Los Angeles, CA -
Actor James Franco didn't find Ricky Gervais' swipe at John Travolta during the Golden Gloves to be funny.
The 49-year-old Gervais unleashed his joke a month after Carrie Fisher outed Travolta as gay.
"Not nominated, I Love You Phillip Morris," Gervais said in his opening monologue referring to the gay-themed romantic-comedy. "Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor. Two heterosexual actors pretending to be gay. So the complete opposite of some famous scientologist then."
The line hit a nerve with the audience and Gervais added, "Probably."
"My lawyers helped me with the wording of that joke," he said. (The video is embedded in the right panel of this page.)
Franco, who will co-host the Oscars on Sunday with Anne Hathaway, told USA Today that he didn't find Gervais to be that amusing.
"I haven't really read about the fallout of Ricky Gervais," Franco told the paper. "I was there and I didn't think he was that funny. The jokes were kind of – gay Scientology jokes? South Park did that like five years ago. So I don't really want to do Ricky Gervais' style."
Franco recently suggested he might be gay in responding to such rumors.