Comedian Ricky Gervais dominated the narrative of the Golden Globes after delivering a speech to celebrities Sunday night that had #HollywoodHypocrites trending.
Gervais spent his opening for the award show dissing Hollywood elites and corporate America, much to the surprise of the audience and delight of the rest of America.
“If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech,” Gervais said after making a “Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself” joke. “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.”
Despite ratings for the award show hitting an 8-year viewer low with only 18.33M viewers, Gervais’s speech has garnered tons of attention online. Arguably more attention than any other aspect of the show.
NBC’s Youtube clip of the speech has more views, at 2.6M, than all videos published from the evening combined at the time this article was written. All other videos only had 2.3M total views, with the top ten videos making up 1.4M of those views. (RELATED: Ricky Gervais Says Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself During Golden Globes Speech, Tells Award Winners To ‘F**k Off’)
The top ten videos on Youtube included acceptance speeches by Joaquin Phoenix, Renée Zellweger, Awkwafina, Brad Pitt, Taron Egerton, Michelle Williams, Tom Hanks, Kate McKinnon, Ellen DeGeneres and Charlize Theron.
The numbers aren’t much different on Twitter with Gervais’s speech bringing in a whopping 7.1M views and 45.5K retweets at the time of publication.
Ricky Gervais kicks off The #GoldenGlobes. pic.twitter.com/ZSdqiWMudx
— NBC Entertainment (@nbc) January 6, 2020
The top ten videos shared on Twitter were only viewed a total of 4.1M times in comparison. Those videos included Tom Hanks, Joaquin Phoenix, Awkwafina, Brad Pitt, Amy Poehler, Taylor Swift, Ellen DeGeneres, Kate McKinnon, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ramy Youssef, and Jennifer Aniston.
The highest watched video shared by NBC on Twitter after Gervais’s monologue was DeGeneres’s acceptance speech which has been viewed 1.2M times and retweeted only 534 times. The number doesn’t even come close to Gervais’s 7.1M views and 45.5K retweets.
If the Golden Globes were smart, they’d continue to allow Gervais to speak his mind because he’s seemingly tapped into something that the average American truly believes.