So Gervais’s route to comedy stardom was quite different from, say, Louis C.K.’s or Jerry Seinfeld’s — road warriors who spent years honing their acts in thankless sets at dingy clubs before they became mainstays of stage and screen (and friends of Gervais, by the way). By contrast, Gervais achieved prominence as a stand-up only after his sitcoms were successful. This colors and reinforces his tendency to see himself as an uncompromising outsider, even as he is invited to host the Golden Globes.

Of the time when he and Merchant pitched “The Office” to BBC executives, Gervais told me that he told the BBC: “ ‘It’s either me in it, writing and directing, or not at all.’ After the meeting, Steve said, ‘Can I do the talking in future?’ ”

Jon Plowman, a veteran British comedy producer who was the BBC’s head of comedy entertainment at the time, recalls Gervais and Merchant as more excited than standoffish about the potential project. “In their heads it was already a hit in Britain and a hit in the U.S., and they were absolutely certain about it,” Plowman told me. “And that sort of thing is infectious, and you think, Well, hooray — if they believe it, then I’ll believe it. And maybe the actors will believe it, and maybe the viewers will believe it eventually.” Plowman added that he appointed a “slightly more experienced producer” to oversee Gervais and Merchant, “to make sure that they did know which end of the camera has the lens in it.”

The success of “The Office” allowed Gervais to connect personally with several of the comedians he looked up to, elevating him from an admirer to a peer. Larry David, the “Seinfeld” co-creator and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star, told me that when he first saw the British “Office,” he felt an instant rapport with Gervais. “It was one of the few things I would watch where I would think, Boy, I wish I thought of that.”

Christopher Guest also spoke admiringly of the affectionate strain of comedy he saw in “The Office” and its follow-up, “Extras.” In both his own movies and in Gervais’s television shows, Guest told me, there are “two things happening simultaneously, which can be confusing, perhaps. One is that these people have a much bigger sense of themselves than they should, because otherwise it’s not funny. They take themselves very seriously. But they’re also human beings, so you see the other part, the tragic part of that at the same time. In comedy you can’t have a story inhabited by people that are doing things well.” But Guest didn’t try to apply this standard to Gervais’s other identity as a stand-up comedian. “There are people who go after those things that are explosive,” he said. “I’m not really in the business of dealing with that, that’s not my issue. And Ricky, certainly, can push those buttons for people.”

Gervais’s stand-up act can be difficult to reconcile with his TV work. Attired in a black T-shirt, jeans or black pants and a headset microphone that recalls the aggressive seduction expert played by Tom Cruise in “Magnolia,” Gervais may variously riff on the first doctor who had to tell a patient he had AIDS, or the differences between Dustin Hoffman’s character in “Rain Man” and a real-life autistic man he met (who, Gervais jokes, he promptly whisked off to a casino). His stand-up act possesses little of the sentimental heart of “The Office” or even of “Extras”; it can be ruthlessly funny, but also belligerent and a little bit paranoid. As a stand-up, Gervais seems to take a childlike glee in going directly at all the topics he’s been told to stay away from. At the end of a long rant in his 2010 HBO show, “Ricky Gervais: Out of England 2” he declared, “If I have offended anyone, and I’m sure I have, I don’t apologize.”

When I visited Gervais in the summer when he was filming “Life’s Too Short,” he was enmeshed in another pseudo controversy. Having appeared in a cameo on the season finale of the American “Office” a few weeks after Steve Carell left the series, Gervais wrote on his blog, “If you’re going to jump a shark, jump a big one.” He added: “I assume most people know I didn’t do the U.S. remake for the art. I did my version for the art. That’s why I stopped it after a few hours of telly.” The remarks were widely interpreted as Gervais insulting or dismissing the NBC series. In a follow-up post, Gervais wrote: “I simply said it’s different to the original which I created and made with different ambitions. What’s wrong with that?”