"He's back! Did you miss me?" asks David Brent in the new trailer for his new feature film Life on the Road. The 90-second teaser shows Brent at his new place of work, juggling his life as a "singer-songwriter" with being "a rep" at somewhere called Lavichem.We wrote about our fears for this film when it was first announced, how Gervais seemed unaware that he was bastardising his own legacy by refusing to let his most famous character die. It's too early to judge the film, of course, but that does appear to be borne out in the trailer: you see Brent doing his 'awkward for awkward's sake' routine but without any of the humanising elements of The Office's ensemble cast. Take away Tim, Dawn and Gareth and you've basically just got a guy misspelling "cumming" as "cumin".Before The Office, Gervais found fame on The 11'O Clock Show. Back then there was something cruel about his humour; it was funny, but it tended to be about the shock of saying something in poor taste, such as jokes about "little div kids" and Channel 4 being "a bunch of queers".His masterstroke was to take that awkward, politically incorrect humour, which he clearly loved, and create broken loveable weirdos inThe Office.David Brent was a vessel for all of Gervais's un-PC gags, but the joke was on Brent, because he was a man trying to make people like him though no one else found him funny.Since then, Gervais has given up on the pretence, and his various live and home entertainment versions of David Brent, as well as on his podcasts and his Golden Globes hosting roles, he's continued his mean streak, with the implication being that it is all in some way ironic because he's a clever guy really. Over time it's becomes less and less believable that Gervais doesn't just find it funny to be mean.At this point it feels like Brent is no longer a cloak for Gervais. He's a "character" in name only. In the same way that David Walliams and Matt Lucas went from mocking people with prejudices on Little Britain to embodying those blinkered stereotypes on their racist airport show, or Noel Fielding went from skewering his own shallow need to be part of the cool crowd on The Mighty Boosh to doing gags about chavs on Live At the Apollo, so Gervais's latest outing feels like the very thing David Brent was supposed to be a comment on: awkward, poor-taste jokes by someone whose own sense of ego has obscured their unlovable nature.More on VICE:How the New 'Office' Spinoff Will Destroy Ricky Gervais's Comedic LegacyI Don't Watch Any Comedy—Why Does That Make Me an Imbecile?The Creator of 'You're the Worst' Talks About Writing, Clichés, and Love
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