Jimmy Carr during filming of the Graham Norton show at the London studios
(Picture: PA)If anything, it’s a surprise it’s taken this long. In his 22 years of comedy, Jimmy Carr has made a career out of jokes that take straight-faced pleasure in slicing right through the boundaries of acceptability, poking fun at everything from acid attacks to Rohypnol; this is the man who named his 2007 tour Repeat Offender, after all.
But now, speaking on stage last weekend, Carr has admitted his time “to get cancelled” has finally arrived. A joke from his recent Netflix special, about how Nazis murdering “thousands of Gypsies” was one of “the positives” of the Holocaust, went viral on Twitter, and was widely criticised; social media users, Downing Street, fellow comedians including David Baddiel, and Traveller, Holocaust remembrance and anti-hate groups all spoke out.
The argument about whether some things are off-limits for comedians has been going on for decades — this isn’t some new Culture Wars creation — and the truth of it has always been the same. Causing offence through humour isn’t the problem. It’s the motivation behind the offence that counts.
Is it simply a mindless quip? Is your “edgy” joke a Trojan horse that allows you to speak an opinion you know has no place in civilised society and, as a result, dog-whistle to a like-minded audience? Or is your humour a tool to lower our guards and let us address our own prejudices, tackling subjects that would otherwise be too painful?
You get the impression Carr knew a joke like this would cause backlash, as later in his Netflix special, he attempted to justify it. It had an “educational quality”, he reasoned, to inform people that other groups, beyond the six million Jewish people, were murdered by the Nazis. It feels like a flimsy excuse; there’s a reason why tours of Auschwitz aren’t littered with one-liners.
Should this signal Carr's demise? Probably, unless he feels like evolving his work. Like all art forms, comedy changes, and audiences change. Communities once marginalised are now, rightly, more included in public discourse.
Ultimately, though, what makes you a good comic is whether you can make people laugh. The numbers (gig tickets sold, Netflix specials streamed) can be a good barometer. In this specific sense, it's whether enough people think his genocide joke is funny or not. That is surely the court in which Carr is asking to be judged; if he’s found guilty, he can only blame himself.
