Jimmy Carr, Laugh Funny: an up-yours to civility – delivered with AI joke-bot efficiency

Jimmy Carr certainly does, as his latest tour title reminds us, “laugh funny”. I once heard his world-famous honk constantly erupt from the back row of an Edinburgh Fringe show performed by the very low-fi Edward Aczel – a deadpan ‘anti-comic’ who used to have a penchant for reading out the Wikipedia entry on the Spanish Armada on stage. It’s not the sort of thing that gets you a Netflix special, but Carr’s appreciation of Aczel’s deliciously deliberate boringness is a reminder of how much he has lived and breathed comedy, even its weirder, wilder alternative fringes.

It’s a shame then, that Carr himself doesn’t quite conjure up that kind of thrillingly subversive studentship on this latest dance around the block. Of course, his subject matter is certainly an up-yours to civility – if you have seen his (fourth) Netflix special Natural Born Killer or any of the others, you’ll know the drill: this flurry of new jokes runs the gamut of abortion, sex, identity politics, domestic abuse, murder, paedophilla, twisted parenthood. (Oh, and Harry and Meghan: the latter’s new UK publicist Charlie Gipson should probably note that Carr’s two-footed tackle on the grifting duo gets the biggest laugh of the night.)

But even by Carr’s coolly polished standards, this is subversion by AI joke-bot: these are crisp gags told by a wide-eyed, wrinkle-free avatar with a brutal efficiency that slightly sucks the life out of the savagery. And when his battle of the sexes gags come armed with dildos, there are moments that are less (Natural Born) killer, more filler. And oddly, he occasionally laughs at his own jokes now too.

Still, that’s not to say it isn’t refreshingly naughty to consider the phrase ‘gender fluid’ as a noun, or ‘trans fats’ as something else altogether. Against a backdrop of an NHS that has only just come to terms with biological sex being a scientific fact, and raging ideology wars, comedy needs Carr’s fearlessness.

But that devil-may-care attitude makes you really sit up and take notice when he takes on the crowd: the king of the comeback has always relished comments and heckles from his audience, and so it is encouraged here. Has he paid his taxes? “In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s an early show and late show” the former tax avoider told his second audience of the night at the Leas Cliff Hall in Folkestone. “One for me, one for them”. Well, he’s always been one of the most hard-working stand-ups in the business… aside from his Netflix specials, he currently has (by his count) five TV shows airing, is constantly touring – and he’s been cancelled twice.

As all taboo-busters must do these days, he skillfully breaks the fourth wall by sharing his genuine, more thoughtful musings on identity politics (“real acceptance isn’t you’re so brave and beautiful,” he says. “it’s just a shrug”), and on mental health, where he wrestled his own well-documented demons. “This dark sense of humour pays off in our darkest days” he says, underlining the point of this hour-and-a-half joke Blitzkrieg. If the world is going to hell, Jimmy Carr will stand firm, more resilient than the rest, reminding us it’s OK to laugh at it all.

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