Too Far, Jimmy Carr? Page 6

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 (maybe one of them will even succeed where Dudley Moore failed and play "Tarzan" in a movie).

Personally I fail to see how he's "taking the p*ss out of soldiers" as has been suggested in some of the papers.

Also I'd like to point out the irony in this 'controversy' being stirred up by the Daily Express, a newspaper that has so much respect for amputees that they've twice been forced to apologise, by the PCC, to Heather Mills for printed unsubstantiated slurs about her.

Quote: Kevin Murphy @ October 26 2009, 1:01 PM BST

The amputees, the British paralympic team, and Britain in general.

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Everyone's a winner then.

Quote: Kevin Murphy @ October 26 2009, 12:58 PM BST

The joke was that he was finding a silver lining in a terrible situation.

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See what youre saying Kevin but the 'victims' of the joke are the soldiers themselves. (not much of a silver lining for them)

But to be fair, I didn't see the context of his telling. Maybe the rest of his act allowed us to see his attitude in the right light and with correct motivation to make the joke.

Hmmm - back peddle, back peddle.

Mixed response from squaddies:

http://www.arrse.co.uk/Forums/viewtopic/t=136267.html

Some calling him a c**t, some saying he probably nicked the gag from a wounded serviceman.

Quote: Dkmj @ October 26 2009, 1:05 PM BST

See what youre saying Kevin but the 'victims' of the joke are the soldiers themselves. (not much of a silver lining for them)

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If you've had a limb or two blown off, I'd say that winning Olympic gold would be considered the very definition of a silver lining.

Quote: Tony Cowards @ October 26 2009, 10:52 AM BST

Military personnel have very robust senses of humour, it's a defence mechanism for dealing with the things that they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

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I was in the Navy for a large part of my youth. Have to say that there was a lot of Simon Weston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Weston) jokes flying around. Now I saw the reaction of some of my colleagues who had served during the Falklands to these jokes and it was not pretty. It became personal and disrespectful. Sure servicemen have a robust sense of humour but they have a very strong sense of injustice and do not react well to disrespect.

Now if Jimmy Carr had delivered this in the right context (and he may well have done, I don't know) then it may have gone down well with the forces. But if not then Jimmy should avoid squaddie gigs for a while.

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.

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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.

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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

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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!

I've not read all this but we all know Jimmy Carr. It's probably gone down quite well with the servicemen themselves because you need to be able to laugh rather than cry. I can understand relatives' reactions though.

Quote: Tim Walker @ October 26 2009, 1:24 PM BST

Tenuous.

Very tenuous.

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So what do you think the joke is?

Quote: Kevin Murphy @ October 26 2009, 1:31 PM BST

So what do you think the joke is?

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The joke is that there are more amputees in Britain due to them having their limbs blown off in the Middle East. Therefore there will be more potential Para-Olympians.

Quote: Tim Walker @ October 26 2009, 1:24 PM BST

Tenuous.

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Disagree. That was exactly the logic of the joke. Whether Carr was right to make it or not is another matter. As I and others have commented it is exactly the sort of joke a disabled serviceman might make, but it is a bit like Chris Rock making jokes about niggas – not necessarily a licence for you to do the same. I do not however see in this remark the conscious cruelty that characterises a lot of modern humour (including it must be admitted some of Carr's.)

Quote: Tim Walker @ October 26 2009, 1:34 PM BST

The joke is that there are more amputees in Britain due to them having their limbs blown off in the Middle East. Therefore there will be more potential Para-Olympians.

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Ah. I took it to mean the servicemen would make good athletes, rather than Britain having a larger pool to select from. Your interpretation hadn't occurred to me, but I can't see anything wrong with it.

Quote: Tim Walker @ October 25 2009, 5:19 PM BST

Isn't that's the defence a lot of club comedians in the 70s used to give about racist jokes? "There was a black fella in audience and he was laughing his head off" Fair to say that if he did this gag at a gig for servicemen it would most likely get a lot of laughs and be considered appropriate, but I'm not sure it's the same for a normal non-squaddie public audience.

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Quote: Kevin Murphy @ October 26 2009, 1:38 PM BST

Ah. I took it to mean the servicemen would make good athletes, rather than Britain having a larger pool to select from. Your interpretation hadn't occurred to me, but I can't see anything wrong with it.

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Right, so the joke was nothing really to do with maimed amputee British servicemen then? Come now...

Would the 'joke' be better along the lines of 'we're not winning the war in afghanistan but hey at least we might win the paralympics now' - contexualising politically that brave service men and women are being killed and maimed in a war that has many questions marks hanging over it, not least the issue of proper protective gear etc. I think if you are going to make a joke in this area you have to have some kind of thinking behind it, it's not enough to say I was just trying to make people laugh.

Quote: Tim Walker @ October 26 2009, 1:39 PM BST

Right, so the joke was nothing really to do with maimed amputee British servicemen then? Come now...

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I don't know how you could reach that conclusion. The word "amputee" is in the joke.

Can I just ask the people who think this joke is in bad taste what they think about the 'Tarzan' sketch?

http://bit.ly/10OdTP