By Charles C. W.
Cooke
Monday, February
07, 2022
British comedian Jimmy Carr is under fire
for making a dark joke during his recent Netflix special. Here’s the crack:
When
people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of 6
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.
Over the weekend, someone put this clip up
on social media, and all hell broke loose. Carr was roundly condemned in the
press; he was targeted for cancelation by all manner of “anti-racist” advocacy
groups; and he was called out by the British
government, which announced that it is looking
into passing
legislation that would “hold Netflix to account
for streaming.”
Why?
Admirably, Carr has refused to grovel — or
even to say that he is sorry if people were offended. Instead, he acknowledged that he was “going to get cancelled, that’s the bad news. The good
news is I am going down swinging,” before predicting that one day people will
tell their children that, in the past, “I saw a man and he stood on a stage and
he made light of serious issues. We used to call them jokes and people would
laugh.”
Personally, I think that Carr’s joke
is, as he himself describes it, “f***ing funny.” But, even if it’s not, who cares? At what point did
the British decide that their role was not to decide whether or not to sit in
the audience but to decide what could be offered up on the stage? Speaking to
the Sun newspaper, the “Celebrity Big Brother and My Big Fat
Gypsy Wedding star,” Paddy Doherty, said that Carr
should be
investigated by the police. That wasn’t a joke. He’s talking about mass murder
being a positive – would he be allowed to say this about black people killed by
the Ku Klux Klan?
This is nonsense from start to finish.
“Investigated by the police” for what, exactly? The high crime of
upsetting Paddy Doherty? Besides, there’s nothing to “investigate.” Carr wrote
the joke, delivered the joke, explained the joke as he was telling it, disseminated the joke, and then defended the
joke. This ain’t no job for Sherlock Holmes.
As for the insistence that it “wasn’t a joke,” what does that even mean? It was
intended as a joke by the comedian, sold as a joke by Netflix, and received as
a joke by the audience, which laughed. Yes, Carr implied that “mass murder is a
positive.” That was the joke, and it’s funny because it was
unexpected, and because nobody in their right mind — including Jimmy Carr, who
surrounded the joke with a little
history lesson — actually believes it. Doherty
tries to parse what Carr is “allowed” to say, by raising hypotheticals, but I’m
not sure quite what he means. “Would he be allowed to say this about black
people killed by the Ku Klux Klan?” he asks. Which . . . yeah, he would. If he
can make Holocaust jokes, he can make KKK jokes. They might even be funny.
Worse yet was the U.K.’s Minister of
Culture, Nadine Dorries, who told the BBC that “what Jimmy Carr did is not
comedy.” I’d like to be able to respond to this contention by pointing out that
nobody made Nadine Dorries the arbiter of national taste, but, alas, it seems
that the British government actually has. During interviews on the
matter, Dorries has said:
“We don’t
have the ability now, legally, to hold Netflix to account for streaming that
but very shortly we will.”
And:
“We are
looking at legislation via the Media Bill which would bring into scope those
comments from other video on-demand streaming outlets like Netflix. So it’s
interesting that we’re already looking at future legislation to bring into
scope those sort of comments.”
This is just bonkers. Faced by
differences of opinion, the British still tend to mutter “it’s a free country.”
But is it? Dorries has complained in the past that “left-wing snowflakes are
killing comedy.” Now, she wants the power to prosecute comedians who make jokes
that cross her personal line. You couldn’t make it up.
As it happens, there is a simple way for
people who don’t like Jimmy Carr’s jokes to avoid being upset by them: turn
off the TV. Hell, if figures such as Doherty and Dorries really can’t cope
with the guy, then they can cancel their Netflix subscriptions in protest. But
there is no need for the rest of us to be implicated by their response. Once upon a
time, the British
understood that.
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