Jimmy Carr speaks out on being cancelled for ‘career-ender’ Holocaust joke
Jimmy Carr has spoken out on being ‘cancelled’ for a ‘career-ender’ Holocaust joke, which spawned a massive controversy.
Carr is a comedian well known for his dark jokes that often push the borders of acceptability, but one joke from a Netflix stand-up set went viral for all the wrong reasons.
This joke came from the 2022 stand-up special, His Dark Material, which the British comedian specifically introduced by calling it a ‘career ender’.
He went on to make a joke in which he suggested that people often don’t talk about the Romani people who died in the Holocaust, suggesting this was because not many people wanted to talk about the ‘positives’.
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This drew widespread criticism, with between 200,000 and 500,000 Roma and Sinti people believed to have been killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.
Speaking about it on the Louis Theroux Podcast, Carr was asked about this, pointing to how it had been clipped on social media, claiming it removed context.
Carr told Theroux that it was ‘clipped in a way’ that removed a ‘bit before the joke and after the joke where it’s contextualised’ by the comedian saying he was about to tell some incredibly dark and risqué jokes.
He added: “If you clip it up in the wrong way you can cause controversy.”
The comedian went on to talk about how it was an attempt to ‘say the worst possible thing’ whilst discussing the Holocaust, saying of the joke: “No one at the show thinks for a second I think that… It is kind of an interesting thing because people don’t know that bit of history.
"The Romani people call the Holocaust ‘The Devouring’.”
Carr called the Romani people a ‘poetic beautiful people’, but was brutal in his assessment of the controversy that followed.
He said about the joke: “It’s really interesting to talk about those dark bits of history. If you’re going to go down that road, if you’re going to do a bit of the show called ‘career-enders’, you have to expect there’s going to be some people that are going to be upset.”
Nadine Dorries, at the time Culture Secretary, called the joke ‘abhorrent’ and suggested it should be removed from Netflix.
Carr claimed that he had not followed the backlash closely, saying that 'other people’s opinions about me is none of my business'.
Regarding Dorries comments, however, he simply joked: "How is she doing?"
Theroux then referenced a tweet from Dorries in which she said that 'left-wing snowflakes are killing comedy'; however, at the time, she responded to the tweet, saying (via the BBC): "Well, that's not comedy."
When asked by Theroux whether he had been brought into Netflix to speak to Romani people as a result of the backlash, Carr said: “Netflix were like, 'Do your thing. We signed you up, we okay this, great'."
He finally pointed to a take that Dave Chapelle had on cancel culture, saying: “The joke that makes you roll around laughing and you can’t wait to tell your friends, and the joke that offends you and you think is disgusting come from the same place. We’re trying to make you laugh, trying to lighten the load of life.
“We’re paid for the attempt, like Evil Kinevil, we’re paid for the attempt we’re not paid for the joke. Sometimes swing and a miss, sometimes it offends.”
At the time of the controversy, the chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust slammed Carr, saying: “We are absolutely appalled at Jimmy Carr's comment about persecution suffered by Roma and Sinti people under Nazi oppression, and horrified that gales of laughter followed his remarks.
"Hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti people suffered prejudice, slave labour, sterilisation and mass murder simply because of their identity - these are not experiences for mockery."
Topics: Jimmy Carr, Netflix, TV and Film, UK News, Viral
Michael Slavin