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saintescuderia · 9 months ago

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Things I Learned from Ricky Gervais’ ‘After Life.’

I was told I would cry from laughter — and from ugly emotional sobbing.

Ricky Gervais and I have a love-hate relationship.

One the one hand, he is one of the funniest comedians who haven’t diluted their craft for the sake of pleasing people. He makes jokes because he finds them funny. He is self-assured in his humour that nothing phases him — not even society’s politically correct tendencies — but it also means he just doesn’t give a shit. If you’re offended, that’s on you. There is no sensitivity here.

Which actually sums up his character, Tony, quite well.

We meet Tony who is struggling to make sense of life in the wake of his wife’s death. For him, he would’ve committed suicide had it not been for the fact that he needed to feed the dog. And that brings me to the first point.

#1 / Animals are sometimes (read: often) better.

I say this because one of the scenes that really got me was when Tony and his dog, a German Shepherd by the name of Brandy, visit the beach. Tony looks at the water and remembers a memory of his wife. Suddenly overwhelmed with the familiar desire to end it, he tries again. Wading into the water fully dressed, he keeps going in and in — until Brandy notices as starts desperately barking at him. Tony hears her and reluctantly comes out to be with his dog. Brandy might not have given him a reason to live— the show’s whole premise is that only you can give that to yourself — but she gave him a reason to not kill himself.

#2 You can grieve yourself.

This show was recommended to me in that, “if you’ve ever experienced loss, it’ll hit.” Now, I have never really lost anyone really close to me. All the funerals I’ve attended in my life had been some convoluted relation in the community in which I was there was an extension of my parents. I don’t know death. I don’t know loss. Not really.

But, the show did come at a time when life had done a complete overhaul with me. People had walked out, I had flipped out. Without warning, my life had completely changed. I was still processing everything that had happened which made me struggle at times to recognise the person in the mirror. I had a lot to grieve in that so many doors had closed — doors I though had remained open forever.

Tony’s navigation through his pain and suffering was something I could relate to all too well. He held so much anger within himself that lashing out was his way of coping. He punished others to create distance. The coping mechanism of pushing everyone as a form of self-punishment because he couldn’t save his wife; that he doesn’t want anyone else close anymore because they could disappear and cause him more grief to mourn.

That, or I’m just projecting.

#3 Support comes in many forms.

Admittedly, Tony was an asshole to to the people around him. Lenny, a co-worker who loves to eat, receives the blunt of many a food-related joke as Tony pokes fun of his size and appetitie. A new girl to the workplace, Sandy, asks Lenny if it bothers him. Lenny shrugs it off, completely indifferent.

“Nah, he’s just a mate.”

And you think, honey no, that guy’s being a dick to you. Tony isn’t his friend, he literally calls him a pig. One sequence has Tony holding onto the back of Lenny’s neck and talking about his neck fat.

Yet, at the end, it turns out that Lenny, the clueless and hungry Lenny, was actually right. During a tangent at the end of the show where Tony realises how grateful he is for the people in his life, he thanks Lenny for being his “human stress ball.”

Lenny didn’t do anything spectacular. He didn’t chase after Tony like his brother-in-law who would try to come up with ways to make Tony happy. Lenny just knew this was Tony’s was of coping and took it and let him have this as a cathartic outlet.

Which reminds me —

#4 Don’t be an asshole.

I kept waiting for the therapist’s asshole-ish ways to pay off and give Tony the answer he was seeking. That the tough, careless ‘love’ was actually love and there would be a turning point.

Spoilers: it never came.

In fact, the turning point came from Tony’s conversations with a lady he befriends at the cemetary. She had lost her husband and they would often sit together and talk. A kind, simple lady. Her name was Anne and she delivered one of the key lines from the show that stuck with me.

“I know you might not like living, but you make the world a better place.”

(Or something along those lines. I may be misremembering since I was sobbing throughout it all.)

Tony realises that punishing humanity only adds to the problem — Anne’s line of “they grow in numbers” about the assholes of the world is the plain truth — and that doesn’t work for him. Not anymore. The pain he felt actually eased when he did good things. And it’s easier to do good things if you just try to be a good person overall.

This train of thought led him to finally start to change his life. From cleaning up the dishes around his house to buying proper food to showing tokens of appreciation to the people around him. Tony sees that he’s not the only victim of life and that everyone has their own shit. Giving people the benefit of the doubt and trying to do good is much better for the soul than adding to the asshole tally of the world.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees, the shade of which they know they’ll never sit in.”

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