After Hours

I've been watching The Ricky Gervais Show lately on DVD. It's pretty weird - basically, it starts as a podcast and gets animated into a cartoon. I'm a little surprised that Ricky Gervais looks like Fred Flintstone, but if he doesn't mind, who cares? So they just sit around and ask Karl Pilkington questions. At first, I thought he was just stupid. That's not the whole story. OK, he might not be very smart, but he also has a breathtaking lack of imagination. They ask him a question - any question - and he can only answer back with another question. Eventually, he'll launch into a long, drawn-out answer that makes no sense at all. This is my favorite one right here, the "blind ghost" answer. In earlier episodes, I thought that Gervais and Merchant were being kind of mean to Pilkington, but by this episode, I began to admire their restraint. The one thing about Karl Pilkington that's nothing short of incredible is that he is completely even-keeled. He never gets angry or annoyed and always talks in that lilting semi-monotone. Nothing bothers him. When he tells a story that makes no sense or sounds like an idiot, he doesn't care. That's kind of admirable. But then Gervais and Merchant swoop in with the ridicule. And Pilkington just digs a deeper hole. I can imagine that some of these conversations go on for hours. We just get the edited parts.