Ricky Gervais slammed celebrity cancel culture and said “you don’t agree with freedom of speech” if you don’t agree with “someone’s right to say something you don’t agree with.”
“Everyone’s got a different definition of cancel culture,” the 59-year-old explained during a recent interview with Metro UK. The comments were noted by Fox News in a piece published Monday. (RELATED: Ricky Gervais Hits Celebrities With Joke About Diversity Following ‘I Take Responsibility’ Anti-Racism Video)
“If it is choosing not to watch a comedian because you don’t like them, that’s everyone’s right,” he added. “But when people are trying to get someone fired because they don’t like their opinion about something that’s nothing to do with their job, that’s what I call cancel culture and that’s not cool.”
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Gervais continued, while he explained that “you turning off your own TV isn’t censorship. You trying to get other people to turn off their TV because you don’t like something they’re watching, that’s different.” (RELATED: Ricky Gervais Says Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself During Golden Globes Speech, Tells Award Winners To ‘F**k Off’)”
The Office” star said that basically “everyone’s allowed to call you an a******e, everyone’s allowed to stop watching your stuff, everyone’s allowed to burn your DVDs, but you shouldn’t have to go to court for saying a joke that someone didn’t like.”
“And that’s what we get dangerously close to,” he added. “If you don’t agree to someone’s right to say something you don’t agree with, you don’t agree with freedom of speech.”
At one point, the “After Life” star gave an example of how a month back he tweeted out a Winston Churchill quote about “freedom of speech” and was called out by someone saying that Churchill “was a white supremacist.” The famed comedian responded to the person “not in that tweet he isn’t.”
“It’s like if someone did something once that’s wrong, everything they did was wrong,” Ricky said. “You are allowed to have things in common with bad people as long it’s not the bad things. I’m a vegetarian and I love dogs, like Hitler. But the only thing I have in common with Hitler are the good bits!”