The audience laugh. First, they laugh when the comedian they have paid to see say ‘unsayable’ things mentions the Holocaust. Then they laugh when he gives them the punchline. Murdered Roma and Sinti dead are the punchline.
When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of six 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.
— Jimmy Carr, His Dark Materials (2021)
In that darkened theatre, Jimmy Carr and his audience are grubbily united in an unspeakable thing that is, in fact, all too speakable.
The Conservative Party’s 2019 manifesto specifically targeted Gypsy, Romany and Traveller (GRT) people and is currently pushing through legislation — with Labour’s support — to deliver on that promise. In April 2021, Labour distributed leaflets featuring explicit anti-GRT rhetoric.
In May 2021, The Times — the so-called “paper of record” — published a piece by Matthew Parris headlined It’s time we stopped pandering to travellers. He argued that Britain should “phase out the ‘ethnic minority’ rights of people who are not a race but a doomed mindset”.
It was The Times’ annual attack on GRT people with Parris picking up the baton from David Cameron’s former speechwriter Clare Foges who contributed the 2019 (Travellers can't always play the racism card) and 2020 (Let's not be afraid to challenge Traveller culture) editions.
Jokes don’t exist in a vacuum. In the section after the line that ricocheted from TikTok to Facebook to Twitter, Carr says the ‘joke’ is “fucking funny, edgy, and educational”. It’s the shield for material he flagged up earlier in the routine as a “career-ender”, knowing full well that it would be nothing of the sort.
When Brian Logan reviewed Carr’s show in June 2019, the Holocaust joke was already part of the set…
Deep-rooted convention is destabilised when Carr appears to laugh at the Nazi extermination of Gypsies. We gasp at the flouted taboo, then laugh to recall that – here at least – there are no consequences.
It’s the successor to a line he used on Radio4’s Loose Ends in 2006, which the BBC apologised for but Carr did not:
The male gypsy moth can smell the female gypsy moth up to seven miles away — and that fact also works if you remove the word moth.
… and a piece of crowd work on his 2005 DVD, where he engaged a dark-haired man in the audience by saying:
Have you ever Tarmacked a drive? No? No, you've just fucked off with the deposit like the rest of them.
There’s a pattern here. In a friendly environment, Carr’s explanation would be — as it was when discussing his “most offensive joke” to Paul Provenza — “it’s about the turn on the language.” But under pressure, he’s taken the strategic decision to make it about ‘cancel culture’.
You are going to be able to tell your grandchildren about seeing this show tonight. You will say 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.
— Jimmy Carr, Whitley Bay, 5 February 2022
Saying, “It was just a joke,” isn’t a protective incantation. Jokes draw upon and rely on the world in which the teller lives. Carr’s jokes about GRT people rely on the assumption that he is “one of us” and ‘we’ buy into that prejudice. He can pretend to play with expectations while drawing on long-held hatred.
David Baddiel — who has his own history with cruel and racist jokes — quoted his own show Trolls — Not The Dolls…
You can obviously tell a Holocaust joke that is cruel and inhumane and mean-spirited and racist.
Or you can tell one that targets the oppressors, or draws attention to the fundamental evil of it, or shines a light on the humanity of the victims.
… concluding that Carr’s line is an example of the former rather than the latter, and therefore “indefensible”. He then shared a joke told by the academic, writer and director Devorah Baum:
A survivor dies, goes to heaven, tells God a Holocaust joke. God says: “That’s not funny. The survivor says: “Ah — I guess you had to be there.”
… and spoiled it by adding:
As a footnote, I'd add that Jimmy is a close friend of mine and a brilliant stand-up in general. Makes no difference to how I feel or think about this specific joke.
While Baddiel couldn’t help but soften his critique of his friend — “one of us” — Victoria Coren Mitchell went much further:
While I’m here, might take a moment to mention I also love Jimmy Carr, a close friend who’s made about a thousand jokes I wouldn’t make myself, as a stage performer, but as a man is full of goodness and kindness. He’s a properly decent person.
She followed up by quoting E.M.Forster (“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend. I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”) and stating: “I wasn’t defending the joke.”
A great deal of moral cowardice is tied to the likelihood of seeing someone in a green room or at a dinner party. And just as often it’s explained away with reference to literature and higher ideals. It can be more efficiently explained by those three words again: “One of us.”
Boris Johnson’s appointment of his former advisor and Oxford contemporary Guto Harri as his new Director of Communications drew an explicit “one of us” moment from Times columnist and fake leather jacket connoisseur David Aaronovitch yesterday:
He may be likeable and he may be one of us, but I am not terribly reassured by the presence in No 10 of our Guto.
Harri — an ex-BBC journalist and former PR man for Aaronovitch’s employer, News Corp — is “likeable” because he is “one of us”. Hacks are laughing at Harri’s mortifying first day but he’ll be eagerly welcomed back into journalism when he’s done. After all, Alastair Campbell never stopped being “one of us”.
Boris Johnson is also “one of us”. When his secondment to Downing Street is finally over, he’ll slip back into the pages of The Daily Telegraph. Just consider the words of Telegraph columnist and leader writer, Tim Stanley, on Question Time last week:
Boris Johnson is a phenomenon. I'm amongst a minority who rather likes him actually and he reminds me of a character in an Ocean's Eleven films where technically he may well be a con man and he might be the bad guy, but you want to see if he gets away with it... And how he did it and part of me still thinks he might get away with it, he might pull off one more great con.
If you’re “one of us”, there’s always a chance to pull one more con. People like Johnson and Carr are always allowed the last laugh.