Ricky Gervais has celebrated a new milestone for his show After Life , not long after a scathing critique from fellow comedian Stewart Lee started doing the rounds again on social media.
The controversial comic shared a post to X/Twitter on Friday 23 August, writing: “Thanks to the 160 million people who made After Life the most-watched British sitcom in the world.”
He also shared a clip of “one of my favourite scenes ever”, in which his character is called a “paedo” by a child in a school playground.
“I’m not a paedo, and if I was, you’d be safe, you tubby little ginger c***,” he tells the child.
Shortly after, he shared a post thanking “the hundreds of millions of people who watched my specials Humanity, SuperNature and Armageddon on Netflix. Especially the people who complained. Best marketing in the world.”
In another post, he said: “The more successful you become, the more criticism you get. The more criticism you get, the more you work. The more you work, the more successful you become. Cheers.”
His comments came just hours after a fan shared a clip of Lee dissecting After Life, branding it “one of the worst things ever made by a human”, during an interview with Welsh actor and comedian Rob Brydon.
Brydon pointed out that Gervais had cited Lee as a “big influence”, to which Lee responded: “Yeah, well I don’t suppose Robert Oppenheimer felt great about having created the atomic bomb.”
Both Gervais and Lee’s names trended on X/Twitter as fans shared their own views on the two comedians, with some criticising Gervais’s After Life clip.
“A contrived, ‘Needless to say, I had the last laugh,’ fantasy in which someone behaves in an implausibly d***headed fashion to enable Gervais to deliver a withering ‘edgy’ riposte.
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“The whole series in a nutshell.”
YouTuber Steve Shives wrote: “I only watched the first series of After Life and that was enough. It was less a comedy and/or a drama and more an act of attempted self-absolution, Gervais arguing why he shouldn’t be judged for being an intolerant bully.”
Gervais had a similar reaction the first time Lee’s comments were aired. While he did not explicitly acknowledge the jibe, he tweeted in September last year: “Watch the award-winning, record-breaking After Life now streaming on Netflix around the world.”
He also “liked” a number of comments about Lee from his fans, including one in which the comedian was described as “never-been-funny”.
Another tweet “liked” by Gervais read: “I don’t even know who Stewart Lee is however, his comments about After Life really makes him look like a sad, bitter individual.”
You can read The Independent’s review of After Life’s third and final season here.