So, are we laughing at the dwarf or are we laughing with him? Once you'd decided which side of the height-challenged fence you were sitting on, you could get on with the rather more important business of deciding whether new Ricky Gervais comedy Life's Too Short is any good or not.

And it is - good, that is - in a 'law of diminishing returns, it's not The Office', kind of way. Gervais and Stephen Merchant are masters of the faux-documentary genre and, in Warwick Davis, Life's Too Short's dwarf-in-residence, they've found the perfect vehicle for taking the rise out of egotistical self-delusion. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what all their stuff is about.
Built around a video diary documenting Davis's disintegrating life and career - from the heights of a Star Wars Ewok, he's now reduced to begging for crumbs from agents Gervais and Merchant - Life's Too Short has as little to do with life as a dwarf as Towie does with Essex. It's about scrambling for survival on life's seething ant-heap: and if that means a spot of Ricky - grovelling, so be it.

'How does he get away with it?' pondered Liam Neeson of Gervais's career. He'd stopped by at Gervais's office for comedy tips and proceeded (hilariously) to reveal a total sense of humour bypass. How indeed? Gervais's smug style hovers on the jokey butt-cheek of self-parody but, even though you know he's laughing at us, not with us, you can't stop yourself from giggling.

One of the questions you might ask about Life's Too Short, the new comedy from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, is how it would have worked if its central character wasn't a dwarf. Life's Too Short is built around an actor called Warwick Davis, who plays a comically tweaked version of himself. Like the real Warwick, this one was an Ewok in Return of the Jedi and runs a talent agency hiring out other dwarfs ("I've had a lot of success and this is my chance to pay that forward"). Unlike the real Warwick (I assume), this one is in the middle of a messy divorce and looking for a way to pay off a massive tax bill. And one of the striking things is how much of the comedy depends less on his physical stature than on his status, as a man whose opinion of himself is considerably larger than the world's. Warwick is playing Warwick but he's also playing Brent/Millman/Gervais, that slippery amalgam of real character and comic invention that props up nearly everything Gervais does.

You saw it again and again, in the unmistakably Brentish way that Warwick added self-serving footnotes to embarrassing footage ("Oohh..." he said nervously, as his estranged wife lets rip. "Showing off"); in the little sideways glances at the camera; in the unwitting revelations of his self-centredness. None of those jokes would be substantially different if Davis was two feet taller. Similarly, Warwick's incompetent accountant (who doesn't know how to do percentages on his calculator) would be equally funny with an averagely sized client. And the cameo in which Liam Neeson turned up at Gervais and Merchant's office for advice on comedy improvisation didn't even need Warwick to be in the room (though he actually was there, keeping a chair warm). A lot of it, in other words, would have worked in exactly the same way, though it would have been a good deal more vulnerable to charges of recycling.

Which leaves us with the jokes that are inextricably related to Davis's height. Some of these play mischievously with prejudices. "You're a dwarf. How can you not know 'Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho'?" Warwick said to one of his performers incredulously. Others exploit his height, such as a long sequence in which he had to enlist a scornful passer-by to help him get into Gervais and Merchant's office (the door buzzer was too high). And one or two edge us uncomfortably close to simply laughing at little people. As Warwick pompously compared himself to Martin Luther King and talked of his dream that "one day dwarfs will walk equally", his rhetoric was undermined by the sight of him falling out of his car. It's a punchline moment, but is it a joke about a self-deceiving man or one whose legs don't reach the ground? I'm still not entirely sure, and I suspect that Gervais in particular would be happy about that. If you want to take offence, be his guest. He's certainly made it easy for you. But be warned that you may have to suppress a laugh as you do it, and then think about what exactly you're suppressing.

Warwick Davis on Life's Too Short

Being 3ft 6in has never stopped Warwick Davis from getting what he wants, from a role as an Ewok to his own Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant sitcom Life's Too Short.

If you saw Karl Pilkington's recent Sky series An Idiot Abroad, you'll have seen him phoning Britain's leading dwarf actor Warwick Davis to check whether a Dwarf Village he'd visited in China was politically correct. Davis assured him, quite angrily, that it wasn't.

So you might be surprised to find Davis starring here in another dwarf-based jape, also made by and featuring Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais.

In this mockumentary, Davis plays a version of himself as he attempts to raise his profile as "a sophisticated dwarf about town". It's screamingly funny, and if Davis chooses to send himself up, who are we to judge?

Nobody complained when he played an Ewok, which is ­basically a sci-fi teddy bear.

Shaun Williamson is in it too - continuing his gag from Extras, but the funniest bit is a cameo from Liam Neeson who reveals he's branching out into comedy.

Miss this at your peril.

This spoof documentary from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, starring 3ft 6in actor Warwick Davis as a fictionalised, David Brentified version of himself, contains all their tricks: bemused expressions; awkward looks to camera. But it takes no prisoners and is very funny. Davis displays fine comic chops as he hustles for acting work, mismanages his finances and grapples with his failing marriage, plus there's a cracking scene with Liam Neeson failing to grasp the basic concepts of comedy.

I sat before Life's Too Short, arms crossed and daring it to be funny because I really wanted to be offended AND unamused. A comedy series about dwarves? Who the hell would write such a thing? (Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.)

But Life's Too Short isn't a comedy about dwarves, though it does have a dwarf star - the urbane, winning Warwick Davis, a dwarf actor (Return of the Jedi, Harry Potter) down on his luck. His wife's thrown him out, he's almost bankrupt and the work has dried up. Even clients at his dwarves-only casting agency are bad-tempered and resentful.

Though it stars Gervais doing his Gervaisy thing (the sly looks to camera, the faux puzzlement) he is eclipsed by Davis playing a version of himself. But everyone is overshadowed by Liam Neeson, who is majestically unfunny as a humourless Liam Neeson ("I'm always making lists. That's probably why Steven Spielberg
cast me as Oskar Schindler") who earnestly wishes to become a stand-up comedian.

Life's Too Short: Me, Johnny Depp and Ricky Gervais

Of all my career achievements, I am most proud of Life's Too Short.

The dwarf actor dilemma

This week sees the start of Ricky Gervais's new series Life's Too Short, a comedy about a dwarf acting agency and its self-important owner. In real life the star, played by Warwick Davis, really does run such an agency. But how easy is it to be an actor with restricted growth and keep your integrity intact?

Anticipating the flak Life's Too Short might provoke and opting to get his revenge in first, Ricky Gervais last week announced that he embraced the haters. After last night's first episode, it's not the haters Gervais need worry about. It's the thoroughly indifferent. The problem with this new series is not that it's offensive; it's that it's just not very funny. It took over eight minutes to raise the first smile - Warwick Davis falling out of the 4x4 - and the only real laugh came near the end when Liam Neeson tried to pitch a stand-up routine about Aids.

It all just seemed too familiar; partly because any element of surprise had long since gone thanks to the endless preview trailers and the PR campaign to reassure everyone that the show was basically politically correct, but mainly because it felt like the show you'd have written yourself if you were trying to write like Gervais. Push the boundaries of taste. Tick. Blur the real and the imagined. Tick. Rope in a few celebs. Tick. Take the money and run. Tick.

For those fortunate enough to miss all the hype - there must be one or two of you, I guess - Life's Too Short is a mockumentary about a dwarf actor whose career and marriage has hit the skids and is hoping to revive both by making a reality show of his life. In theory, this is as good a starting point for a comedy as any other. Failure, anger, hubris and self-delusion are key building blocks of much humour and there's plenty of potential for all four. Only it's seldom realised.

It's not so much Warwick Davis as the dwarf who is the problem, but Gervais and, to a lesser extent, his sidekick, Stephen Merchant. There's only so long you can go on writing and performing the same type of characters without boring your audience and the pair have passed the point of no return. We've seen Gervais humiliating Merchant in Extras, we've seen them both humiliating Karl Pilkington in An Idiot Abroad. And the joke has worn thin by the time they play Warwick Davis's agents and bully him.

Increasingly, also, Gervais' own ego is getting in the way. There used to be a tension when real celebs started showing up in Extras because there was a lingering sense that they didn't quite know what they had let themselves in for and that the joke might be some way on them. That ambivalence is now long gone.

Gervais' own desperation for fame is now utterly transparent. Having seen him crave Johnny Depp's approval on The Graham Norton Show last week, it's become impossible to believe in his indifference to celebrity. Which rather kills the gag. And while you can't not be happy for Gervais that he's achieved the recognition his genius deserved, it's a bit of a shame for the rest of us that it seems to have - temporarily, I hope - nobbled his talent.

Gervais and Merchant's comedy is generally held to be the antithesis of this kind of thing - it's known as the comedy of embarrassment, because it creates characters so deluded they are unbearable to watch. Their new Walter Mitty is Warwick Davis, "Britain''s go-to dwarf" as he styles himself, who still thinks he's a big shot (dwarf puns being unavoidable in Life's Too Short) after starring as an Ewok in Return of the Jedi in the Eighties. The joke is that he's not a big shot at all, and all it takes is a camera trained on his existence for a few hours to show that his life is rubbish.

You feel a little bit sorry for Davis, not because he is portrayed as both feckless and conceited but because he has big shoes to fill (pun two). In Gervais and Merchant's previous two hits, Gervais was front and centre. His performances as David Brent and then Andy Millman are easily overlooked, because, aside from all the funny lines, they were really good. He invented a whole new screen language for faux documentary - a pained lexicon of glances and gurns, saying a dumb thing to camera and then realising it was slightly dumb but windmilling on anyway.

So when Warwick Davis starts blundering on about how he is not homosexual, and that in fact he has many a notch on his bedpost, that's a Brent-ish line delivered in a Brentish cadence and prompting a distinctly Brentish wince. And Davis is not as good at it as Gervais. I dare say had you watched Life's Too Short a decade ago you would have thought it matchless revelry. Now it's just not as good as The Office.

At least not yet. Gervais and Merchant's comedy does have a habit of growing on you (dwarf pun three. My sacking imminent). Extras, in particular, was sold to us as a series of celebrity spoofs and ended up being an affecting character piece about what happens when your friends make it and you don't. As that series proved, Gervais and Merchant have a gift for human drama as well as sometimes inhuman comedy. They have earned the right for us to see how Life's Too Short plays out.