At what point did the British decide their role was not to decide whether to sit in the audience, but to decide what could be offered up on the stage?
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:
