The Golden Globe awards got started this evening with the standard monologue from host Ricky Gervais. Gervais is known for the sort of jokes that push the envelope, and this year was no exception. Nobody was safe from Gervais' barbs tonight, and even those who weren't targets were taken aback by what they heard. The best reactions of the evening came from Tom Hanks.
Hanks was saved from the roasting that Ricky Gervais gave the rest of the assembled celebrities and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, but one gets the impression that he felt their pain just the same. When the host went after Martin Scorsese's height, and the age of Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriends, one got the impression that each of them took the jokes in good fun. But not every joke was likely taken quite so well.
Between the awestruck look in the image above and the grimace Hanks gave us seen below, you could tell the Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood actor didn't find many of the jokes as funny as he did find them surprising. Twitter is absolutely in love with these expressions at the moment.
Depending on your feelings regarding Ricky Gervais, you may have been making face similar to the ones we got from Tom Hanks. Some of the jokes, like the idea that Felicity Huffman made the license plates for everybody's limo, are the sort of lines you'd expect on a Comedy Central Roast more than the Golden Globes.
We can be fairly certain that these images will be popular for the next few days. We can add some large white text to these pictures and have some pretty good meme material. If the images really take off, then we could see them years from now, long after we've forgotten why Tom Hanks made these faces in the first place.
While Tom Hanks may not have been the target of any Ricky Gervais jokes, he's certainly dealt with them before. Recently, Gervais admitted that one Golden Globes joke he regrets from a few years ago involved Hanks and Tim Allen presenting an award. The joke appeared to smack Allen pretty hard for not being as successful as Hanks, but as Gervais pointed out, almost nobody has had a career like Tom Hanks. It wasn't meant to specifically take a shot at Allen.
Will we get some more great Tom Hanks faces before the night is out? I'm sure Ricky Gervais isn't done dragging the Hollywood Foreign Press or any of the people in the room. Considering how Twitter has gone all-in on these pictures of Hanks, we could even see Gervais make reference to that fact. At this point, social media can shape a live broadcast and it's a safe bet Gervais is looking at Twitter himself to see what people are talking about.
