Ricky Gervais accused of recycling jokes in new Netflix show After Life

The series follows Tony (Gervais) who, after his wife dies and he contemplates taking his own life, decides to live long enough to punish the world by saying and doing whatever he likes

Fans have accused Ricky Gervais of recycling jokes in his latest Netflix series, After Life.

The series follows Tony (Gervais) who, after his wife dies and he contemplates taking his own life, decides to live long enough to punish the world by saying and doing whatever he likes.

As pointed out on Twitter, the first episode of the show features a joke already seen in his 2004 live tour Politics, where he shared an anecdote about a friend from university, Pete, who bought a newspaper from a “little old lady” with a front page showing an elderly mugging victim.

In the joke, Gervais says: “And the old lady, just making conversation — she probably said it to everyone who came in that day – she went to Pete: ‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’ And he went, ‘Yeah. Yeah, she’s 93. Scarred for life.’ But you leave it, don’t you? Pete went, ‘Well, that’s not scarred for life then, is it?’”

“She went, ‘What?’ ‘You scar a baby for life, don’t you? If she lives till she’s 100, she’s only been scarred for seven per cent of her life.’ He did the maths for her! Like this old woman’s meant to go, ‘Yeah, you’re right. F*** her!’”

After Life sees Tony have the same encounter with an elderly woman. “Terrible, isn’t it? Scarred for life,” she says, to which Tony replies: “Hardly scarred for life. She’s 93. If she lives to 100, she’s only been scarred for seven per cent of her life.”

Similarly, in the first episode of the second season of the radio show The Ricky Gervais Guide to..., co-host Stephen Merchant recounts the proverb: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” The same proverb appears in episode five of After Life.

Several fans took to Twitter to criticise the repetition.

Others, however, praised the repetition as a deliberate choice.

After Life is out on Netflix now.