Ricky Gervais did what he was hired to do in returning to host Sunday night’s Golden Globe Awards: waltz in — open-collared tux telegraphing his studied disdain — and fire off a string of one-line stingers targeting Hollywood’s pomposity, hypocrisy and its talent pool (some would say they’re one and the same).

Mission accomplished, to absolutely no one’s surprise.

That’s not a criticism of Gervais, who would have looked foolish and phony had he not come out with verbal guns a-blazing. After all, that was the raison d’etre for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association bringing him back for a fifth time: to add some buzz to a self-congratulatory, overlong three-hour telecast.

Gervais, for the most part, did not disappoint. “I don’t care anymore … I’m joking, I never did [care],” he said in his opening monologue, referring to his past “oh no he didn’t” hosting gigs.

“Lucky for me, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association can barely speak English and have no idea what Twitter is — I got offered this gig by fax.”

It would have been more shocking had Gervais, known for his un-PC brand of humor, toed the line of predictability and pulled a Billy Crystal-type hosting gig, long on show-biz custom but short on the bite for an industry that, more often than not, deserves the slings and arrows shot in its direction.

So there he was in the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, staying on topic with shots at scandal-scarred Felicity Huffman (she made the license plates for his limo, he said), comparing diminutive “The Irishman” star Joe Pesci to Baby Yoda and singling out the Hollywood “pedophiles” who “are all terrified of Ronan Farrow.” He mocked the idea of an In Memoriam segment — saying it was canned because “it wasn’t diverse enough, it’s mostly white people.”

He even got in some self-promotion for his Netflix series, “After Life,” via predictable jokes about the dominance of Netflix (news flash, Ricky: it’s not so dominant anymore).

I liked his joke about Leonardo DiCaprio attending the premiere of the interminably long movie “The Irishman”: “By the end [of the movie], his date was too old for him.” Touché. But his reference to “Cats” star Dame Judy Dench, who “loves nothing better than plunking herself down on the carpet, lifting her leg and licking her [bleeped out],” was tasteless.

Shock for shock’s sake rarely works — and it didn’t work here. The unsmiling faces seated in the Beverly Hilton said as much; there was not even an attempt at the faked forced laughter that usually pervades these awards ceremonies.

Gervais did, however, take the streaming services to task, name-checking Apple in particular, for shows “made by a company who runs sweatshops in China.” He also called out sanctimonious performers: “You’re in no position to lecture. You know nothing about the world. If ISIS had a streaming service, you’d call your agent.”

I was a little surprised that Gervais spent the rest of the evening being curiously low-key — as if his initial gust of topical riffs had blown the wind right out of his sails. But as the ostensible captain of the Golden Globes ship, he steered the telecast as smoothly as could be expected, leaving the self-serving preachiness (and there was a lot of that) to his show-biz cohorts.