With a drink in hand and an immediate promise that this would not happen again, Ricky Gervais kicked off his fifth time hosting the Golden Globes with a monologue skewering, among others: Twitter callouts, Felicity Huffman, Jeffrey Epstein, and award season’s moralizing speeches.

The controversial British comedian, 58, promised before the show he’d go after “the general community. I’d go after cinema and I’d go after television and I’d go after actors and I’ll go after pretension and hypocrisy,” and for the most part, stuck to his promise. “Let’s have a laugh at your expense, shall we?” he said. “Remember, they’re just jokes, we’re all going to die soon.”

Known for drawing audience gasps and Twitter outrage for his jokes – his 2016 bit on Caitlyn Jenner’s transition and her car crash in which another driver died drew particular ire – Gervais trained most of his scorn this year on the Hollywood industry. He traveled to the show in a limo, for instance, though his had a “license plate that was made by Felicity Huffman,” a reference to her trial over illegally buying her child’s way into college.

From there Gervais stayed generally true to his don’t-care beat, sending up Hollywood’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein (“I know he’s your friend, but I don’t care”), Leonardo DiCaprio’s dating life (he attended The Irishman’s premiere and “by the end, his date was too old for him”) and Hollywood film and TV executives who are “all terrified of Ronan Farrow – he’s coming for you.”

Gervais had some predictably uncomfortable bits: calling talk show host James Corden a “fat pussy” and a bleeped-out joke about Dame Judi Dench lifting her leg and licking ... something, but saved his most biting words for the industry’s moneymakers. “You say you’re woke but the companies you work for – Apple, Amazon, Disney – if Isis started a streaming service, you would call your agent, wouldn’t you?” he said, referencing Apple TV+’s The Morning Show’s theme of morality, “which is rich coming from a company that runs sweat shops in Asia”.

“So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech, right?” he continued. “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.”

Noting that most people in the room “spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg”, Gervais capped his monologue with a caustic edict to the winners: “If you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and God, and fuck off.”