Carr said: “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.”
The statement prompted laughter and clapping from the audience.
If only for my own mental alertness I’m going to try and write a few thoughts about Jimmy Carr’s joke about Romani dying in concentration camps.
Jimmy Carr recently made a joke in a Netflix special which was, apparently, dedicated to pushing the envelope and getting himself cancelled (or striking a blow for free speech, whatever). I haven’t seen the whole special and maybe I should (I will) but I have seen the excerpted joke. It’s not good, but Carr is that kind of comedian, hit-and-miss and really hateable a lot of the time, with his weird 1930s face and affected donkey laugh* like some kind of pre-Ealing very unfunny British comedy extra. I have watched him compere UK game shows where he demonstrates a reasonable amount of skill reading jokes (eg trademark insults) off cards but more commonly just keeping the show together.
The gas chamber joke is one of those ones a comedian can do because it appears to edgily divide and conquer its audience: those who actually believe that ‘gypsies’ deserve(d) to die are hoist on their own petards (or at least: who cares what those people think) and those who appreciate the possibility that there is some way in which the joke can be seen to be a joke about racist hate, have to then concede that it’s a contribution to the discussion (about what can and can’t be said, about the ridiculousness of racism, etc).
Of course it’s still a shit joke. Mainly it’s shit because it’s so lazy – the old ‘punching down’ to a marginalised group. It’s not brave to joke about ‘gypsies’ on any front, and this is proven simply by inserting any of the other groups who were murdered in the death camps – Jewish people obviously but also gays and disabled people. If Jimmy Carr had joked that it was terrible that Jewish people had been murdered but gays had also been murdered so that was a plus, then he would be beyond cancelled. I’m not saying that LGBTQI people per se have power to effect that, but actually in my opinion that sector of society has adequate support – by dint of family and social connections throughout mainstream society – that there would be outraged resistance. Clearly, had it occurred to Carr to make a joke that thousands of homosexuals dying in gas chambers or by other means of torture/systematised elimination would be a good thing, he would have abandoned that as an idea because there would have been gay people in the immediate audience when he made the joke, or friends of gay people, many would indeed not even really have understood a joke predicated on the idea that a government would hate gay people enough to want to kill them. But Romani people are still far enough on the outer that he can make the joke. It’s just an outright bullying piece of shit joke by a privileged prick to a bunch of privileged pricks, and for most of those privileged pricks the idea of a gypsy/Romani person is a piece of cartoon fun, like something out of Enid Blyton.
I wish I could say something more sophisticated about it than that, because I wanted to assist with my own mental alertness, but it seems that simple to me. I do recognise that the whole special, which I will say once again I have not watched but will, was about pushing the envelope. Obviously when you set out to do something like that you are going to necessarily mess shit up occasionally and that’s OK. But I guess the bottom line really is Jimmy Carr doesn’t have the capacity or credibility to handle big issues. His joke doesn’t make anyone think seriously about the issues it raises, it just makes (reasonable) people think Jimmy Carr is trying to operate outside his abilities and it’s kind of blown up in his face. Not, sadly, in terms of getting him obliterated from his day job (would he really care? I would if I was him because what kind of supporters would you end up in bed with if that did happen) although I’m sure he never needs to work again as it is. But definitely in terms of him making the world a little bit worse and decent people despair a little more, he’s had a cracking success. Fuckwit.
Update: OK I watched it, sort of, I listened to it while I was searching for an image, which made me realise how long I can spend searching for a simple image, although I guess it seemed longer. Yes, he tells the joke framing it in all these cowardly ways about how (for instance) it raises awareness of the murder of 'gypsies' and then goes on to talk about how Jehovah's Witnesses were also murdered, with a few jokes about how that might come about. Then he goes on about how if you can't laugh at terrible things, you aren't equipped to handle them when they 'really' happen. He boasts about how edgy he is, etc and how he's going to be cancelled sometime anyway so he might as well get it out of the way or something. Almost all of the show is set-ups for a really sad, wretched view of the world, which I guess is understandable, what hope would you have if you lived in England? Fuck!
* 'asthmatic donkey fucking a seal', he says in the show
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