Acerbic British comedian Ricky Gervais made this year’s Golden Globe Awards somewhat palatable. As host of this year’s show, Gervais used his opening monologue to turn what is usually an exercise in glitzy masturbatory excess into a platform for calling out Hollywood as a land of corrupt, woke, virtue-signaling hypocrites who take themselves way too seriously and think everyone else should, too.

Gervais – hosting the Golden Globes for the fifth time – did not get (or ignored) the memo. In a little under eight minutes, Gervais verbally laid waste to the preachy and sanctimonious denizens of the progressive echo chamber that is Tinseltown.

His no-holds-barred point was nicely summarized near the end of his masterful tirade in which he said, “So, if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god and f—k off, okay?”

Gervais’ preemptive strike against politicking onstage made later political speeches by Michelle Williams and Patricia Arquette, among others, come across as more self-serving than usual.

The overall in-house reaction to Gervais’ gleeful mockery of Hollywood elites was one of gasps and groans punctuated by nervous laughter and confused silence from people not used to being called out to their faces on their ridiculous pretensions and moral preening. (To be fair, some celebrities seemed able to laugh at themselves. Legendary director Martin Scorsese chuckled and appeared to agree with a missive directed at him about his diminutive height, while actor Adam Driver solidified his regular guy persona by laughing at the jokes like a regular guy.)

Hollywood’s tone deafness manifested again in the form of journalists weeping – see here and here – for celebrities wounded by Gervais’ relentless oratorical assault. L.A. Times (of course) reporter Lorraine Ali best exemplified the media’s horror in a column in which she concluded, “The commentary would have meant far more if Gervais himself had been brave enough to drop the tired agitator shtick and, for once, read the room.”

It seems not to have occurred to Ali that Gervais wasn’t just speaking to the people in attendance; he was also speaking to a general public that long ago abandoned the notion of the rich and famous as their wiser moral betters.

Celebrities as a whole – and their defenders in the press – can’t simply laugh at Gervais’ jokes, because that would be a tacit acknowledgment he’s right about politically provincial Hollywood’s vacuous sermonizing.  That Hollywood can’t take a joke is, ironically, funny.