The fact that Ricky Gervais’s slashing MC performance at last night’s live telecast of the Golden Globes Award is actively competing with the US-Iran confrontation for media attention once again shows our society’s charming (and sometimes healthy) preference for trivia over substance.

I didn’t watch the show live because I couldn’t care less what the Hollywood Foreign Press Association thinks about anything, and because the Hollywood community culture makes me retch. I did follow the thing online, as several sites were gleefully streaming blow-by-blow descriptions of Gervais’s routine.

I can’t conclusively rate the ethical nature of his pretty much non-stop attacks on the attendees without knowing what his job was: to entertain them, to entertain the TV audience, or both. If it was both, then the comic would have been restricted to the kind of generic humor we have been accustomed to at the Oscars and Tonys. Yet why would anyone hire Gervais to do that? (Remember the outrage over Seth McFarland’s Oscar hosting gig when he delivered exactly what one would expect the politically incorrect creator of “The Family Guy” to bring to the party?) In the end, we have to assume that since this was the fifth time Gervais got the assignment, both the Golden Globes producers and the glitterati who were paying attention consented to what they got. Continue reading →