For someone who is rarely absent from our screens, Jimmy Carr remains a bit of an enigma. If television commissions and gongs are anything to go by, Carr, who headlines this year’s Glasgow Comedy Festival alongside Joan Rivers and Russell Brand, should be at the peak of his popularity. His quiz vehicle Distraction won him a coveted Rose d’Or for best presenter, while his current stage show recently scooped best live tour at the British Comedy Awards.
Yet even the comic’s more admiring reviewers and interviewers have a tendency to pepper their observations with the odd, puzzled barb. By turns, he has been called “defiantly uncharming”, “a telly-swamping juggernaut” and “artfully impersonal”, the latter a phrase that, in a culture that seems to prize self- revelation and confession above all else, comes close to an insult.
Something about him gets people’s goats, although it’s hard to put a finger on what exactly that something might be.
This reaction doesn’t seem entirely rational. It’s as if the slicked-back hair, home counties diction, boyish face and junior floor-walker suits prompt an almost Pavlovian distrust from his detractors, who are all too eager to caricature him as a smug, public schoolboy (he went to a state grammar school in Buckinghamshire). It seems appropriate that he should call one of his early tours “Charm Offensive”, because the more he attempts to insinuate himself into the public’s affection, the more his very presence seems to irritate some.
Does Carr, I wonder, ever worry that his sheer ubiquity might be stoking a backlash? “I don’t know what to say to that. I feel like I live an incredibly charmed life. I suppose the problem with being a successful comic is that you’re not for everyone. If you think I’m funny, then you’re right. If you don’t think I’m funny, then you’re also right. It’s not for me to say.”
Arguably Carr is a victim of his stage persona. As one reviewer put it: “It’s hard to spend a whole evening with a man with an answer for everything.”
Certainly, his ever-presence on the box has not helped. There have been times of late when Britain’s digital revolution seemed little more than a plot to allow him total dominion over the airwaves. Between his own show, Eight out of Ten Cats, and guest appearances on panel games such as QI and Have I Got News for You, it’s not uncommon to find him on two networks at once.
And he doesn’t even stop at the real world. Next Saturday, he will become the first comedian to play a live gig in the virtual world of Second Life. A 300-seat “virtual venue” is being built online. Into this space will be streamed live video of Carr performing in front of an audience of 50 real people in London — “I need them as a kind of reference to see if the material is working”. A giant screen will also show him his audience of “avatars”. (If nothing else, this experiment raises the intriguing possibility of the first virtual heckler, although the fact they have to type their interruptions may take some of the sport out of it.) It is 8.45 on a dark January morning and Jimmy Carr, 34, is in a car from north London (where he lives with Karoline Copping, his television executive girlfriend) to Peterborough, where in the evening he will play a gig on his Gag Reflex tour. “It’s about the 50th,” he says. By the time he gets to Glasgow on March 24 it will be close to the 100th, but he is already looking forward to it. “This will be my third year and my second at the Armadillo.
There’s a very different feel to the gigs than in Edinburgh, a certain combative nature. It’s not a tough crowd but a fair crowd. It’s also the place where I feel most like a caricature of a soft, southern shite.”
By most people’s standards, it would be too early in the morning to have your motives examined and interior life poked and prodded, but Carr jokes about it being “free therapy”. He is unfailingly polite. We were originally meant to talk the previous day, but he was forced to rearrange at the last minute, for which he apologises at length. “Please don’t think I think my time is any more valuable than yours,” he says, sounding genuinely put out.
Admirably old-fashioned good manners are one of the first things you notice about Carr. (I imagine he’s the kind of person who always remembers to write thank-you notes). Yet you’d struggle to guess this from his stand-up routine, which has a heartless bravado running through it like lettering in rock.
Where other comics trade in whimsical charm or story-telling, Carr’s currency of choice is the one-liner. Much of his skill is in the editing. Unlike many lesser talents, he knows how to pare a joke down to its essentials until it has the formal perfection of a haiku. (“I’m not worried about the third world war. That’s the Third World’s problem.”) Often his act finds tension from flirting with an audience’s idea of what it’s acceptable to laugh at, as in perhaps his most famous joke: “A woman came up to me to complain after a gig — quite a large lady — and she said, ‘You’re fattist.’ I said, ‘No, I think you’ll find you’re fattest.’”
If you have only ever seen him read a television autocue, then watching him sustain a barrage of gags for 90 minutes, taking the audience with him by force of will, is a revelation. Even if you don’t find him funny (I do), it’s still possible to see how technically brilliant he is.
Not everyone appreciates the joke. It is just more than a year since Carr found himself splashed across the news pages of the broadsheets after an appearance on Radio 4’s Loose Ends in which he made a joke about gypsies. “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.”
The BBC apologised unreservedly, after complaints from both the Gypsy Council and members of the public; Carr chose not to. Is he sure he did the right thing? “It’s a good joke,” he says bluntly. “There are more offensive things in my act.
“I can see why, if you’re the spokesman for a pressure group, it’s good to have something to rally against. It’s a good way to get an issue into the public eye. It’s like Little Britain. The adult incontinence society, or whatever they’re called, had a field day after the show had a character who wet herself all the time. But I think sometimes there’s a lot of mock offence.”
Carr argues that you have to separate the comedian from the joke, and he is “uber-liberal”. “I am never going to defend a joke. You have to credit the audience with a certain amount of intelligence. Human beings have huge innate linguistic intelligence. People get it and it’s patronising to say they don’t.”
Besides, he doesn’t believe anybody pays attention to what comedians say. “I think comedy is basically conservative with a small ‘c’,” he says. “It reflects what’s going on in society. It doesn’t change anything, but brightens the landscape.”
But presumably Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson think they are good people just having a bit of fun? At what point does playing with an ugly stereotype — gypsies smell — to get a laugh become a kind of collusion with those? “I am,” he adds wearily, “in no way interested in talking about this again.”
That is perhaps understandable given that he has just written (with Lucy Greeves, his copywriting friend) The Naked Jape, a whole book dissecting the nature of the joke. Whatever you think of Carr’s analysis of “Gypsy-gate” — and I confess it leaves me uneasy — he has applied his brain to it, the same brain that got him a first in social and political sciences from Cambridge University. Likewise, he may be unmoved by the criticism he has received, but there is nothing wilful or rash about his intransigence.
Actually, I’d guess there’s very little rash about any part of Jimmy Carr’s life. His stage persona — “It’s not a character act. It’s all me in a very unnatural setting situation” — exudes a chilly detachment, as if that big Vulcan brain can’t stop itself from whirring, analysing, observing, even in the heat of a gig.
It’s tempting to play the amateur psychologist and link this self- control to the death of his mother from pancreatitis, which left him, at 28, with much of the responsibility for his teenage brother’s upbringing. But who knows? Perhaps he was just born that way.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it is easy to mistake this temperamental quirk for aloofness, which may explain the unease that his public persona sometimes provokes, even among those who find him very, very funny.
Even Carr himself talks about “loosening up” on stage recently.
“I am much better than I was two years ago. I’ve definitely been opening up. I can talk a little bit about myself now. It’s becoming a bit more personal — although it’s not as if I do jokes about my height or my National Insurance number.”
“What’s true about comedians is that we’ve all got a hole in our personalities,” Carr said recently.
What exactly did he mean by that? “It depends on the context,” he says. “But I have a desire to get up on stage and perform. Most people don’t need that. I suppose it’s a desire to be loved. I don’t see that as a psychological failing.
“Different people get that in different ways.”
The wit of Jimmy Carr
- A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day. She said: “Can you spare a few minutes for cancer research?”
I said: “All right, but we won’t get much done.”
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