Ricky Gervais says James Corden was 'horrified' after stealing joke and contacted him directly

Ricky Gervais has said James Corden was 'horrified' after stealing his joke and contacted him directly to explain the situation.

In case you missed it, The Late Late Show host found himself at the centre of a fresh scandal last month.

While discussing Elon Musk's Twitter takeover, Corden went into a descriptive joke that was suspiciously similar to one of Gervais' routines in his 2018 Netflix special Humanity.

Let's first look at Corden's version, who highlighted Musk's reference to the social media platform as the 'digital town square' on an October episode of the talk show.

"It isn't," the 44-year-old said. "Because if someone puts up a poster in a town square that says, 'Guitar lessons available,' you don't get people in the town going, 'I don't wanna play the guitar! I wanna play the piano you piece of s**t!'

"Well then that sign wasn't for you, it was for somebody else. You don't have to get mad about all of it."

Gervais' bit, meanwhile, is about humanity's tendency to think the world revolves around them, particularly on Twitter.

"They can be following me without me knowing, choose to read my tweet, and then take that personally," the 61-year-old said.

"That's like going into a town square, seeing a big noticeboard, and there's a notice for guitar lessons, and you go, 'But I don't f***ing want guitar lessons!'"

One eagle-eyed viewer noticed the jokes were nearly identical and took the liberty of merging the clips together and sharing it online, where it quickly went viral.

Corden received a heavy backlash for the blunder, and The Office creator even chimed by captioning a now-deleted clip: "The bit about the town square advert for guitar lessons is brilliant."

He later took down the tweet as he said he 'started to feel bad for him'.

But Gervais has since said that he was contacted directly by the TV host, who was apparently 'horrified' by the whole situation.

Speaking on the Headliners podcast, the comedy legend said: "He did. I said, 'Don’t worry about it.'

"I said, 'If your writers were in the back of the room when I was warming up and you got it out there before I did it on Netflix…'

"But whatever you think of James Corden, there is no way he knowingly ripped off my joke and thought he’d get away with it."

When asked if he regretted his tweet, Gervais replied: "No, because I’m allowed. I didn’t know how it had happened. And I thought it was funny. I thought it was absurd that it was such an obvious rip-off.

"But again, I don’t know how he got to it because the writer must have walked him through and said, 'Do this and do that.'

"Or he saw it five years ago and completely forgot about it and thought he’d made it up. That can happen as well.

"There are some plagiarists but a lot of it is genuinely accidental. So that is clearly my routine but I don’t think he came up with it at all.

"I think a writer pitched that to him and didn’t tell him it was mine, or the writer forgot."

Although people continue to rip into Corden and suggest he stole the joke, others have defended him and put the blame on the writing team.

Gervais stands by what he believes, saying there's 'just no way' Corden watched his special and thought he could get away with ripping him off.

"There is no way James Corden watched that and thought, 'I can get away with this,'" he said.

"It was the biggest special of the year. There is no way he thought, 'I can rip him off.' He was horrified. No chance."

LADbible has contacted The Late Late Show for comment.