Before I get stuck in properly with this let me make it clear that Carr isn’t especially funny to me, and his recent Netflix special is bloody awful. He’s trying hard to be Bob Monkhouse but doesn’t have the material to match his, so copes on ‘edgy’ comedy to give him his material and again, much of it sucks.
His Netflix special came out just before Christmas, but his line about Gypsies being murdered in the Holocaust was only picked up a week or so ago. Carr has rightfully been condemned, and his line isn’t funny unless you think the murder of thousands of Gypsies is funny. That’s where one can peel the humour off it. That’s it. Do I think that Carr should be canceled or as one SNP councilor says, the crowd laughing at the crowd should be prosecuted?
Well, no. Condemning Carr for being a prick is enough, though that just feeds his ego and prolongs his career but going down the road to prosecute the audience leads us down the road to the sort of authoritarian regime that gave birth to the likes of the Nazis or Stalin. There’s also a lot of talk about how comedy should be only about ‘punching up’, which leaves comedy in a place where it essentially it picking on the usual easy targets for leftish performers and audiences and closes off so many subjects of comedy because anything can be the subject of comedy or satire.
Except Carr’s line was neither. It was just racist pandering to a core of his audience. In a free world Carr should take the criticism for this but at the same time we shouldn’t be calling for audience members to be prosecuted.