Is it edgy comedy to have a good laugh about a particular genocide?
Jimmy Carr has been condemned by anti-hate groups including the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Auschwitz Memorial and Hope Not Hate for his comments about the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community in his Netflix special.
I have no idea who Jimmy Carr is, apart from someone who had a Netflix special and fancies himself a comedian.
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.”
I saw the clip earlier today. There was laughter but it wasn’t a great big roar. There’s no indication of how big the audience was so maybe it was a big roar for that particular audience, but it wasn’t the kind of torrent you usually hear for killer jokes. In short it was my impression that not everyone laughed.
Anyway, point is – genocide jokes at the expense of the victims as opposed to the perps are not so much “edgy” as…that other thing. Carr said it was edgy though.
The Auschwitz Memorial urged Carr to “learn about the fate of some 23 thousand Roma & Sinti deported to Auschwitz” in a tweet to their 1.2m followers.
Well I think he knows their fate; that’s what the joke was about.
The Guardian sums up:
It will be an unwelcome row for Netflix, who last year faced an intense backlash and a staff walk out after comments made by Dave Chappelle about transgender people in his comedy special.
Not comparable. Not comparable at all; not even close. Transgender people are not being packed into cattle cars and sent to gas chambers. It’s not necessary to catastrophize about trans people on every occasion.
Comments
21 responses to “Edge of what though?”
It’s still popular to hate on Travelers, Roma, Gypsies, Carnies, etc, isn’t it? When my Dad found out that it was no longer acceptable to say “I jewed the dealer down and got a great price on my pickup,” he switched over to “I gypped them.”
Haha, Dad.
I loved him, but he had some faults.
I can’t remember if I saw the special containing that joke, but I have seen a few of Jimmy Carr’s specials. I like him. His entire shtick is saying over-the-top outrageous things, but not in the dumb, bro-y, “people can’t handle my truth” way that so many of his fellow comics do. He doesn’t simply spout racist and sexist things and pretend that it’s daring. He reminds me a little of Otto Jeselnik, who I also like.
I just don’t think he’s the kind of act where you can pull a line out of context like that without losing the meaning. Yes, the “joke” is certainly that people don’t like the Roma, but I’m not sure that the Roma are really the butt of that joke as opposed to Carr’s on-stage persona.
Screechy — well, that’s as may be. But Ken “Popehat” White’s remark about another “edgy” entertainer comes to mind,
He does have form on the jokes at-the-expense-of-Gypsies front. Here’s Lucy Mangan on his “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” joke:
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/jan/06/comedy.bbc
Carr is a British comedian. I like him; I think he’s funny. In any case, he’s well established in the roster of actors and comedians that work British TV, and his comedy seems good enough to stand on its own. I don’t know why he would resort to racism, hatred or shock.
Jimmy Carr on a better day
At first glance, I thought you said Jimmy *Carter*, and did a double-take.
Not a funny joke, period.
Also Jimmy Carr.
“Say what you like about these servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re going to have a fucking good Paralympic team in 2012.”
“Why would you become an Islamic fundamentalist suicide bomber on the off-chance you might get 72 virgins when you die… become a Catholic priest and have them now!”
“They say there’s safety in numbers. Yeah? Well tell that to six million Jews.”
“I’m not worried about the Third World War. That’s the Third World’s Problem.”
“You know why so many American kids die in high school massacres? It’s because they aren’t allowed to run in the corridors.”
@Screechy Monkey,
I suppose the joke (and those in Roj’s post above) could be funny in the right context, that is, if he were playing an Archie Bunker-type character and we were laughing at him (and we knew he was in on the joke).
Or, as Michael Stipe put it (regarding Andy Kaufman): “If you believe there’s nothing up his sleeve than nothing is cool.”
“But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis.” OK so how come I know about it?
Along with homosexuals?
WaM #8 – you are trying to compare British and American comedy. Altough American comedy ahs improved sine Bunker’s day, it is still rarely as acerbic as British. Jimmy Carr’s jokes are often “off colour”, but you need to see the delivery, not just bread the words.
No topic should be off limits for comedy, not even the Shoa. Comedy is often the way we deal with the harsh facts of life.
It seemed like no time had elapsed at all after the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain, presumably taken from a campsite by a dingo when I firts heard”
Q What’s the biggest bthreat to a test tube baby?
A A dingo with a straw.
I like South Park humor, especially the movie Team America: World Police made by the same two guys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. I like the musical number Everyone Has AIDS in the movie. It definitely makes me laugh, but I cannot say exactly why or how.
If I would engage the words by themselves, the song would seem to joke about people with AIDS, and people who died of AIDS. But I would not find that funny, so something else is going on. Engaging the performance is more than engaging the words.
In a theory of punching up or down, maybe I laugh at the audience of marionettes feeling good, which might be punching up. But a theory of punching up or down never captured the satire in a Charlie Hebdo cartoon for me.
Der Durchwanderer wrote a long comment here a few weeks ago that spoke to me better about standup comedy engaging how a person in the audience functions internally. I’m sorry I did not bookmark the comment, and I cannot find it. But as I recall the explanation, my laughter deals with conflicts or contradictions in my cognition or my emotions.
This fits with what Roj Blake just wrote in #10, “Comedy is often the way we deal with the harsh facts of life.”
Dave was it this one?
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2022/6-6-billion-kilowatt-hours/#comment-2920390
Or this one?
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/smile-when-you-call-us-that-2/#comment-2914221
Ah no it must be this one:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/waaz-ya-sensa-yuma/#comment-2907197
High quality comments, a quick scanning of the most recent ones has underlined. Very high quality.
Ophelia, thank you so much for finding that comment by Der Durchwanderer (Nov. 14, 2021). This paragraph from it speaks for me exactly:
My pleasure, Dave. It’s worth resurrecting.
In fact…
In the words of that great philosopher, Goofy…well, gorsh.
I see Goofy as a 20th century Diogenes.
Yes, it is edgy comedy. It works as a joke in subverting the audience’s expectation of where the joke is going. But more than that, the joke both recognises that prejudice against Gypsy travellers still exists in the UK, and then asks the audience whether they side with that. That is not laughing “at the expense of the victims”, it is a barbed poke at today’s attitudes, following in the tradition of the Shakespearean fool.
Dogenes, perhaps.