Ooh, offensive comedy

I was just reading Chortle and the Daily Mail Online (I know! I’d gone to incredulate at the Jan “tissue of lies” Moir article) and I saw that Jimmy Carr has been in trouble, for one of his jokes. So I clicked on the story, because apparently there’d been “tabloid outrage” and I thought, well this has got to be serious. I mean, if the tabloids are outraged.

Obviously, I wanted to disagree with the tabloids, but the thing is though, I kind of WAS expecting it to be an offensive joke. I mean by his own admission his comedy is offensive, and even if he didn’t ever make any such admission, I’m sure he won’t give a fuck that I do.

OK, maybe now you’re expecting something actually soulful and nice. Obviously it wasn’t. It’s Jimmy Carr. But I’m also a big fan of comedy that isn’t soulful and nice. Give me as offensive as you like as long as there’s guts and conviction behind it.

So anyway, with no run-up, one of the jokes from his current tour show was: “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.” Now to me, that is a darkly funny joke. It draws attention to wars that most of us seem happy to forget are even happening, let alone how the nation sleepwalked into them. It raises this ridiculous yet subversive idea that it might actually be part of a cynical government plan (can’t win the war, well we’re going to win the fucking Olympics then) – and also it’s quite positive, really. “Fucking good Paralympic team?” Blimey, we only got the Falklands out of the Falklands War. And it doesn’t demean the troops. To me, it actually highlights what they are doing, and the way they are neglected and manipulated by the public and the government.

Of course, I might be reading too much into it. That might not have been how he wrote it. Or said it. I don’t reckon Jimmy was expecting his comedy reviewers to give his jokes an academic dissection: ”Despite the almost archaically traditional nature of his opening gambit – the well-trodden “Say what you like about…” – Carr goes on to prove that he is not only in the comedic debt of the music hall tradition, but may be compared to such satirical greats as Pope, Swift and Peter Cook with their visceral reminders of inconvenient truths, and plangent use of the F-word”.

Actually, what bothered me most about this episode was one of the Mums of the seriously wounded troops, who was quoted as saying “Soldiers are fighting for freedom of speech. I hope Mr Carr remembers that when he makes offensive jokes ridiculing them.” Firstly, I don’t think he was ridiculing them. Unless you think it is inherently ridiculous to be in the Paralympic team. Secondly, they are fighting for many things, but I fear that freedom of speech isn’t one of them. Mary Ann Evans used her freedom of speech to read out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq (while her friend read out the names of dead Iraqi civilians) at the Cenotaph in central London, and she was arrested and found guilty of breaching Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act. Because she’d bothered to try and draw attention to what is actually happening, she was silenced. So the government could continue to fail to equip the troops properly for a war on a country whose Islamic institutions proved unconquerable by Genghis Khan and the Soviet fucking Union. So yeah, I liked Jimmy’s joke. It’s the way I read far too much into ‘em.