The ridiculous opinions of faux idiot savant Karl Pilkington fueled The Ricky Gervais Show, an audio comedy series that became one of the world’s most popular podcasts.
Now the loopy audio bits, in which Pilkington jousts with The Office co-creators Gervais and Stephen Merchant, are being retrofitted as animated segments in a new HBO series, The Ricky Gervais Show, which debuts Friday at 9 p.m. EST on HBO.
Gervais and Merchant updated reporters on Pilkington’s post-podcast whereabouts at a press conference last month in Pasadena, California: The bald buffoon’s supposedly on an international tour to assess the Seven Wonders of the World. Gervais said Pilkington told him, “‘The Great Pyramid is overrated. It’s a bad design. The lounge is going to be huge, but the bedroom is going to be tiny.’ He’s an absolute idiot.”
Gervais and Merchant met their comic foil at a British radio station, where Pilkington worked as a sound technician. They recorded a series of unscripted conversations for the The Guardian ‘s website. Downloaded 190 million times, the Gervais-Merchant-Pilkington audio sessions inspired Wildbrain animators to transform the ad-libbed dialogue into 13 episodes of The Ricky Gervais Show cartoon.
In the first episode (clip embedded above), Pilkington argues that people have more than six senses, claims that cavemen and dinosaurs co-existed, and recounts the legend of a pub tankard that killed anyone who touched it.
Here’s a sampling of Pilkington’s most profound observations, as recounted by Gervais and Merchant (taken from transcripts of the press conference).
Evolution: “Karl’s serious understanding of evolution is that it went, ‘Stars, germ, fish, mermaid, man.’ He actually thought ‘mermaid’ is part of human evolution,” says Merchant.
Chimpanzees, Part 1: “I was trying to get the rudimentaries of evolution and I explained that we are closer to chimps than chimps are to the gorillas,” says Gervais. “He was going, ‘No, we are not.’ I go, ‘We are 98.6 percent genetically identical to a chimpanzee. That’s 1.4 percent difference between us and a chimp.’ And he went, ‘That’s got to be the ass.'”
Chimpanzees, Part 2: “There was an interesting article in The Guardian making the point that chimpanzees, like humans, have an adolescence,” Gervais says. “It was about this teenage chimp that had an argument with his father and ran away. Karl went, ‘What was the argument about?'”
Fame: “Karl doesn’t want any part of it,” Gervais says. “He got recognized the other day and absolutely hated it. That’s why I want him to be famous, for my own amusement, just because it will be funny.”
Not really a moron: “Joking aside, I don’t think Karl is an idiot,” says Gervais. “He’s a genuine artist in the sense that he sees the world through different eyes. He doesn’t try and perform. He isn’t trying to be a comedian but he’s got an opinion on everything and usually it’s a funny one because it hasn’t been heard before.”
Half-pet, half-friend: “He’s like a little creature,” Gervais says. “I mean, I can’t cuddle Stephen and squeeze his head and wrestle him. He won’t have it. He’s got dignity. Whereas Karl, I can wrestle and he’s like a funny little creature you’d find in a tree. So he’s a cross between a friend and a pet.”
