Netflix Presents: the New, Improved Jimmy Carr!

Jimmy Carr in his newest special, Natural Born Killer (Netflix photo)

Content warning: this essay will directly address the vulgar, transgressive, and sexually violent themes common to Jimmy Carr's stand-up comedy.

Jimmy Carr’s latest Netflix special, Natural Born Killer, features an extended riff on the fatuousness of the phrase “date rape.” He suggests that the qualifying prefix is a nicey-poo addition that makes the crime less horrific, mainly for the perpetrator. This sounds particularly weird coming from Carr, whose content has often featured sexually transgressive themes. Carr’s stock character is a shitty, libidinous satyr. This is just the first time he’s felt compelled to justify himself.

I have a particular fondness for one-liner comics. Milton Jones, Jack Handey, Gary Delaney, Steven Wright. Jokers who don’t require lengthy contexts to understand their punchlines, they just zap us with abrupt reversals or insightful wordplay. Short, incisive jokes often reveal deeper truths. With Jimmy Carr in particular, whose routine involves teasing audiences’ bottom limit, his transgressive themes often reveal that his audience, no matter how jaded they think themselves, still has a bottom limit.

Carr loves jokes he knows defensive interests will hate. In past one-hour specials, he’s lobbed out what he calls “career-ending jokes”; this time, he boasts of his intent to get “cancelled.” Not for nothing, either, as his routine has involved jabs at the disabled, the Holocaust, religion, and women. He’s previously told rape jokes, and jokes which imply he’s a drug-addicted pedophile. The above-mentioned “date rape” diatribe comes only after delivering a trademarked rape one-liner.

To his credit, Carr’s transgressive jokes make himself the bad person, never the victim. Unlike, say, Louis CK, Carr doesn’t use his aggressive tone to garner audience sympathy or wallow in self-pity/; you’re supposed to hate his stage persona. But Carr has always played that persona with winking acknowledgment that, like us, he’s in on the joke. His character knows what an awful human being he is, and invites us to participate in the pile-on.

This time, Carr doesn’t do that. He delivers a lewd joke, then counters with an explicit explanation of why we shouldn’t find such content funny. Not just once, either: he breaks character multiple times, sometimes for several straight minutes, and culminates the performance riffing extensively on the importance of consent. As he lectures viewers why we shouldn’t have laughed at the joke he just delivered, we wonder: who is this guy wearing Jimmy Carr’s face?

Louis CK

Perhaps there’s an autobiographical reason for Carr’s reversal. He became a father for the first time in 2019, aged forty-seven. At approximately the halfway point of this performance, he includes a nearly three-minute narrative of how he feared his child’s premature birth might’ve blunted his edge. The story ends with him realizing he still had it, apparently deaf to the irony that a one-liner comedian just took nearly three minutes to establish one punch line!

I’m reminded of Jimmy Kimmel, another Jimmy famous for working blue who attempted to reinvent himself. Kimmel, previously co-host of the basic cable raunch-fest The Man Show, turned into an advocate for radical empathy when he transferred to broadcast TV, frequently turning weepy-eyed at expressions of injustice. His former co-host Adam Carolla, meanwhile, has become a Fox News and right-wing podcast staple, doubling down on his basic cable persona. Again, audiences seek the authentic Jimmy.

Please don’t misunderstand, I believe both Jimmys could have their secular “come-to-Jesus moment.” As a former basic White conservative myself, I know irreligious conversions happen. Yet Carr attempts to do double duty, delivering the transgressive joke before lecturing us on why our laughter makes us bad people. His fatherhood narrative ends with a coat-hanger abortion joke. His consent riff is him lecturing a young audience member on when it’s okay to “get your dick out.”

Because there’s definitely a place for such content. We laugh at Carr’s blue material because we recognize something of ourselves. No matter how enlightened or empathetic we’ve become, we possess the same vulgar, libidinous id; becoming an adult doesn’t mean we’ve defeated those tendencies, only that we’ve learned to conceal them in public. Carr is funny because when he delivers his raunchy content, he helps us compartmentalize that side, and leave it in the theater.

This time, I’m left confused. When I laugh at Carr’s blue material, then he lectures me directly on why his own content wasn’t actually funny, I wonder: have I changed? Or has he? Previously, Carr encouraged us to leave the unrestrained id with him, onstage. Now, he lectures us, and I feel compelled to conceal my laughter. I can’t relinquish my id, because I can’t admit I have one. So it comes home with me.