25 Minutes Of Top Notch Comedy From Ricky Gervais

So just be careful with charity, okay? Particularly at Christmas, that's when they sting you, when they give you a guilt trip. You're sitting down Christmas day, you got all your food, loads of food, too much food. Probably gonna throw a lot of it away. And all the adverts on telly are for charity, right? This one runs every Christmas day. Is there an old lady near you, cold and lonely this Christmas? Yep, I ******* hate her. Nosy bitch winds me up all year round. I can't wait for the cold weather, if I'm being honest. There's no old lady near me. She died last year of hypothermia. So, result. The other big campaign, the other big campaign, a dog is for life, not just for Christmas. Right behind that, I love animals. I'm really into animal welfare. And that's obviously aimed at parents, whose kids go, can I have a puppy? Can I have a puppy? No, can I have a puppy? And they give in to shut them up, and they get the puppy, and they like it when it's cute. Then they grow up and they get bored with it, and they lumber the parents with it, and the parents get bored with it, and they abandon it. 11,000 pets abandoned in England and Wales last year. And I think kids should have pets. I think it teaches them life lessons. I haven't got children of my own, but I've got loads of nieces and nephews, and they've got kids of their own now. And I wanna be a cool uncle and give them what they want, but I wanna be a responsible one too, and sort of not add to the stray problem. But I think I've solved the dilemma. This is what I do, okay, as a tip. You gotta wait till Christmas Eve, go to an animal shelter or an animal rescue home, not a breeder. And I go there, and I go straight to the veterinary bit. And when they're dealing with the little runts that are born all sick, and they're just putting them down, they've got no quality of life, I go, no, don't kill that one. I'll take that one. And they go, it's only gonna live a day. So I run home with it, going, don't die yet. Get your Starbucks, a little bit of Starbucks. Don't die yet, don't die. And I run in, and I call my niece. She runs over. I go, look. Oh, you got me a puppy. Your best uncle got you a puppy. Oh, thanks. Go and play with it, quick. Go and play with it. And they take it to bed, Christmas Eve, and they sleep with it, and they wake up Christmas Day. It's cold, dead, stiff, gone. So, not a problem. And they always come down, and they say, oh, oh, my puppy's dead. And I go, what, the puppy your uncle got you? He did his bit, and whatever happened after that isn't his problem. And they go, yeah. And I go, oh, no, maybe you rolled over on it on the night. Oh, did I? Oh, no. I killed my puppy. I go, no, no, you didn't kill your puppy. Jesus killed your puppy on his birthday, because you didn't spend enough on your uncle's Christmas present. So, they usually buck their ideas up the next year. The other big campaign, of course, don't drink and drive. Right behind that as well. A lot more stigma attached now. When I was growing up, there was no stigma. It was like, if you got away with it, that was all right. I'd be getting in the car. We're grownups. I'm family, and I'd go, oh, you can't drive, you're drunk. And they'd go, it's all right, I won't get caught. But people now know that that's not the point. It wrecks lives. I've done it once. I'm not proud of it in the slightest. I'm ******* ashamed of it. I wasn't drunk, but I was over the limit. That was Christmas, and I took the car out, and I knew I shouldn't. I knew at the time, I shouldn't be in this car. But I learned my lesson, because I nearly killed an old woman. In the end, I didn't kill her. In the end, I just raped her. But as I say, nothing came of it, because luckily, thousand to one shot, I know, she had Alzheimer's. Yeah, not a credible witness. I'll tell you what, spiders, they're always ready, aren't they? Spiders, always ready for action. A spider is always ready, like that. Completely ready, all the time. I mean, some animals are sometimes ready. You scare a cat, it'll go, ooh, like that, okay? Then it goes back to chill. Most of the time, they're just on their side, aren't they, cats? Cats are just, chill out, head down. All four limbs stretched out in one direction. You will never see a spider like that. You will never see a spider just lying on the floor with his head down like that, and all eight legs just out like that. What the ****? They're always ready, like that. And they're always ready in every direction, like the ******* Matrix. They don't have to go, what was that? They don't have to do it, they've got ******* 10 eyes and eight legs over the top. They're even ready when you don't think they're ready. You can see an empty web. You go, that spider's not ready. No, touch the web. What? Touch the web. And it's there, like that. I ******* hate them. 37,000 different species of spider. I mean, millions and billions of individual in each species, okay? And that's just one class, arachnid, of one phylum, arthropoda, which there are many. There could be five million species of animal on the Earth. Best guess, right? Minimum, scientists say. There's so many we can't, but five million. And that's 1% of all animal species that have ever existed. 99% of all animal species that ever existed are extinct. And that remaining 1% is five million strong. Take one of those species, termites. If you were to weigh every termite alive now, it would be 10 times the tonnage of every human being on Earth. And it's statistics like that, that make me think that this book isn't totally accurate. It's the book of Noah, the children's edition. I got this as a prize at Sunday school. I used to go every week. I believed in all this till I was about eight. This is when I was four. St. Agnes Sunday School presented to Ricky Gervais, R-I-double-K-I, like a ******* mongoose, for regular attendance. Not in for doing anything good, just for turning up. Oh, he's always there, give him some, he'll be back. Let's have a look at the evidence. Long, long ago, when God first made the Earth, I'll let both those points slip. We haven't got time, okay. Long, long ago, I should just say, is 5,000 years, according to the Bible. According to the Old Testament, the Earth is no older than 5,000 years, okay, which puts us around the time of the agricultural revolution. It's actually 4.6 billion years old. Let's pop that in. 4.6 billion years ago, when God first made the Earth and sky, all right, don't big it up. I mean, it comes as a package, really, doesn't it? The sky was never an optional extra. It could be, I built you a planet, I can't breathe. Would you like an atmosphere? Of course I ******* would. So everything was peaceful, everything beautiful. God made human beings too, and he wanted them to be good, like himself. Arrogant. But very soon, they wanted their own way. They would not listen to God. They became wicked and did wicked things. Look at them doing wicked things there. You can't get more wicked than that, really. Oh, **** off, wicked. **** off, wicked. God looking on, yeah, carry on, see what happens. See what happens. Bloke there running off with a big bag of money. Don't put it in a bank, you cunt. This lecture, as you've worked out, is about political change. No, but how do you change things? If you want to change society, how do you change things? Well, we're not all in power, by definition. Some of us haven't even got the vote, but if you've got a voice, in our country, we've got freedom of speech, you can change things slowly, but you can be heard, and that's one way. I used to work at University of London Union, and a day went by when there wasn't a march that started outside, or people giving out flyers and leaflets and stuff, and I always used to take them to read them, because I wanted to know what people were giving up their time for, and I remember one was a leaflet boycotting Nike and some other designer labels for using third-world sweatshops, particularly China, and there was a frightening statistic on this leaflet, I'll never forget, it said that the CEO of Nike has amassed $5.2 billion, and for a female worker in one of his sweatshops in China to earn that, she'd have to work seven days a week, eight hours a day, for 10,000 years, but they don't want to, lazy. There was another thing on there, it's absolutely true, one of the supervisors in one of the sweatshops in China had been accused of sexually assaulting one of the female workers, and he'd been, that's not funny, is it? No, true, and he was suspended, but fled the country before he'd come to trial, and the CEO of Nike was asked an awkward question about this at a press conference, and he said, no, he wasn't sexually assaulting her, he was trying to wake her up and must have touched the wrong places. What? That's a bad excuse, isn't it? Touched the, what? Mrs. Chang, Mrs. Chang. Just shout, don't touch her at all. Mrs. Chang. I love bad excuses when they're sort of embarrassing, sort of heinous, things like that. A friend of mine I went to college with was a medical student, and when he did his degree, he did an internship or junior doctorship at University College Hospital, and he was working nights, and it was about 1.30 in the morning, and this guy came in and he had a bottle of sauce stuck up his arse, as you do, and completely disappeared. He hadn't left, like, you know, enough out. He hadn't thought of the return journey. Even Hansel and Gretel sort of left breadcrumbs, didn't they? He hadn't thought it through. He was getting so into it, the whole bottle up there, oh, then he couldn't get any purchase, he couldn't, you know, tie a bit of string to it or something, just think ahead. Or, empty it out, fill it with concrete, put a broom handle in it, let that set, then you've got the full length of the bottle and a handle. But he hadn't put as much thought into it as me. Amateur. Now, so, and also, instead of going in there and saying, excuse me, mate, got a sauce bottle stuck up my arse. I know what I was doing, you know what I was doing. Get it out and I won't do it again. Instead of saying that, he went through his whole face-saving rigmarole of filling out an accident report, just making it worse for himself. And this is the excuse he gave, okay? He said, well, what happened was, this is a great excuse, right? Said, I'd been shopping at Safeway and I came home with my shopping and I realised that I'd locked myself out of my house. So I put the shopping on the doorstep and I saw that I'd left open a bedroom window, so I thought I'd get in there. So I tried to climb up the drainpipe, but as I was climbing the drainpipe, my belt broke and my trousers and pants fell down. I went to grab them, I lost my grip and I fell and I landed on the bottle that went straight, and that's what happened. So I went, okay, so got it out for him. When he left, they made an amendment to the accident report. My mate put, this story would be somewhat more believable if Safeway sold their bottles of sauce with condoms already attached. I said, oh, the condom, ****, he knows I'm lying. Why did he put a condom on it anyway? Because he was then going to use it on his chips. How mean is that? If you're into, you know what I mean? Shoving condiments up your arse, buy two, they're only 79p, I guess. I don't know. One for chips, one for arses. You know where you are. You have to make bad excuses. My favourite leaflet of all time. I bet some of you haven't even got a favourite leaflet, have you? Sort it out. No, it really is. You'll see why. And I kept it with me for about three months and showed it to everyone. It was a leaflet that came round the union in about 1994, 95. And it was a Terence Higgins leaflet about safe sex. And it was aimed at the last demographic of gay men that weren't taking HIV seriously enough. And so it was very hard hitting and seen and it used like really sort of colourful language to get the message across. And I remember it so well. And the title of this fly, you know it's going to be a good leaflet when this is the title. This is the opening gambit, right? It was called, you know, you don't always have to have anal sex. Thanks very much. Think of a couple of old age pensioners just queuing for their flu jab. They're just browsing, we just digest. What's this one? You know, you don't always have to have anal sex. See, I ******* told you. So that was what it was called, right? And it was a 10 point plan of alternative to, you know, that. So, number one, okay? Always started the same as well. Always started with why not, right? Why not, like casual, like you're saying like a recipe or something. Why not throw in an onion, right? Right, okay. Number one was this. And it had these little diagrams, like little drawings that you get on safety things on planes. So anyway, number one, 10 point plan. Number one was, think of this as medical advice, okay? Number one was, why not just wank each other off? I've got the new leaflet. Oh, what does it say? Why not just wank each other off? Okay, oh, casual. Number two, number two was great. Again, just a casual suggestion, right? Number two was, what, always the same. Why not, right? When is that? At this, so casual, why not? Imagine you queue up to see a GP. They go, the GP will see you now. And he's sort of writing, come in, sit down. What can I do for you? I'm gay and I'm worried about HIV. Come on his back. Number three, whenever I show this to people, when I got to this one, people were laughing and going, oh, and they went, oh, right? Number three, it's the worst one. Number three is, why not come in his hair? Not the hair, on the back. Come on the back, sure, on you go, go on. But that's where my fascination with animals started at school. And I did well at school, but I felt that I just learned to pass exams, as opposed to, I feel like I just wanna get so much knowledge now. It must be a sign of age, but I just, I wanna know about everything, things I never cared about before. I've got a digital TV and there's 72 channels, all ----, except I watch hours on end of the History Channel and Discovery Channel now, just back and forth, like six hour stints at History Channel, Discovery Channel, back and forth. Ask me anything about sharks and Nazis. Not as bad as a lot of people make out. Sharks, I mean, Nazis, horrible. Sharks, brilliant. Nazis, rubbish. But the shark's an amazing creature. It's got a sense of its body. It can tell the slightest movement in water, a floundering fish, through electrical impulse, it can zone in on that. It's got good eyesight, contrary to popular belief. And it can taste and smell the slightest human secretion of, like, blood and sweat, one part in a billion, from a mile away. A shark would have found Anne Frank like that. Nazis, rubbish. No, no time for them, no time for them. I've been to her house, it's tiny. I can't believe one of them didn't go, let's look upstairs today, you know what I mean? What the **** were they doing? Okay, yes, you know. Sarge, Sarge, wait, what? What's that tapping noise? Rats, move on. She had time to write a novel, for Christ's sake. Well, it ends a bit abruptly, and no sequel, lazy. No, I'm not here to talk about war, and particularly not at this time, you know, and we're here to, not my favourite war, either, the Second World War, you know. Well, if you're asking, the Falklands. People say it was a conflict, it was a war. And it was, it's my favourite war, because it was a range war. What that means is that the RG guns could fire nine kilometres, and our guns could fire 17. So we just parked our boats about 10 kilometres, and they were falling into the sea, and we were shelling the ---- out of them. It's the war equivalent of holding a midget at arm's length. And he's flailing like that. And you're just steadily kicking in the bollocks. What's it called? Malvinas. Crap. What's it called? That's why the Falklands was my favourite war, with the little midget feather, right? Vietnam, best soundtrack? Definitely, definitely. First World War was good, you know. They say it was a great war. It wasn't great, it was good. I mean, no, I mean, it wasn't great. For me, if it's great, it's got to be perfect. It wasn't perfect. I like the bayonets and the mustard gas. Isn't it like the poetry? That, ooh, that sort of brought, do you know what I mean? Brings a war down for me, poetry. It's the only time poetry isn't bent, but even so, let's keep it out of war. There's one poem that everyone goes on about, which is very poignant, because the soldier died writing it, and I suppose it is quite poignant. It's called We Are The Dead. It goes, we are the dead, once we lived without the sun on our face, loved and were loved, and now we lie in Flanders fields. Be honest. If you'd rather have a gun in your hand instead of a pen, mate. What are you doing? Pick your gun up, you. Let's have a game of football in no man's land. Second World War was all right, but not, the ending, that tears a lot of people, because we say, oh, you know, the A-bomb. Atomic power's bad, but war's bad, but it ended a war, so, you know, and it was invented by Einstein, essentially, atomic power, and he's brilliant, isn't he? So, so bright. No, he said that light could be described as discrete bundles of energies that when irradiated onto an unstable, what sort of cunt thinks like that? Do you know what I mean? That's what turned Stephen Hawking's mental, too much thinking. I mean, I'm not a doctor, but I'm pretty sure it's too much, too much swatting can send you a little bit like him. I don't know, but it's sort of like, the universe is expanding. Of course it is, Stephen. Now, take a day off, go for a walk, not a walk, but, I mean, go out, just open a window, at least just cut, watch a bit of telly, Robot Wars is on, you like that. Just, I'm just, I don't know, I'm not, oh, don't have a go at Stephen Hawking, he's a genius, he's not genius, he's pretentious. Born in Kent and talks in the American accent. Oh, no more war, no more war, animals have been used in war, traditionally for, you know, forever, I mean, cavalry, and they used to send in dogs and goats to rip up the horses' underbelly in the 10th century and stuff, and I was looking on the US Navy website, researching this show, and looking at the personnel, and they've got, in the US Marines, it's absolutely true, they've got a 90-strong team of sea lions and dolphins, and they're trained to take these depth charges down and drop them under submarines and blow the, isn't that incredible? I mean, they don't know what they're doing, they're doing it for a bit of fish, but it's still, I mean, I think mainly it's the dolphins that do all the dangerous stuff, and the sea lions are more for morale when they get back going, that was brilliant. That was, oh, that was, oh, well done, let's go to the, are you gonna do tomorrow's? I would, but I think I've got a bit of whooping cough coming on, so, you're doing a brilliant job. I did a lot of research on the internet for this lecture, and it is the greatest resource in the world, but it's sort of clogged up with people doing homemade websites about themselves. It's stuff like, my name is Rupert, this is my cat. Thanks very much. Here are my favourite Cure songs, in order. I don't give a, why are you, and there's trivia websites where people sort of go on there and add to them something they have to share with the world, like they think we care, and they credit themselves, they must wake up in a cold sweat and go, oh, I must tell the world this, and this is a real one, the peanut is not a nut, it is a lagoon, phew. I wanna share with you some of my favourite ones, this is from Deb and Jen's World of Trivia, it's a real website that everyone goes on to, and page three of 84, my favourite, the animal facts, of course. Now, some of these are true, some of them are a little bit embellished, some I'm not sure about, but always think of the person who's telling us this, why he's telling the world this, what is his motivation, what's he thinking? Right, okay. There we go. You can lead a cow upstairs, but not down. That's true, by the way, it's the way their joints don't oppose, so a cow will go upstairs, but it won't go, think of the poor bastard who found that out the hard way. But they, come on, Daisy, down you go, or I can't go downstairs, my joints, I don't care about your joints, my wife's coming home in five minutes, get down the stairs. Have you seen those blow-up cows and blow-up sheep you can get in Ann Summers and sex shops? Now, the point of a blow-up doll is presumably for a man who can't get a real woman. How fucked are you if you can't get a real sheep?