By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 15, 2008

Fitfully amusing but seldom very hilarious, Ricky Gervais's first stand-up special, premiering on HBO tonight, reveals that the seeming genius of modern comedy does have his limitations. As a stand-up comic, he simply is not in a league with such masters of the art as Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld.

"Ricky Gervais: Out of England -- the Stand-Up Special," this week's winner of the most-awkward-title competition, affirms Gervais's imagination, inventiveness and wit -- but not in ways as emphatic or enjoyable as on his BBC and HBO sitcoms "The Office" or "Extras," or other justifiably popular works in the Gervais oeuvre.

Perhaps he's funnier on home turf in the U.K., as opposed to performing before this humongous mob of an audience at Madison Square Garden. Gervais seems rather a tiny act for so vast a venue, his material falling short overall. Although the hour has its highlights, there is a great reliance on toity topics (he even confesses that a final story is "toilet-related") and, like virtually every modern comedian except Seinfeld, a wretched excess of potty mouthiness.

Some comics are very comfortable with that language, but Gervais seems not. And couldn't he at least have donned a clean shirt for the occasion? As if in a nod to "American Idol" judge Simon Cowell, Gervais wears a tacky and saggy black T-shirt, one that appears to have spots or smudges on it. It's depressing.

In addition to jokes about our precious bodily fluids ("warm wee," for one) and that sure-fire rib-tickler, underpants, Gervais takes pains to push the envelope by bringing up such discomforting topics as cancer and chemotherapy, autism, AIDS and the Holocaust ("I blame Adolf Hitler"). This is dangerous territory, and Gervais doesn't really justify going there.

Naturally, we expect and even demand irreverence in stand-up comedy, but though a Chris Rock or a Lewis Black (or such legendary figures as Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce) turn irreverence into art, Gervais has less finesse and insufficient mastery of the genre. The audience in the Garden seems pleased as punch, however. Gervais might get away with it by virtue of a certain cherubic cheekiness; that innocent-looking baby face is almost a license to offend.

Gervais gets solid laughs near the show's end, too, by looking analytically at such common old nursery rhymes as "Jack and Jill" and "The Boy Who Cried 'Wolf,' " and being clever rather than just dirty about it. His show would be more satisfying if there were more of this kind of material and less indulgence in the cheap shock. Rock's comedy specials can be watched repeatedly for the brilliance of the material and the execution; it's hard to imagine anyone but a blood relative or very close friend wanting to watch this Gervais special again, ever.

Sometimes, clearly, Gervais is spoofing insensitivity rather than practicing it. On other occasions, it's too close to call.

He gets off a nifty greeting near the show's beginning, asking the American crowd: "What's it like being a Third World country?" And he goes off on a productive tangent when reminiscing about the Falklands, his "favorite war." To his credit, much of his ridicule is directed at himself.

Unlike true geniuses of stand-up, however, Gervais keeps a cheat-sheet onstage -- a page or two of notes tucked away on the lectern where he stores his beverage. He is also guilty of laughing at his own material, pretending to break up several times as he reads to the audience from what he claims is a pamphlet on STD prevention.

Hey -- we'll do the laughing here, Bub, if and when it's called for. In this stand-up special, it's begged for but not called for -- at least, not often enough.

Ricky Gervais: Out of England -- the Stand-Up Special (75 minutes) airs tonight at 9 on HBO.