Jimmy Carr Is One Cheeky Bastard In His First U.S. Netflix Comedy Special ‘Funny Business’

Jimmy Carr’s comedy is not safe for work, although it works quite successfully for him.
Carr, 43, has hosted multiple game shows and panel series for British television over the past decade, and released nine DVD stand-up specials in the U.K. But Jimmy Carr: Funny Business, filmed in London as a Netflix special, is the comic’s first major foray into the United States. As such, the “zinger slinger” pauses at multiple times to inform his live audience in England of the American translations. Such as when he belittles residents of “the west country” by suggesting that flooding there allows them to “make use of their webbed fingers,” Carr might just as well be talking about Louisiana. Or, later, he compares a certain type of ugliness to New Jersey.

When he goes into the crowd looking for audience members to either identify with his jokes or become the targets of them, Carr at one point finds an accountant and responds, “Where were you when I f—ing needed you mate?!��� He added: “Don’t Google this if you’re watching in America, I’m a good guy.”

I’ll save you the trouble. Carr found himself in a scandal in 2012 after allegations of avoiding taxes. Not that he ever avoids trouble and potential scandal onstage. So much of his act, in fact, revolves around finding where we draw lines of good taste and then he gleefully jumps over them. Often Carr’s precise wording of jokes helps him misdirect us to the laugh. Sometimes he may be more clever by half. Sometimes he may be crude. “I don’t want to be crude. Well, I do want to be crude. But not ’til later. I’ll ease it in. It’s a gift,” Carr said.

“I try not to censor myself onstage,” he said. “If I think something’s funny, I might think you thought it was funny as well, and we all have a laugh, release some endorphins, and the world will be a slightly better place. Yeah? And if anyone’s offended, eh, f— ‘em.” 

Carr has such a dizzying array of one-liners, though, that helps keep the audience off-balance or on his side. Like this harmless chestnut: “My friend said to me, ‘What rhymes with orange?’ I said, ‘No, it doesn’t.’” Or even this misdirect: “I like those black and white films where no one says anything. Interracial porn.”

Carr also keeps audiences from turning against him not only by reminding them that the job of a comedian isn’t exactly hard labor, but also by giving them multiple opportunities to offend him or merely join in the fun. During one stretch halfway through the hour, Carr displays text messages from the audience on a giant screen. During another, Carr declares a “heckle amnesty” for audience members to shout at him right then and there. It’s all just more fodder for Carr to show off his quick wit, which in turn lets the audience know that he has taken care and put enough thought into his barbs.
That said, he also suggests that’s what separates men from women in the field of stand-up comedy itself. “I think it’s because women have an ability that men don’t possess,” Carr said. “Women have the ability to think of something funny to say, and then not say it. Because it might hurt someone’s feelings or be inappropriate. Men don’t really have that gear. What we’ve got is probably best described as joke Tourette’s. If we think something might be funny, we are f—ing saying it. Not later on when everyone’s calmed down. Right f—ing now.”

Even so, Carr — just like Amy Schumer in her 2015 HBO special (and Patrice O’Neal almost a decade earlier) — decided to joke with the audience near the end of his set about more sexually deviant positions and the names they’re given. Although Carr’s hour does take one or two more shifts in the final minutes, once more allowing him to wonder what jokes are worth the trouble of offending. “Where to draw the line?” he asks.

He even surprises himself in the middle of his Funny Business, though, interacting with a woman in the London crowd who dares to still believe in horoscopes, only to discover she’s an engineering student from China.

“You definitely didn’t google me in China! I tell you that for nothing,” Carr told her. “There’s no way I made it past that firewall.”

[Watch Jimmy Carr: Funny Business on Netflix]

[Photo: Netflix]
 
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.