Ricky Gervais shares James Corden reached out to apologise after joke-stealing scandal

Ricky Gervais has no ill feelings towards James Corden as he admitted that he has contacted him directly to apologise for using his joke on TV.

The Late Late Show host had already publicly apologised for using a gag from Ricky's 2018 stand-up show Humanity during a monologue on his late-night US TV show.

And now sharing that he has directly apologised for the incident, the After Life star has shared that he said 'Don't worry about it' and was convinced a scriptwriter wrote the copied lines.

Asked if Corden had directly contacted him, Ricky told the Headliners podcast, 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.'

Asked if he regretted reacting to it, Ricky added: 'No, because I'm allowed. I didn't 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.