Jimmy Carr’s cancelling marks the long, sad death of comedy… not

Comedy is dying…

Its end, often prophesied, is finally here. We know it’s real because Jimmy Carr has said so and he should know. The World’s Last-Standing Stand-Up has been widely condemned for making a joke about the murder of gypsies at the hands of Nazis during the Holocaust and that, he claims, proves his point: you simply can’t make a joke about anything these days.

Is he right? Well, obviously, nobody laughed when Carr told that joke, despite the laughter-like noises coming from the packed audience at the sell-out show filmed for a Netflix special for which he was no doubt paid very little. Undoubtedly, nobody will laugh during his UK tour that runs throughout the year until December. It’s probably why the last gig, at Manchester’s O2, is almost sold out: because nobody intends to laugh at that kind of material.

So, yes, this certainly looks like it’s officially The End of Comedy, which arrives like a biblical plague: puns raining down on our heads and one-liners consuming all airtime. In these dark end days, nobody can buy a ticket to any comedian they’ve seen on the TV because they’re sold out for weeks. As for the bigger acts, clear a space in your schedules for next year. Comedy is enjoying such a fierce death rattle that everywhere is sold out.

Sorry? What’s that you say?

Well, yes. I suppose it does look like British comedy has rarely enjoyed ruder health, but you’re mistaken if you believe that. Comedy is dying. Even John Cleese has repeatedly prophesied its demise (usually from the island of Nevis in the Caribbean), admitting last year that “you can’t make jokes”. One guesses that means he won’t be making any jokes in his documentary “John Cleese: Cancel Me” which he’s made for Channel 4 for broadcast this year.

Comedy has clearly “run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible”, and its death will be witnessed across the UK in 2022, at venues hosting nationwide tours by what few comedians remain… Bill Bailey, Katherine Ryan, Russell Brand, John Bishop, Nina Conti, Alan Carr, Alan Partridge, Al Murray, Dara Ó Briain, Josh Widdicombe, Jack Dee, Lou Sanders, Joe Lycett, Jon Richardson, Count Arthur Strong, Doug Stanhope, Ed Byrne, Joel Dommett, Rob Newman, Geoff Norcott, Jason Byrne, Jason Manford, Larry Dean, Jenny Éclair, Joanne McNally, Omid Djalili, Kevin Bloody Wilson, Milton Jones, Paul Foot, Hannah Gadsby, Paul Chowdry, Reginald D. Hunter, Rhod Gilbert, Julian Clary, Paul Merton, Matte Forde, Roy Chubby Brown…

Let’s just say that pretty much every comedian (plus Tim Vine) will be out on tour this year and, like the last of the buffalo, it will be sad to see the end of these magnificent beasts, even if the poor bastards don’t even realise there’s nothing left to mock and that comedy has died…

Although, before comedy disappears completely… Did you hear the one about the stand-up comedian who made a very successful career by claiming cancel culture is “destroying his career”? It certainly “cancelled” (geddit?) any bill he owed the taxman after being caught in a tax avoidance scheme in 2012.

That, you might remember, was another scandal that caused Carr to worry about his career. “It did feel that I was going to lose it all. It felt like maybe I was going to get cancelled” he recalled recently. But that’s the other thing to remember about Jimmy Carr: he’s been going out of business longer than BHS did under Sir Philip Green.

Remember the career-ending joke he made about gypsy women in 2006 on the BBC Radio show Loose Ends for which the BBC was forced to apologise? Or the career-ending joke he told in 2009 about amputees coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan?

Carr has spent the best part of 20 years claiming his career was about to end, which ultimately is the cheapest and easiest way for any comedian to ensure the exact opposite. Today we call it “cancelled” but Carr is merely the youngest of the “too rude for TV” comedians, only relevant when they’re claiming to be irrelevant. Causing offence is integral to their profits. If the line between good and bad taste wasn’t drawn at the Holocaust, they’d be deliberately provoking controversy on other subjects. Carr certainly has plenty to go at, given he routinely makes jokes from the point of view of the rapist, the child killer, or the backyard abortionist.

“I feel sorry for the people that get offended. I feel sorry for people who can’t laugh at dark shit because when their life is terrible, they just have to fucking white knuckle it…” says Carr at the end of his Netflix special. Yet it’s a facile rationalisation. No matter how much he abstracts his act, turns it inside-out in an attempt to become “meta” and explore comedy’s relationship with free speech, Carr’s comedy is deeply reactionary. It is material that has been used and reused a thousand times by different comedians also chasing the receding edge of notoriety.

Few in his audience will have faced the kinds of psychological trauma that Carr claims his humour cauterises. His audience enjoys his act precisely because they never have had to “white knuckle it”. They enjoy a luxury affording to people who have never faced cancel-culture in the purist forms of persecution, rape, and murder. It is ultimately a decadence that doesn’t even enjoy the excuse of satire. Cleese rightly bemoans the moralising around Fawlty Towers’ notorious Major, but the Major would never exist in contemporary comedy and not because he’s been cancelled. Rather, the life experiences that shaped that character’s outlook are no longer relevant for our time. As a representative of a certain outlook, the Major must remain in our historical record, but, moving forward, we have other worldviews to ridicule. One can’t help but feel there are simply better and funnier things to laugh about.

And that is the ultimate punchline: even as Carr remains an anachronism for people who live and think through anachronisms, comedy itself will explore other routes through our collective psyche.

Comedy will never die.