Has controversial comic Jimmy Carr ended his own career?

So what is funny? Lots of things. Elbows, lightbulb jokes, cat videos, the chandelier scene in Only Fools And Horses. In terms of stand-up comedy it’s routines which nod to universal truths. Or which use observational humour to shine a light on the perplexities of life and thereby unite us in a shared sense of bewilderment. Or which discuss things we all do in private. Or which talk about things we all think but don’t/won’t/can’t voice. It’s about release, silliness, catharsis, speaking truth to power and, yes, about taboo-busting and confrontation.

What isn’t funny is watching a smug, privileged, white, male, Cambridge University-educated comedian with a braying laugh try to do some or all of this by trotting out lame gags centred on easy targets. That’s just pub bore stuff. Workplace bully stuff. Metropolitan Police group chat stuff.

READ MORE: Comedian Jimmy Carr's most controversial six jokes. Acceptable or not?

If you haven’t followed the stushie which has erupted around Carr, a veteran stand-up and the presenter of Channel 4’s 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown, it turns on a section at the end of the hour-long special. In it he says this: “When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of six million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.”

That’s followed by a barrage of spontaneous laughter and, though it can be difficult to divine intention from the simple act of putting two fingers in your mouth and blowing hard, appreciative wolf whistles. Well, it was filmed in Southend. As well as reminding viewers that what he has just said is “******* funny, well done me” and “edgy as all hell”, Carr dwells on its educational property. The joke was intended to draw attention to an aspect of the Holocaust which isn’t as widely discussed, he says, namely the murder of Roma, homosexuals, disabled people and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

OK. But what was the joke exactly? Does its darkness centre on the fact that some people don’t like Roma or feel a degree of prejudice against them? If that’s the case, the same thing can be said of Jews (and how: we learned on Thursday that incidents of anti-Semitism in the UK reached a record high in 2021). So why not really push it and make the joke about them? Now that would be edgy – though also illegal, I imagine. The back end of the gag, meanwhile, turns the Carr cross-hairs on Jehovah’s Witnesses. Again, an easy target. Again, it’s hard not to conclude that, far from mining dark material for catharsis, the comic is just pandering to prejudice while staying on the right side of the law.

Carr seems to take his humour very seriously – he once tried to sue Jim Davidson for using a ‘fat joke’ he thought he had invented – and at one point earlier in the show he mansplains to a female audience member (in a section about mansplaining) that the joke he has just done is “meta”, by which he means it is even more clever for being self-referential. (As an aside, the only way I can understand that term is by thinking about the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where all the escalators and structural gubbins are visible on the outside). So is that what this is about? It passed me by if it is, and unless the crowd was composed of PhD students on a meta comedy-gathering field trip, I think it evaded his audience too. Here’s another question: if Carr really does take his humour seriously, why isn’t he funnier? Then again, if by some alchemy of phrasing, timing and build up the joke was so utterly sublime that anyone who heard it dissolved in mirth, would that make it OK?

His Dark Materials debuted on Netflix on Christmas Day and as it turns out the Holocaust gag evaded pretty much everyone with skin in the game until weeks later when a clip of it was uploaded to social media platform TikTok. Based on my scant knowledge of the language, the Roma for ordure is ‘sheka’. Whatever the truth of it, that’s certainly what hit the fan when the clip went viral.

Since then, much noise. Anti-Fascism group Hope Not Hate has hailed comedy as “an amazing tool for progressive change” but expressed disappointment that Carr has “decided to use his platform to celebrate the murder of one of the most marginalised groups in society.” The Traveller Movement, a charity, described the Holocaust segment as “truly disturbing” and something which goes “way beyond humour.” A petition has been launched to have the segment removed. Even UK culture secretary Nadine Dorries has chipped in her tuppence worth.

Others have defended Carr. There was a trigger warning, they say. There’s a clue in the show’s title, they say. They note how Carr opens the show by telling his audience it contains jokes about terrible things but that they are just jokes, not the terrible things themselves. They can point out that Carr isn’t “celebrating” the murder of Roma, he’s referring to it in a comic sketch in which he appears to make light of it for a deeper purpose. They can justify that (or at least explain it) by in turn referring to what you might call Brent’s Law (“There is no subject that you should avoid discussing or making jokes about,” copyright Ricky Gervais in a radio interview last month). If push comes to shove they can play the You Do Not Have A Right To Not Ever Be Offended card, or its flip side, C’mon Snowflake, It’s Only A Joke. And (this is me speaking now) Carr has a point about general knowledge concerning other victims of the Holocaust. Check Hansard if you don’t believe him: on January 27, Holocaust Memorial Day, Labour peer Baroness Whitaker asked a question in a Lord’s debate about how the government will ensure that children know about it. Mind you, she also asked whether putting Roma and Traveller history on the school curriculum might reduce the “race hatred” experienced by those communities – hatred which, in some forms, could come as humour. Or even humor. And so back to Wordle.

After Wednesday’s debacle, I expected Thursday’s word to be ‘sorry’. It wasn’t. It was ‘pause’, which longueur could soon apply to Jimmy Carr’s career. He was met by protestors outside a gig in Dunstable last Tuesday, and last weekend at a gig in Whitley Bay he was heckled. He responded by railing against “cancel culture” and is reported to have said: “I am going to get cancelled, that’s the bad news. The good news is I am going down swinging … You are going to be able to tell your grandchildren about seeing this show tonight. You will say I saw a man and he stood on a stage and he made light of serious issues.”

Carr has described his Netflix show as containing jokes which are, in his words, “career enders”. Rightly or wrongly, he may turn out to be the prophet of his own demise. How meta is that?