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The Ricky Gervais Show: Difference between revisions
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* [[Animated Adaptation]]: Originally started as a radio show, then a podcast. It basically just animates the stories the characters tell on the show, with [[Hilarity Ensues|truly hilarious results]].
* [[Art Evolution]]: Starting with the second season of the cartoon, the animation started to gain more [[Ren and Stimpy|Kricfalusi-style]] elements and become more expressive and lively.
* [[Artistic License: Biology]]: Karl doesn't understand nature, and frequently speculates to fill in the gaps. For example: He was convinced that slugs eating postage stamps was a nationwide problem, and that slugs were sticky because they ate so much stamp glue that they sweated it from their pores when nervous.
* [[Ascended Extra]]: Karl. He started as producer of the show and was not on the air at all, but Ricky and Stephen then started actually talking to him and realized he was ''comedy gold''. He's become pretty much everyone's favorite participant in the show, which isn't surprising since Ricky can become an [[Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist]] in a matter of seconds and Stephen often acts as [[The Watson]]. It's reached the point where in the animated adaptation, only a few non-Karl bits (ie stories and such told exclusively by Ricky and/or Stephen with little or no interjection by Karl) have appeared.
* [[Author Appeal]]: Both of Karl's movie pitches revolve around someone having their brain (or part of their brain) transplanted into the body of another person.
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* [[Centipede's Dilemma]]: Many times Karl will be telling a story and Ricky and Stephen call him on the possibility of said scenario working. This leads to some very, VERY outlandish explanations.
* [[Characterization Marches On]]: When Paul "The Party Animal" Parker was first mentioned in the cartoon, he was imagined as a schoolkid wearing bowling shoes and a Doctor Who scarf who was asked to plan his school's parties. From his second appearance, where he was discovered to be an adult, he was reinvented into a Ferris Bueller-esque legit party animal.
* [[Chew Toy]]: Stephen. While Karl is the butt of the show's jokes, Steve tends to be the butt of the world's. He believes that tallness should be considered a disability because of all the insults he gets and the expensive things he has to buy because of his tallness (like he can't fit into small cars, has to buy things from expensive Big And Tall stores). His story about Carnival in Rio is epic (basically, despite the reputation of Brazil's women as being sex fiends, he couldn't get a single woman to pay attention to him, and STILL can't), along with the story about how he was not allowed in a night club because he didn't bring any women with him.
** One woman said that she was "frightened" by a picture of him on a subway because he looked absolutely gargantuan compared to everyone else.
* [[Cloudcuckooland]]: The Manchester estate where Karl grew up. So far, we've heard of "the lady whose mom was a witch", Shorts Man (who used short shorts to flash people), a woman who kept a horse in her house and had a son who chased cars, Jimmy the Hat (who never wore a hat), Scruffy Sandra ([[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]]), a man who tattooed himself and accordingly had terrible tattoos on his dominant arm, and Karl's uncle Alf who had a mattress in the back of his van but slept in a rubber dinghy. Among many others.
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* [[Crying Wolf]]: Occasionally becomes a problem for Karl; he spends so much time talking about stuff which is obviously ludicrous nonsense that when he actually says something that has the element of truth to it (or is indeed just entirely accurate), Steve and Ricky are automatically primed to reject it out of hand.
* [[Deranged Animation]]: It's just as deraged as [[Regular Show]]'s animation.
* [[Does Not Like Spam]]: Ricky has it in for Turkey Twizzlers, every mention of them is to point out how only [[Fat Idiot|Fat Idiots]] eat them.
* [[Dope Slap]]: Karl is CONSTANTLY in the receiving end of the verbal version of these.
* [[Double Entendre]]: Ricky and Stephen love making them, despite (or perhaps ''because'') of how uncomfortable it makes Karl.<br /><br />This is doubly true, although more legitimate, on the older XFM (radio) shows, as Karl was afraid of the repercussions of Ricky or Steve swearing on-air. Of course, the one time XFM got a complaint and Ricky and Steve were meant to be reprimanded, Karl [[Cloudcuckoolander|forgot to tell them]].
* [[Double Take]]: Sometimes, the things Karl says will drive Ricky and Stephen to baffled, stupefied silence.
* [[Dude, Not Funny]]: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPRWr778XGQ During one show, Karl refers to Steve as an "Invalid".] What follows is a long awkward silence. Then, Ricky quickly states that they had a request to play a song. It's one of the few times where Ricky doesn't have a snarky remark. You can hear Steve's bitter remark of "I...I don't want to do this right now" in the background while the music was playing.
** Every so often, Karl's lack of political correctness about certain issues will prompt Ricky and Steve -- themselves not exactly shy about playing with politically incorrect humour -- to react in a "Whoa! Hold on there!" fashion.
** Probably the best example is when Karl is talking when he went out with a girl who he later found out had a (supposedly) terminal illness. He broke up with her soon after because he didn't see the point in spending time and money on her when "she's going to die on me". Ricky literally screams "Oh God!" in disgust before calming down and saying, even though he understood what Karl meant, you still can't say something like that in public.
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** One example is when Karl is reciting the opening to [[The Elephant Man]], stating that John Merrick came to have his deformity because his Mother was scared/trampled by an elephant when she was pregnant with him. Steve immediately states he's wrong, when it is in fact true (in a way at least).
** In a 2002 episode, when Karl presents a 'logic' puzzle to Ricky and Steve (nutshell: man turns on light before he goes to bed, why?). The answer is that he is a lighthouse keeper, with Ricky blasting him about the fact that the light is off at day and calling him a buffoon. When Steve (and hopefully ANYONE listening) realises that Karl is ''right'', this leads him to cheer jubilantly on-air.
* [[Dumb Is Good]]: Despite being a complete moron, Karl is all in all an innocent, good person. In [[An Idiot Abroad]], the only sins he could come up with were reading the unforwarded mail of his flat's former tenant. He also took pride in saving flies from drowning in his pool so they could live another day, and felt sorry for a worm being eaten by a robin.
* [[Eccentric Townsfolk]]: Karl's stories about his childhood feature a lot of these.
* [[The Eeyore]]: Karl. Ricky often gets angry at him for complaining so much when, as Ricky sees it, he has close to no problems or responsibilities.
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'''Karl:''' [[Comically Missing the Point|No, I haven't mentioned the jellyfish today.]] }}
** Ricky himself has sometimes gotten basic facts wrong in the course of berating Karl, or claimed that even the bits of his stories that are true couldn't happen. The latter part, at least, can possibly be justified through Karl's poor and inarticulate method of telling stories, which can often make it very difficult to tell what is fact, what is fact he's exaggerated and / or somehow distorted, and what's just completely made-up. Ricky even said that [[Stephen Hawking]] could be speaking to Karl and all that would come out of Karl was "gobbledygook".
** In "The Ricky Gervais Guide To Philosophy", Karl expressed annoyance at Rene Descartes ("I think, therefore, I am") obviously having plenty of free time on his hands. This annoyed Steve, who immediately pointed out that Karl himself is a rather lazy person who [[One-Hour Work Week|seems to have plenty of free time on his hands as well]] (Karl once lamented that the highlight of his week was going to the cobbler's) and has yet to produce anything from it on the same level as Descartes, so shouldn't be criticising others for having plenty of free time.
* [[Ink Suit Actor]]: In the animated adaptation, as shown in the photo on this page.
* [[Insane Troll Logic]]: Karl is this Trope incarnate. For example, he's willing to donate all of his organs except his eyes. He doesn't want to donate his eyes because [[Our Ghosts Are Different|he's afraid of becoming a blind ghost.]] Even though he is convinced that blind people will get eyes in the afterlife.
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** Karl thought the dodo went extinct because it tasted terrible and no-one wanted to eat it.
* [[Insistent Terminology]]: Ricky '''hates''' when Karl calls his ''Rock Busters'' clues "cryptic."
* [[Intellectual Animal]]: Karl has a tendency to attribute human-like thought processes and intelligence to animals and insects. Even worms. And then gets confused why they don't act the same way he would in various situations. Needless to say, this opens him up to a lot of jokes from Ricky and Steve about how these animals, while not possessing the kind of or level of intelligence that humans do, are still much smarter than him.
* [[Jury Duty]]: A question about Karl's hair (or lack thereof) leads to an anecdote of Karl performing jury duty. [[Hilarity Ensues|Cue maniacal laughter by Ricky]].
* [[Kiss of Life]]: Steve told a story about how a kid he knew thought he could resurrect a bird that had been hit by a car just by kissing it.
* [[Know-Nothing Know-It-All]]: Karl often proves to be a particularly frustrating example of this for Ricky and Steve, as he will often misread something or only briefly skim it without fully digesting what it's saying (or -- frequently -- just make something up entirely) and then use this half-understanding to come up with a flawed and inaccurate impression of what's going on. And then will ''refuse'' to accept that he's wrong about it. Conversations will frequently have examples of Karl stating an inaccurate or clearly misunderstood point, Ricky or Steve correcting him, a brief pause, and then Karl saying "No, but..." and continuing on as if they hadn't spoken.
** For example, he saw a blurb in the paper about [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0328_060328_fly_glasses.html a fly with glasses]. He assumed that the fly was near-sighted and they were correcting his vision. This prompted a tirade from him about why humans are [[The Social Darwinist|"saving everything"]]. After laughing, Ricky has to explain to him that it's an art piece to show how [[Frickin' Laser Beams|awesome lasers are]] and that they didn't prescribe corrective lenses for a fly. They try to ask him how they would even test for near-sightedness in a fly and Karl replies, "Well, he'd be bumping into stuff". Cue maniacal laughter.
* [[Lack of Empathy]]: Karl seems to have a mild version of this; he's certainly not sociopathic by any means (he can be fairly sympathetic to others, including bugs drowning in his pool and worms), but he seems completely unable to put himself in the shoes of the person (or animal, as the case may be) that he's discussing, to the inevitable end that he's completely unable to understand why they just don't do what he'd do in that situation (such as why people in famine and poverty-stricken nations don't just move somewhere else). This tends to lead to some of his failures of logic.
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* [[Literal Change of Heart]]: Played with when Karl mistakenly thinks it's possible to replace a heart with a pacemaker.
* [[Literal Minded]]: Most of Karl's misunderstandings and [[Insane Troll Logic|bizarre logical interpretations]] appear to stem from the fact that he is incredibly (and for Ricky and Steve, at least, infuriatingly at times) literal-minded and practical-minded, to the extent that he [[Sidetracked by the Analogy|doesn't appear to understand basic analogies at all]] and tends to over-think even the most simple questions to the point where he's at times unable to answer them. For example, the phrase "throwing stones in glass houses" absolutely baffled him to the point where he was asking what kind of special people live in glass houses.
* [[Lost Episode]]: The first 8 or so episodes from XFM Series 1 (2001- 2002), which featured Karl's first appearances, are missing from the XFM archives and are not in circulation anywhere. Likewise, apart from a few compilation tapes and two full episodes, most of the original 1998 series has vanished into the ether.
* [[Ludd Was Right]]: Karl's stance on most new technology: for example, dismissing travelers who use sat-navs <ref>Referred to a GPS across the pond</ref> as "lazy." This does not go unchallenged by Steve and Ricky who imagine Karl giving a hard time to Columbus for using a compass or -- a ''boat.''
* [[Malaproper]]: Karl does these frequently. For example, he once said he did not want to be ''bungled'' with anyone else instead of ''bundled''.
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** '''B.''': "I don't want to live far from the water, I want to be right on top of it." {{spoiler|1=Be On Sea = Beyonce}}
** '''C. D.''': "If there was a Jamaican on the Titanic, he would have said this." {{spoiler|1="Christ, Da Burgh!" = [[Chris De Burgh]]}}
* [[Ms. Fanservice]]: Karl's girlfriend, Suzanne is depicted in the cartoon as a curvacious blond with a big ass. In season three there's a nice background shot of her silhouetted in the shower.
* [[My Girl Is a Slut]]: Karl and some friends were camping on the beach when another couple started camping nearby. When the husband offered Karl and his friends some sausages, they interpreted this as swinger's code and left.
* [[My New Gift Is Lame]]: Karl explains how he gave Suzanne a Christmas gift of an industrial-size box of condoms. Upon being pressed, Karl admits that this was a "good year" for her.
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* [[Near-Death Experience]]: In the third season of podcasts, Karl tends to act as if the surgery to remove his kidney stones was one of these. Ricky tends to disagree and be less-than-impressed with his complaining on the subject as a result.
** They once dedicated an entire segment of the radio show to Karl's stories about his "near-death experiences" as a kid. The first involved choking on a Mr. Freeze pop (which he credits with giving him a sense of a new lease on life, as a result of which he went to school for three whole days in a row); the second was a snowy day when his mother didn't think it was safe to go out, so he had to sneak out to do his paper route in time to get back and watch ''[[The Pink Panther]]'', and he got caught in an upstairs window and almost fell; and the third was during the martial-arts craze in the eighties when he tried to "kick his height," but froze at the apex of the kick to try to get his father's attention, lost his balance and hit his head on the ground. There was also the story about the time he ate too many cream cakes and had a bad stomachache. His mother called the doctor, who sarcastically said he didn't have long to live, which his mother believed until Karl's dad came home and phoned the doctor to check. Ricky tactfully suggests that in another family, they might have realized the doctor was joking.
* [[Not Good with People]]: Karl seems far more comfortable around bugs (or ghosts!) then friends or family. During a date with Suzanne, he becomes far more interested in the ladybug that lands on his arm.
* [[One-Hour Work Week]] / [[The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything|The Producer Who Doesn't Do Anything]]: To hear Ricky and Steve tell it, Karl has a large amount of holidays and free time and does only the bare minimum required for his job. And he does ''that'' very reluctantly.
** In episode four of the third season of podcasts, Ricky and Steve essentially spend several minutes at the beginning chewing Karl out for how lazy he is, [[No Sympathy|particularly after recovering from the removal of his kidney stones]]. Karl tries to defend himself that he needs to have free time to have things to put in the diary that Ricky and Steve make him do, only for Steve to point out that the podcast is [[One-Hour Work Week|literally the only thing Karl has to do at that point]], and that by going from his diary all he seems to do is have breakfast in a cafe and play with insects anyway.
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* [[The Social Darwinist]]: Karl seems to have this sort of mindset, such as when he describes his Auntie Nora as "a weak person" who's been "allowed" to live longer than she should have.
* [[Spell My Name with an "S"]]: The now-infamous ''"Mr K. Dilkington"'' letter received by Karl and explained in one of his diary segments. Made particularly annoying for him that they suggest he's one of their most valued customers, and later crosspollenates with [[My Nayme Is]] when someone sends an e-mail addressing Karl as such.
* [[Spin-Off]]: ''[[An Idiot Abroad]]'', a mock travelogue where Ricky and Steve send Karl around the world to see the seven wonders, and it's sequel, where he does amazing and impressive things (that ''other people'' want to do, not him; but he gets to choose) to check off a bucket list.
* [[The Stoic]]: Karl. The most he changes facial expression is raised eyebrows. He practically always has the same pouty facial expression.
** It was a huge deal to Ricky that he actually made Karl laugh in a conversation animated for the television episode "Munchies." Ricky kept interrupting Karl, and finally Karl said, "You have to keep it-" "Erect!" and Karl finally gave in and started laughing as loud as the other two. Ricky even pointed out to the audience, "I made Karl LAUGH!"
** He also laughed when Ricky accused him over the phone of not actually meeting gorillas like he said and just having the director in a monkey suit.
* [[Stupid Crooks]]: Ricky is scammed out of a quarter-million pounds by a fraudulent bank transfer for purchasing gold. The crooks (needing to impersonate him) show up with a fake passport using a cutout of [[The Office|David Brent]] as the picture.
* [[Stupid Statement Dance Mix]]: "I could eat a knob at night."
* [[Sure, Let's Go with That]]: While Ricky will usually challenge Karl aggressively on every single inane thing he says, Steve is often more willing to give Karl a pass or at least accept the ([[Insane Troll Logic|sort of]]) logic he's applying to the situation, if usually only out of some warped curiosity to see where Karl's going with it. This can lead to arguments between Ricky and Steve, with Steve usually coming to Karl's defense and yelling at Ricky to shut up and let him finish when Ricky tries to shout Karl down.
* [[Take Our Word for It]]: Karl's descriptions of Suzanne is the prime example, especially as she is [[The Unseen]] to everybody (she wishes for her face not to be in the public domain and the fansites are respecting that wish).
* [[Technology Marches On]]: One original 1998 series episode had Ricky and Steve run a three-in-a-row track set primarily for listeners to record onto a compilation cassette. Needless to say that the on-set Youtube and digital media devices now make this really funny to listen to.
** Numerous episodes of the 2001-2003 years had discussions about emails being better or worse than ''fax machines''. Also numerous discussions by Ricky and Steve lamenting the Internet and how it's only for 'mentalists or computer geeks'. [[Hilarious in Hindsight|Listening to this around a decade later is rather amusing]].
* [[Troperiffic]]: Seriously, notice how many of these tropes are about Karl.
* [[Twin Threesome Fantasy]]: Karl doesn't understand it. Why would you want two of the same woman?
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{{quote|'''Steve''': [[Sarcasm Mode|Well, Karl, I'm glad you've brought this up, because for me, I mean, a lightweight frothy entertainment show, on Xfm, on a Saturday afternoon, is exactly the place where I want to discuss the desperate lonely future that's inevitably coming my way.]] }}
*** Actually, if it's that particular XFM episode being referenced above (10th Nov 2001), Steve is actually first lamenting how even a homeless person can maintain a relationship with another homeless person living in a different city entirely - And whilst Ricky and Steve do ask Karl how he met Suzanne, it is not without the usual mockery, which includes suggesting that Suzanne was the sort to go through bins for food. With that in mind, it's perhaps right that Karl, for once, gets quite aggravated.
* [[The Untwist]]: "Monkey News." Karl always tells the story as if it's a shock that {{spoiler|the mysterious character is always a monkey. *gasp*}} Ricky and Steve mock and Lampshade this repeatedly.
* [[Unusual Chapter Numbers]]: The "fourth" season was a series of holiday specials called the Podfather. When they returned to the traditional schedule, they just jumped to the fifth series.
* [[Unusual Euphemism]]: Karl once starts off a story by referring to the "bad wind" that hit America. It takes Ricky and Steve a few beats to puzzle out that he's talking about ''Hurricane Katrina.''
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