Ricky Gervais’s Legs Appear in a Peeled Carrot
This post appeared in our 2015 April Fools’ Day edition.
A woman telecommuting from her home in Bethesda, Maryland, on Tuesday got an unexpected surprise while preparing her daily salad for lunch.
“I grabbed a carrot and peeled it without really paying attention to its shape,” recalled Connie Sykes, adding that her attention was focused on the podcast she was listening to. “For work,” she stressed. Once the carrot was peeled she turned it around and laid it down on a cutting board. “I like my carrots cut into medallions,” she noted. But just as the knife was about to slice into the fleshy orange root she gasped.
“There they were, clear as day. The legs of Ricky Gervais!” She quickly grabbed her camera and texted the photo to everyone she could think of. Sykes says she’s not on Facebook but is seriously considering joining so she can share what she calls “a wildly profound” experience with more Ricky Gervais fans. It’s been dubbed “the great carrot peel reveal” by some of them.
“I’m a humanist, so I don’t know how to explain it,” Sykes told me. She also shared that the day before the reveal she’d read an interview with Gervais in which the comedian, who was promoting the final episode of his TV show Derek, had discussed his atheism. In the interview the New York Daily News repeated the infamous tweet in which Gervais stated: “Everyone has the right to believe anything they want. And everyone else has the right to find it fucking ridiculous.”
“Can you believe that?!” Sykes asked in amazement. She also saw great significance in the fact that, in the same interview, the often-controversial comedian expressed his support for death with dignity. “Ricky Gervais said, ‘people don’t understand that this is beautiful and merciful and right,’ which is why I decided not to slice or eat the carrot,” Sykes reported. “The carrot is a symbol of incentive, after all, and this is what I was moved to do.”
No word yet on what she did with the lettuce.