Ricky Gervais is one of my heroes. You can't help sensing if you're paying attention that behind the cherubic smile and squeaky giggle beats a dark, cynical spirit and that behind that is a mind with many a wry twist and black depth.
The man's view of the world is dark, but his gift for skewering pretenses and pretensions, or tearing down the defenses that people place between themselves and too clear a knowledge of themselves and others, is unerring. He makes me think of this quote from Mark Twain:
I have not read Nietzsche or Ibsen, nor any other philosopher, and have not needed to do it, and have not desired to do it; I have gone to the fountainhead for information - that is to say, to the human race. Every man is in his own person the whole human race, with not a detail lacking; I have studied the human race with diligence and strong interest all these years in my own person; in myself I find in big or little proportion every quality and every defect that is findable in the mass of the race.... What a coward every man is! And how surely he will find it out if he will just let other people alone and sit down and examine himself. The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in the procession but carrying a banner.
In the BBC America promos for The Office (UK version) a man said, "If you don't know someone like David Brent, the chances are, you are David Brent." We are all David Brent. This is the real theme of Extras, in which Gervais as the long-suffering Andy Millman endures the pretenses and posturings of a world full of celebrated Brents.
I have referred a number of times to 
