T.W.
Monday 26th October 2009 4:24pm [Edited]
15,786 posts
Quote: Tony Cowards @ October 26 2009, 10:52 AM BST
Another very good one-liner comic called Gary Delaney has done a load of army/navy gigs with me and he has done similarly dark/slightly tasteless jokes which have gone down a storm and with no complaints just cheering and applause.
Gary Delaney's very good. I did a gig with him a couple of years back. Can't say that I remember him making any similarly "offensive" gags. He did some tasteless gags, but his delivery is often akin to Tim Vine's in terms of a rapid-fire, "don't even think about bothering to de-construct this one" kind of style.
Quote: Kevin Murphy @ October 26 2009, 12:58 PM BST
The joke was that he was finding a silver lining in a terrible situation.
Tenuous.
Quote: Tony Cowards @ October 26 2009, 1:04 PM BST
Surely, if anything, Jimmy Carr's joke is complimenting servicemen who've lost limbs by suggesting that they are so fit and well trained that they will be brilliant athletes even without their full compliment of limbs
Very tenuous.
Whatever you might think of Jimmy Carr's joke, I think it's a little self-deluding to think that he used it as a means of raising awareness of our soldiers' plight, or as a complementary spin on the British Army.
He thought it was funny enough to justify putting in, simple as. As a matter of fact I came up with pretty much the same joke whilst re-writing a sitcom pilot last year. Without trying to sound self-righteous, I decided against including the joke because it personally troubled me to use it (despite it being germane to the episode, which featured a Para-Olympian amputee). It's not wrong to think up tasteless gags - I do quite often - but it is sometimes wrong to tell them to an audience, IMO. Why doesn't Jimmy Carr chuck in some Jade Goody and Madeleine McCann gags? Because he fears loss of ticket sales and bookings from making those kind of jokes. "Maimed British servicemen? Probably get away with that"...
There you go, another reason he shouldn't have used it, it's a gag that even I managed to come up with!