Comedian Accuses Ricky Gervais of Bullying Him on Tour

Comedian Robin Ince was the opener for Ricky Gervais comedy tours in the 2000s, a time when Gervais was at the height of his Office fame. Ince, who left comedy in 2015, says his time on stage with Gervais took a physical toll. 

“I am not saying it is a traumatic experience, but after two weeks I came out in red lumps that my doctor said were a stress rash,” Ince recalled on the Starting Line podcast. “I think my hair was coming out in clumps.” 

“I look back now, and I think it is bullying — really it is,” Ince says of his time working with Gervais. One example? Gervais used to make up a diary supposedly written by Ince. At a Christmas party, he read the fake musings aloud to the partygoers. “I forget how weird it is. I’m very good at sometimes just acclimatizing to things, in which you go, ­’Actually, this is really weird.’”

Ince doesn’t feel alone. Anyone who’s listened to Gervais’ podcasts with underling Karl Pilkington will recognize the borderline cruelty, even if Pilkington is allegedly in on the joke. According to Ince, the cast of Gervais’ version of The Office had to confront him about bullying behavior. “Mackenzie Crook (who played Gareth) eventually went, ‘Rick, can you stop doing it please?’”

Ince said he put up with the Gervais’ passive-aggressive humor, “but people who knew me did not like the way that relationship worked.”

He’s talked about this before. In 2012, Ince told Chortle that he served as Gervais’ “human stress ball” and that touring with him was “monstrous, horrible and bizarre.”

According to Ince, he became the butt of everyone’s jokes, with Gervais as the ringleader. “The way that everyone joined in, it really was very Lord of the Flies, and of course, I am very Piggy-like,” Ince said. “With the distance of time, I can kind of laugh at it, but today I don’t feel I could handle being squealed at constantly.”

Ince and Gervais remained on good terms after the tours, but the two comics haven’t spoken since Ince called him out in 2022 blog post for his offensive jokes about the transgender community. “It is easy to forget the collateral damage of jokes,” Ince said at the time. “Anti-trans punchlines seem to have become highly ­profitable, and it ignores the dehumanizing effect on a swathe of already marginalized people. I think Ricky believes it is just him being a ‘naughty boy.’”

Instead, Ince wrote, Gervais had become “a pin-up and role model for the alt-right.”