Human headline Jimmy Carr has announced a second Terribly Funny show in Newcastle

His latest tour is called Terribly Funny and the official media release also works as a disclaimer of sorts.

"It's about terrible things that might have affected you or people you know and love. But they're just jokes - they are not the terrible things. Jokes are little lies. Nothing more than wonderful, funny, joyful tricks, constructed from language.

"Jimmy will be telling jokes to an adult paying audience who've got a good idea what's in store. And there's no point to the show, save for to make the audience laugh. Having political correctness at a comedy show is like having health and safety at a rodeo. Now you've been warned, enjoy the laughs."

Carr has performed 10 sell-out tours, played more than 2500 shows, won the British Comedy Award for best live stand-up tour, and been nominated for the Perrier Award.

He has hosted 20 series of panel show 8 Out Of 10 Cats and 18 series of spin-off 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown, and presented Big Fat Quiz Of The Year for a decade. He has also hosted three series of Roast Battle on Comedy Central UK and recorded his own Netflix panel show, The Fix, in 2019.

As is the case with most professional comedians, people either love him or hate him. Carr is fine with that. What he doesn't appreciate is people criticising his shows without being physically present in the room at the time the jokes were made. Nuances are missed, context is ignored.

Carr is not angry, though. He's matter of fact about the realities of "cancel culture" (a contemporary reference to the traditional boycott).

"I've been cancelled a few times but they'll never take me alive. I've been cancelled before and I'll be cancelled again," Carr says.

"It's always a very stressful week when it happens, and then you bite-size it. It's one of my favourite psychological terms, bite-sizing.

"It means you put things in proportion. We've got real problems in the world, right? People who are sick or they're bereaved or they've just lost their job. There are real problems out there but I told a joke and some people didn't like it.

"That's it. That's the size of the problem. I told a joke and some people didn't like it."

A case in point is a Holocaust joke Carr made about the Gypsy community in a Netflix special released late last year. It was widely reported in the media and on February 16 a group of angry protesters gathered outside a Cambridge venue where he was performing.

Carr didn't back down.

"You've got to see it in the context of 'What do I really believe in', right? I really believe in freedom of speech," he says.

"And as much as I think it's important that I have freedom of speech, I also respect the freedom of speech of the people who don't like my jokes. They're allowed to not like them. I think it's a bit much, though, if they say not only do I not like this but he shouldn't be able to say this to anyone.

"You're allowed a voice if you don't like something. But it very rarely happens that someone is offended at one of my shows.

"When someone is offended it's more a case of my comedy having escaped from the environment that it is meant to be in.

"I'm meant to perform comedy for people who are interested in my comedy, and it's not broadcasting when people who weren't there make a comment, it's narrowcasting.

"Yes, my comedy exists but you have to decide to find it and to watch it or, in the case of the live tour, buy a ticket and come to the show."

His way of dealing with criticism is to "log off" for a week.

"You can be cancelled on Twitter and it doesn't affect your ticket sales in the least. No one cares. So if you can find the self-discipline to delete Twitter from your phone for a week, it's like nothing ever happened."

He recalls the story of a woman who confronted him after one of his UK shows.

"She came up to me and said 'That was distressing, puerile filth, no better than last year' and I thought 'Well, that's a whole different side of crazy'. I mean, she paid to come and see my shows. Twice.

"The thing about my jokes is that they're from the head, not from the heart.

"I'm up there for two hours telling jokes, so you're going to have a pretty good sense of who I am at the end of it. You'll know that I don't take life terribly seriously. I'll joke about everything.

"I like to think that I am an equal opportunity offender.

"People just have different places where they draw the line with what they think is acceptable or unacceptable and, ultimately, I think you can joke about anything and it being the joke is the factor.

"It's a joke, it's a way of processing the world."

Carr rejects any notion of there being a "golden age" of comedy in the past where performers could say or do anything, and get away with it.

"Comedy rots. More than any other art form, comedy rots over time," he says.

"If you go back and you look at 1940s and 1950s jokes there are very few surviving laugh-out-loud moments for us today."

One on one, Carr is surprisingly humble. Polite and considerate. A pleasure to talk to, in fact, and I tell him so.

"Why thank you. I'm a very positive person, I try to be as upbeat as I can," he replies.

"COVID was awful for people, hard and terrible, but there is kind of a golden age that has come from it. People want to go out now, they want to live a little bit. To laugh. If you happen to share my sense of humour, I've got you covered for two hours."

And his famous "roastings" of audience members?

"Look, Seaworld had splash zones down the front; a warning that if you're in the first five rows, you might just get wet. I should have the same policy at my shows - if you're in the front five rows, you could be in trouble."

This story was originally published online on August 8, 2022

IN THE NEWS:

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: