Ricky Gervais reveals that James Corden reached out to apologise after copying his joke

Ricky Gervais has revealed James Corden has contacted him directly to apologise for using his joke on TV.

The Late Late Show host had already publicly apologised for using a gag from Ricky’s 2018 stand-up show Humanity during a monologue on his late-night US TV show.

And now sharing that he has directly apologised for the incident, the After Life star has shared that he said ‘Don’t worry about it’ and was convinced a scriptwriter wrote the copied lines. 

‘I said: “Don’t worry about it”‘: Ricky Gervais hsa revealed that James Corden reached out to apologise after copying his 2018 stand-up joke word-for-word on the Late Late Show

Ricky tweeted a clip from the television host’s show on Halloween night, where he made the gag: ‘When you see Elon Musk talk about Twitter he does this thing where he goes, “Well, it’s the town square”.

‘But it doesn’t. If someone puts up a poster in a town square that says “guitar lessons available”, like you don’t get people in the town going, “I don’t want to play guitar! I want to play the piano you piece of s**t!”

‘Well that sign wasn’t for you. It was for somebody else! You don’t have to get mad about all of it.’

But Corden’s joke is a copy – practically word for word – of Gervais’ joke that he made in 2018.

Soon after James originally said it, Ricky had drawn attention to the similarities with a sarcastic tweet, but he later deleted it, and explains now that he did that because ‘he started feeling sorry for’ Corden over the backlash.

The Late Late Show host had already publicly apologised for using a gag from Ricky’s 2018 stand-up show Humanity during a monologue on his late-night US TV show

Asked if Corden had directly contacted him, Ricky told the Headliners podcast, said: ‘He did. I said “Don’t worry about it”, I said “if your writers were in the back of the room when I was warming up and you got it out there before I did it on Netflix…”, but whatever you think of James Corden there is no way he knowingly ripped off my joke and thought he’d get away with it.’

Asked if he regretted reacting to it, Ricky added: ‘No, because I’m allowed. I didn’t how it had happened. And I thought it was funny. I thought it was absurd that it was such an obvious rip-off.

‘But again I don’t know how he got to it because the writer must have walked him through and said “Do this and do that”. Or he saw it five years ago and completely forgot about it and thought he’d made it up. That can happen as well.

Rendition: Ricky tweeted a clip from the television host’s show on Halloween night, where he made the gag: ‘When you see Elon Musk talk about Twitter he does this thing where he goes, “Well, it’s the town square”

Word for word? But Corden’s joke is a copy – practically word for word – of Gervais’ joke that he made in 2018. That year, Gervais said that people were taking things too personally on Twitter

‘There are some plagiarists but a lot of it is genuinely accidental. So that is clearly my routine but I don’t think he came up with it at all. I think a writer pitched that to him and didn’t tell him it was mine, or the writer forgot.’

Giving the host the benefit of the douby, Ricky added: ‘I don’t know. I want to be fair. But what I don’t believe is James Corden watched that and thought ‘I can just rip that off’. There’s just no way.”

‘There is no way James Corden watched that and thought ‘I can get away with this’. It was the biggest special of the year. There is no way he thought ‘I can rip him off’.

‘He was horrified. No chance,’ concluded Ricky.

When a fan asked the British comedian whether Corden had asked permission to use the joke, Gervais said: ‘No. I reckon one of the writers ‘came up with it’ for him. I doubt he would knowingly just copy such a famous stand up routine word for word like that’

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