So here’s the thing. In his prime in the early 2000s there legitimately was a liberal PC orthodoxy in comedy. This meant if you made a joke about a marginalised group it was implicitly understood that the humour was either in the outrageousness of it, or that bigotry itself was the true target of the joke, and that we weren’t supposed to take it at face value.

But then actual fascists started gaining power by campaigning against those same marginalised groups, and that type of joke stopped being possible even when played back verbatim. Gervais either hasn’t realized that, or is happy to play to the tastes of real bigots.