“Your [British television] interview with Garry Shandling was notoriously awkward. Were you disappointed with it? —Paul Gaughan Sheffield, England
No, I loved it. I didn’t find it awkward, except when I pointed out that he looked a bit like Bingo from [the children's show] The Banana Splits. He didn’t know who that was.”

My read on it: this interview played exactly as it was intended to. Here we are, still talking about it years later. Home run.

Nintendo are causing more people to play videogames – MORE PEOPLE TO BEAT!!!

Sure Ricky is a bit of a tit. But that doesn’t make much difference — I think the value of his kind of humour is that he has realized that he is a bit of a tit and actually positively channels it, encrusting it and elaborating all the social toxic parts of his ego. The dissonance is what makes it funny. That was what David Brent was, a safe vehicle for his raging narcissism, insecurity and alienation.

This isn’t a new thing for a comedian to do, but what Ricky has done which for me is novel (though I”m no expert on comedy) has been to be quite drastically honest with it. He’s really displaying something quite vulnerable, and I can imagine it is a huge risk to do that – a major commitment. Luckily for him, it has sort of worked. Obviously, not this time.

Okay, so that’s his kind of humour. Now we wonder why it is popular. Well that also seems straightforward: its a sort of antidote to buttoned down, ultra PC British correctness, nanny statism, a sort of pretense tolerance that is really just purely veiled colonial guilt. That’s the wider cultural context he’s playing in. His humour registers with people because it happens to be quite finely tuned to resonate with sensitivities in the wider culture.

In America, those sensitivities are different, they’ve already been exploited at various times and for various effects, and for other random reasons you could spend years pontificating about, the cachet just isn’t there. Hence Garry’s skepticism. It seemed he had already done quite a deep deconstruction of Ricky. So what?

Media isn’t a meritocracy, and it would be naive to think it would be. Ricky is popular not because he’s brilliant but its because he is an expression of all sorts of untidy social neuroses that it is cathartic to laugh about. That those don’t translate from one mass media audience to another shouldn’t be a surprise. No one has to be the good guy or the bad guy.

Okay, and my gut response is: Garry came off as a prick, Ricky as a pathetic dweeb. Neither came out looking god, though Garry is obviously smarter and a much more talented comedian. But not necessarily a nice human.