James Corden apologised to Ricky Gervais after using one of his jokes.

The 44-year-old TV host came under fire earlier this year for copying a joke - virtually word for word - that Ricky used in his 2018 stand-up show 'Humanity', but James subsequently contacted Ricky to offer an apology.

Asked if James contacted him about the joke, Ricky replied: "He did. I said, 'Don't worry about it'.

"I said, 'If your writers were in the back of the room when I was warming up and you got it out there before I did it on Netflix...' but whatever you think of James Corden, there is no way he knowingly ripped off my joke and thought he'd get away with it."

Ricky, 61, previously highlighted the similarities between his Twitter-themed joke and the one that James told during a monologue on 'The Late Late Show'.

Ricky subsequently deleted a tweet that drew attention to the joke, but he doesn't have any regrets about how he approached the situation.

The stand-up star told the 'Headliners' podcast: "I thought it was funny. I thought it was absurd that it was such an obvious rip-off.

"But again I don't know how he got to it because the writer must have walked him through and said, 'Do this and do that'. Or he saw it five years ago and completely forgot about it and thought he'd made it up. That can happen as well.

"There are some plagiarists but a lot of it is genuinely accidental. So that is clearly my routine but I don't think he came up with it at all. I think a writer pitched that to him and didn't tell him it was mine, or the writer forgot."