This is Jimmy Carr’s fourth Netflix special, and the first the stand-up has directed himself. It finds him at a crossroads, too. On the one hand, Carr’s claim to fame has rested largely upon his ability to offend anyone and everyone with his jokes. On the other hand, Carr is now a father of two, and fatherhood has found him questioning whether he may lose his edge? That he’s presenting this new hour should already tell you which hand he favors.
The Gist: Carr’s first special in three years (since 2021’s His Dark Material) is an hour essentially split into two parts.
The first half-hour features Carr telling us he’s about to say something edgy, saying he might be cancelled for saying the edgy thing, then saying the edgy thing. The second half finds Carr interacting with the audience to joke about marriage proposals, the idea of single moms, what it means to be a father, and in the end, teaching a teenager about the importance of consent.
Memorable Jokes: If you’re an avid Netflix comedy fan, then you might’ve noticed an overlapping trend this month. First Demetri Martin and then Neal Brennan played with the traditional forms of presenting stand-up visually; now Carr, like Brennan the week before him, has taken a few minutes out to focus on the very nature of rape jokes. For Brennan, it was about how society views rape in relation to murder; for Carr, it’s about how the truly offensive aspect of rape is how easily men seem to get away with it. Which leads him to crack: “I like my odds.” He also wonders why we would even qualify certain types of rape, such as “date rape,” as somehow different, when we don’t do the same for murder victims.
But seriously, folks. A lone man in the audience shouts “yeah” in the middle of Carr’s biggest rape joke, buffering his rhetorical question, “Do you want to hear my rape fantasy?” with his own reply: “Someone goes to jail for rape.”
Carr gets even more sincere when speaking about the differing gendered expectations and roles for mothers versus fathers. All moms are single moms, he argues, because they have to shoulder the burden of motherhood on their own. Fathers, by contrast, are merely babysitting until mom can return to duty. “Being a dad is a lovely hobby,” Carr admits. Dads don’t need to be in the figurative boxing ring, don’t need to do Christmas shopping, and don’t really prepare for fatherhood. Carr claims fatherhood is a binary: One moment you aren’t one, then the baby is born and you are one. Carr reflects on how the premature birth of their first child made him wonder if he’d lose his prickly sense of humor, only to find relief when he blurted out a barb about clothes hangers while buying special garments for his tiny newborn.
Carr interacts with the audience for the back half of his hour, probing couples for their experiences with kids and proposals, all of it setting up a final segment where the comedian teaches a 19-year-old man about the need to acquire consent before sex, culminating in a pop quiz.
By the end, Carr has transitioned from telling dad jokes to parenting his audience. Or as he cracks: “Don’t worry, Jacob. I’m your daddy now.”
Our Take: Show, don’t tell is a narrative technique that feels even more vital for joke-telling.
Or to phrase it in the style of a trendy media piece… WIRED: Surprising us with jokes we never expected to hear. TIRED: Warning us that this next joke might get you “cancelled,’ then telling us the joke, especially when you’ve been telling it so long and often that Netflix is paying you more money than most non-comedians will ever earn in a year to tell it to us again.
So hearing Carr brag “watch me now” as if he’s going to be the one comedian to finally prove that “you cannot joke about anything anymore” feels like such a letdown when the first lines include groaners such as “when my girlfriend found out I’d been drunk driving, she hit the roof or “I was in Hong Kong. Their Chinatown is fucking massive!” When minutes later, he teases: “This next joke might get me cancelled. Come on,” he urges us to brace for the worst. Only for him to deliver this anticlimactic wordplay:“Transgender people aren’t what they used to be.”
There are other jokes at the expense of trans people that gets an applause break, because that’s the audience he has cultivated. And his jokes about pronouns feel as fresh as Saturday Night Live‘s recurring sketch from the 1990s about a character of unspecified gender: “It’s Pat.” How revolutionary is it, really, to hear Carr declare: “My pronouns are he he he, because I identify as a comedian”?
The simple truth is that Carr has more ambitious targets, knocking anti-vaxxers and Christians alike for not being able to take a joke.
And the harder truth is that he doesn’t feel like he’s “going down swinging” as he claims at one point, but instead, merely going through the motions in the first half-hour. It’s almost perfunctory the way he keeps repeating the self-imposed threat of “cancellation,” when he clearly states he loves the nuance of the English language, which means he knows “cancellation” is the wrong word to apply to him or any comedian. Every joke elicits a reaction, whether it’s laughter, applause, groans, heckles of disapproval, silence, or even sometimes a walk-out. Hundreds of comedians are releasing new specials each year despite these trumped-up threats of cancellation. So when Carr keeps saying those words, it’s almost as if he feels an obligation to do so, for the brand.
It’s only more jarring, then, when Carr comes to life in the second half of his hour. The comedian we see here comes to life. Where once he simply stood, gestured and smirked, he now has a bounce to him, whether he’s re-enacting two very different types of proposing marriage, or turning himself into a sex-education quiz daddy. He’s fully engaged with his audience, which makes us lean in further to hear what he has to say. Because it’s only when embracing his status as a father that he seems to care about what he’s telling us, and his sincerity makes his delivery here that much more effective.
Nobody cares what Jimmy Carr thinks about trans people. But he makes a very good case that we should hear him out as a sex educator. Go figure!
Our Call: May I suggest fast-forwarding or skipping past the first half to STREAM IT? Because Carr could’ve simply led with the bit wondering if he could still be an edgy comedian as a father and avoided the entirely false conceit about cancellation, and still achieved everything he wanted to in this hour. The first half-hour doesn’t nearly live up to the hype, provoking nothing more than the groans that would accompany any old, bad, dad jokes. If he’d cut that out and leaned into the new status that he’s clearly more comfortable with anyhow, he could’ve retitled this not as a Natural Born Killer but as a Real Motherf—er.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
