Jimmy Carr: Telling Jokes

Trailer for 2009 DVD

More Jimmy Carr videos

A former marketing executive for Shell, Jimmy Carr is one of the hardest-working comedians in the UK, and DVDs of his live shows now sell more than 150,000 copies each.

His first full-length show, Bare-Faced Ambition, was nominated for the Perrier in 2002; and he was named best stand-up at the Time Out Awards in 2003, and at the Laftas in 2004. At the same awards he was named ‘funniest man’ in 2005.

He won the Royal Television Society Award for best on-screen newcomer in 2003, and soon established himself one of the main faces of Channel 4, hosting game show Distraction, the first series of The Friday Night Project, three series of panel show 8 Out Of 10 Cats, and several specials such as The Big Fat End of Year Quiz and The Comedians’ Comedian.

Carr has also made headway in the US, performing four times on NBC’s TonightWith Jay Leno and three times on NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien. He made a half-hour stand-up special for Comedy Central, and hosted two series of Distraction USA for the same network.

He has also appeared in the films Confetti, Alien Autopsy and Stormbreaker, all released in 2006; and has hosted a weekly radio show for London’s XFM

Nasty Show, Montreal 2009
Live Review

When you walk into a comedy night called The Nasty Show, you are tacitly entering a covenant not to take umbrage at any of the near-the-knuckle material you might be subjected to. Yet much of the graphic sexual descriptions and casual racism on this Just For Laughs cornerstone did offend me – on a comedic level, if not a moral one.

For the American acts on the bill, The Nasty Show might well have been called The Lazy Show, getting cheap laughs from gratuitous blow-job gags, miming porno scenes and tired ethnic stereotypes. Routines from these acts come from identical points of view and rely on the same received opinions, to such an extent that both the a veteran Jewish Vegas act and a loud in-your-face black woman can do the exact-same gag, despite their very different backgrounds.

Unedifyingly the joke – about black women not going out with Asian (ie far Eastern) men because they’re not interested in small dicks nor IT – got a deafening reaction even on its second airing.

In contrast, the audience were much more uncertain about Jimmy Carr’s taught but sick one-liners about paedophiles and rapists, even if they were considerably better written and frequently more surprising; an unexpected punchline being the very definition of good comedy. Eventually the strength of Carr’s writing won them round, and the laughs started to come, even if they were frequently followed by winces.

It seems the audience for the Nasty Show only like their comedians to be nasty within certain well-defined parameters. Pretend the microphone is a cock and then quip about Asians being bad drivers, good. Michael Jackson gags, bad.

But when acts fish from the same limited pool – as with what happened among the worst of the British ‘frilly-shirt’ acts of the Seventies – it shows that he artform is becoming creatively stagnant, in need of a vigorous shake-up. Judging from the acts on this bill, a certain level of US club acts are in desperate need of that revolution.

The venerable Bobby Slayton has been hosting this show for years – probably since these gags were new – and so sets the tone. He’s supremely slick, with a well-developed sense of timing, so even if his assumption that implying that two front-row punters are gay is inherently hilarious is hardly enlightening, it is shared by the rest of the audience. But although most of his shtick is predictable, when he breaks from the familiar even an jaded critic like me raises a laugh.

He also does his best to bond us under the a collective feeling that we’re in on something edgy, even though a lot of things are working against that premise. It’s in a mainstream venue, with the audience well-lit – presumably because tonight’s performance is being filmed for TV – and takes place at the decidedly pre-watershed hour of 7pm. Underground, this ain’t.

Thirtysomething Jewish act Ari Shaffir continued the theme, with a sequence of jokes about his own ethnicity, and particularly what he sees as the unattractiveness of Jewish women, before acting our porn scenes using the microphone phallically for the first – but by no means the last – time in the evening.

Carr was next, shifting the audience out of their comfort zones, before the ballsy Thea Vidale bombarded them with a torrent of re-enacted filth, again employing the mic for the purpose it wasn’t intended, as well as joking about Africans ‘stinking’ and passing comment on, yawn, airport security.

The great Italian-American stand-up Dom Irrera has a routine about a certain sort of black comedian who gets by on the cadence of their speech alone; and that’s very evident here. Even a conversational line about it being cold in Montreal (which, incidentally, it’s not at the moment), gets a laugh because she phrases it: ‘It’s colder than a motherfucker here.’

In that spirit, let’s sum up her act by saying ain’t no hardcode motherfucking comedy fan gonna laugh their monkey ass off at this goddamn lazy motherfucking shi-it.

But attitude she has by the shovelful, and this audience whoop, holler and applaud their way through its every minute, whatever I might think.

Kurt Metzger, a sometime writer for Dave Chapelle, started strong with a deliberately over-extended metaphor about losing his virginity – or his ‘first vagina’, as he put it – before segueing into a quirky bit about Gunther von Hagens’ Bodyworks exhibits. But just when he started to express a distinctive comedy voice, he crunched gears into – you guessed it – re-enactments of sex scenes and jokes about small Asian penises. It was almost as if he suddenly realised where he was and what was expected of him, so slipped into compliant conformity. Shame, as he seems as if he could be a lot better than this.

Rightfully headlining, Canadian Mike Wilmot shows exactly how filth should be done. Rather than going down predictable routes, he tells everything from his own point of view, as a frustrated, inadequate man. That personal touch, combined with a fabulous delivery and his undeniable descriptive expertise, bringing to vivid life images we’d probably prefer not want to envisage, brought the house down. And for once, I’m with the audience: for a man who professes to have no class, Wilmot is a class act.

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Am I the only person who finds one line jokes really patronising? "Blah Blah, ta da". *Laugh!* Also, he repeats himself. I've heard that Smarties tube on cats' legs joke so many times. Also, he fakes wit. When he's being heckled, "Your Mum". You've thought of this before. Stop faking spontaneity.

Kyle, February 2010

Jimmy Carr is frighteningly intelligent - but arguably also cold, cynical and calculating. He has the ability to conjure up gags about any subject under the sun - but his approach is that of an academic exercise. Unfortunately, with Rapier Wit he seems to have opted for the lazy, crowd pleasing approach of concentrating on sex in all its many forms. The clever reversals of expectation may still be there, though with less frequency, and less amusingly. I also felt a contempt for the audience coming through: "This is the sort of crap you want. I think it's rubbish, but I can give you as much as you can take." The line between this and, say, Roy "Chubby" Brown seems to be getting very blurred. I should add that I have seen Jimmy Carr four times, the first being when he was one of the supports for Milton Jones at a comedy club event. Rapier Wit may be the last.

Geoff F, November 2009

Stop being so pompous Noel James (below). He probably came up with that joke by himself anyway.

Tzameti, October 2009

Saw him live this week and when part of his set was just made of a PowerPoint presentation of "rude" cartoons, revolving around hairy women - send them to Germany, Madonna and her manly body and Susan Boyle being ugly, I could not for the life of me see how he could justfy calling the tour Rapier Whit - maybe Jim Davidson castoffs

Bob, October 2009

Tara just because you have no creativity,the same cannot be said for Jimmy Carr, he comes up with all his own material, it is not dervied from the humorless wasteland of Sickipedia. Jimmy Carr is infinetly funnier than you'll ever be, and I don't even know why im posting this as Jimmy Carr would hardly show much concern for your worthless opinion.

Dave W, July 2009

Saw Joke Technician a few days ago - found it a bit exhausting. Please slow down and tell a story from time to time.

Schadenfreude, May 2009

Rude,tired offensive jokes from sickipedia, no build up, too dead pan and sooo smug it makes him even more detestable. Wasted £20 on his stupid DVD!

Tara, May 2009

Saw the Joke Technician show over the weekend and it was far too edgy, it seemed that he wanted to see how far he could go before offending the entire audience. I can see why he is far better on TV as his put-downs are very good but live he gets worse every time I see him.

Simon Sadler, October 2008

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