I find Ricky Gervais to be very funny, so it therefore seems logical that I will find funny what *he* finds funny.  And he thinks Karl Pilkington is very funny.  Ricky is right.

I’ve had some friends tell me about Ricky’s podcasts before, and how he makes fun of this simpleton named Karl.  I tried to download them for free, failed, and then gave up.  But HBO came to the rescue by taking the audio podcasts and adding animation to them.  They called it The Ricky Gervais Show, and it was good.  Very good.

Now in it’s second season, the show is still hysterical.  In a nutshell, it’s Ricky and his comedy partner Stephen Merchant talking to Karl about all sorts of topics.  Karl’s opinions and views are hard to describe; but he clearly has a unique way of looking at the world.  For example, when talking about the concept of doppelgangers,  Karl asks, “How would I know which one I was?”  He refers to seals as “between a fish and a dog.”  He thinks that the expression about people living in glass houses means that, “If you live in a glass house, don’t be chucking stuff about.”

If you’re like me and can’t get enough Ricky, then Science Channel (the former home of Brink) is airing a series called An Idiot Abroad. This show is live-action, and it shows Karl being sent to visit the Seven Wonders of the World by his friends Ricky and Steve.  His observations on foreign cultures can be at times closed-minded, but there are things that you can’t help but agree with him on.  Like when he sees people eating insects in China, he says that back home a restaurant would be shut down if they had bugs like those, but in China, they are the main course.  In India, when he sees that his bathroom is simply a hole in the ground, he is quite unhappy, and it’s hard to not sympathize.  As for the ‘Wonders’ themselves, so far Karl has not been particularly impressed by the Great Wall of China or the Taj Mahal.

It may sound like these shows are at the expense of someone who doesn’t know he’s being made fun of, and I can see where some would say that it is a bit mean spirited.  But I chose to look at these shows as a celebration of Karl’s own world view.  He may not always be logical, and he may not always understand what is being explained to him, but he sticks to his guns, and he believes what he believes, and that is admirable.  Even if it is mostly nonsensical.