2017.

“Looking at all the wonderful faces here,” Gervais declared in 2010, “reminds me of the great work that’s been don

e this year – by cosmetic surgeons.” Sitting through Fallon was, by comparison, like being beaten unconscious with a whoopee cushion.

Gervais’s humour, needless to say, didn’t go down well in the room. Jennifer Lopez – whom he lampooned for passing herself off as authentically “street” – claimed to have confronted Gervais backstage. And Mel Gibson jokingly – but perhaps not that jokingly – threatened to knock him out in 2016.

But therein lies the genius of Gervais’s hosting. He’s not up there as a member of the Hollywood elite. He’s one of us – gazing half in awe, half in horror at the assembled great and good.

His devastating insight was that we don’t tune in to award ceremonies to see celebrities succeed. We watch in the hope of catching the peeling plaster of an Oscar loser’s smile or of a Will Smith/Kevin Hart style fracas. Gervais is a jester rather than Hollywood creature. Which explains why he is both the perfect Academy Awards host and is also the reason he will never, ever be handed the gig.

Ricky Gervais’s harshest Golden Globes insults

2010

1. On Mel Gibson

“I like a drink as much as the next man. Unless the next man is Mel Gibson.”

2. On the audience

“Looking at all the wonderful faces here today reminds me of the great work that’s been done this year – by cosmetic surgeons.”

3. On Angelina Jolie

“Actors aren’t just loved here in Hollywood, they are loved the world over. You could be in the third world and get a glimpse of a Hollywood star and it could make you feel a little bit better. You could be a little Asian child with no possessions and no money. But you could see a picture of Angelina Jolie and you’d think, ‘Mummy!’”

4. On corruption

“One thing that can’t be bought is a Golden Globe… officially. But if you were to buy one, the man to see would be [HFPA head] Philip Berk.”

5. On Colin Farrell

“The Golden Globes... doesn’t just celebrate talent, it celebrates difference. It crushes prejudice and stereotype. One stereotype I hate is that all Irishmen are just drunk, sweary hell-raisers. Please welcome Colin Farrell.”

6. On Mel Gibson, again

“Our first presenter is beautiful, talented… and Jewish, apparently. Mel Gibson told me that. He's obsessed.”

2011

7. On Scientology

“I Love You Phillip Morris: two heterosexual actors pretending to be gay – so the complete opposite of some famous Scientologists, then. Probably. My lawyers helped me with the wording of that joke.”

8. On Charlie Sheen

“It's gonna be a night of partying and heavy drinking. Or as Charlie calls it: breakfast. So, let’s get this straight: what he did was, he picked up a porn star, paid her to have dinner with him, introduced her to his ex-wife, as you do, went to a hotel, got drunk, got naked, trashed the place while she was locked in a cupboard… and that was a Monday. What did he do for New Year’s Eve?”

(Gervais refers to a 2010 incident in which police were called to a hotel-room where Sheen was staying with adult actress Christina Walsh)

9. On Sex and the City 2

“There were a lot of big films that didn’t get nominated this year… nothing for Sex and the City 2. I was sure the Golden Globe for special effects would go to the team that airbrushed that poster.”

10. On The Tourist

“I’d like to quash this ridiculous rumour going around that the only reason The Tourist was nominated was so the Hollywood Foreign Press could hang out with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. That is rubbish. That is not the only reason. They also accepted bribes.”

11. On Robert Downey Jr

“Many of you in this room probably know him best from such facilities as the Betty Ford Clinic and Los Angeles County Jail...”

12. On the HFPA

“Next up, Eva Longoria has the daunting task of introducing the President of the Hollywood Foreign Press. That’s nothing. I had to help him off the toilet and pop his teeth back in.”

13. On Hugh Hefner

“Speaking of The Walking Dead, congratulations to Hugh Hefner, who’s getting married at the age of 84 to 24-year-old beauty Crystal Harris. When she was asked why she was marrying him, she said it was because he’d lied about his age. He told her he was 94… Just don’t look at him when you touch him.”

14. On 3D films

“It seems like everything this year was three-dimensional, except the characters in The Tourist.”

2012

15. On the Golden Globes

“The Golden Globes are just like the Oscars, but without all that… esteem. The Golden Globes are to the Oscars what Kim Kardashian is to Kate Middleton. Bit louder, bit trashier, bit drunker, and more easily bought.”

16. On Boardwalk Empire

“For those who don’t know, it’s about a load of immigrants who came to America about a hundred years ago, and got involved in bribery and corruption, and they worked their way up to high society. But enough about the Hollywood Foreign Press.”

17. On Justin Bieber

“Justin Bieber nearly had to take a paternity test. What a waste of a test that would have been… the only way he could have impregnated a girl is if he borrowed one of Martha Stewart’s old turkey basters.”

18. On Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas

“They’re ridiculously gorgeous specimens; they’re extremely talented, and probably very interesting. I’m not sure, because I can’t understand a f---ing word they’re saying.”

19. On Colin Firth

“What you don't know about Colin Firth is he's very racist. I mean, really nasty stuff. I've also seen him punch a little blind kitten. Please welcome the evil Colin Firth.”

2016

20. On Caitlyn Jenner

“I’ve changed. Not as much as Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner, of course. What a year she’s had! She became a role model for trans people everywhere, showing great bravery in breaking down barriers and destroying stereotypes. She didn’t do a lot for women drivers, but you can’t do everything.”

(Gervais is referring to a fatal car crash involving Jenner in 2015)

21. On Matt Damon

“He's the only person Ben Affleck hasn't been unfaithful to.”

22. On Mel Gibson, and Bill Cosby

“I want to say something nice about Mel before he comes out. I’d rather have a drink with him in his hotel room, than with Bill Cosby.”

25. On Spotlight

“The Catholic Church are furious about the film, as it exposes the fact that five percent of all their priests have repeatedly molested children and been allowed to continue to work without punishment. Roman Polanski called it the best date movie ever.”

26. On Charlie Sheen

“Joy and Trainwreck, no not the names of Charlie Sheen's two favourite hookers... the films of our next two presenters.”

26. On pay Hollywood disparity

“I'm getting paid the same as Amy and Tina [did last year]. I can't help it if they want to share.”

2020

26. On the HFPA

“Lucky for me, the Hollywood Foreign Press can barely speak English. And they've got no idea about Twitter. They invited me by fax.”

27. On Joe Pesci

“Lots of icons here tonight: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Baby Yoda. Oh no, that's Joe Pesci.”

28. On the Catholic Church

“It was a big year for paedophile movies: Surviving R Kelly, Leaving Neverland, The Two Popes.”

29. On Jeffrey Epstein

“In the end, he obviously didn't kill himself. Just like Jeffrey Epstein. I know he's your friend, but I don't care.”

30. On Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

“It's nearly three hours long. Leonardo DiCaprio attended the premiere, and by the end his date was too old for him.”

31. On James Corden

“The world got to see James Corden as a fat pussy. He was also in the movie Cats, but no one saw that.”