🛑 Truth Watch: Painting: ‘Ricky Gervais (2024)’ by Sean Bw Parker

Comedy has become a ‘safe space’ in culture, and the idea that the public stage is a place where anything can be said has been challenged, if not destroyed, by cancel culture. This has been ramped up in the years 2015-2025, seemingly as the cultural end of the industrialised #MeToo movement in justice and the arts. Gervais’ hosting of the Golden Globes and subsequent trans Netflix stand-up routine has challenged this back, reclaiming comedic freedom of speech as a necessary, valuable catharsis. Gervais shared my new portrait of him shortly before Christmas 2024 to his 14 million X followers, making it by far my best-known work.