What do Jimmy Carr's jokes have to do with the government? - The Jewish Chronicle

Ever since Jimmy Carr’s now infamous “joke” about Gypsies went viral, I’ve been trying to work out what to make of it. Yes, on the one hand, it’s plainly offensive to the thousands of Traveller victims of the Nazis, many of whom have been forgotten in the years since. He probably shouldnt’ve made it.

On the other, it’s clearly not beyond the pale for the thousands of people who saw his tour or the millions who have watched it on Netflix since Christmas and before it became the latest front in the Culture Wars when it made it onto Twitter.

There’s an awkward truth in a lot of the discussion of Carr’s humour, that there is a huge amount of people for whom this simply isn’t that big a deal. It was one of the biggest streaming successes for Netflix over the Christmas period - but it wasn’t until someone posted it on Twitter that everyone with over 5,000 followers decided that they needed to have a take.

This whole rigamarole is familiar to anyone who’s online and it usually goes like this: something contentious emerges, there’s an insane leftwing take that goes viral, an insane rightwing take that goes viral, someone blames the whole thing on the “cultural elite”... and then we all move on with our lives, with precisely nothing changing for the better.

It’s boring, it’s tired and worst of all probably does the square root of nothing to actually address the initial ignorance behind the contentious thing in the first place. And so it was with Jimmy Carr: a whole load of heat and as always very little actual progress.

Comedians decried the death of comedy (somehow missing the fact that the very reason they can keep writing these pieces is that comedians are very much still working in comedy) and everyone debated the value of shock humour and whether it still has a place in the world of 2022.

Outside of Twitter, I doubt anyone really cared. When I asked my mum (a good bellweather of what those outside the M25 without Twitter accounts think) she agreed that the joke was bad but had no burning desire to see Jimmy Carr hounded out of the Hammersmith Apollo with an agreement to never joke again.

So why is it that the government, which I daresay has other things to be working on, managed to find the time to engage in some redundant culture warfare? Firebrand culture secretary Nadine Dorries had a serious issue with it, as did Downing Street. They both issued statements insinuating that it should be outlawed. Mystifyingly, Sajid Javid, whose brief definitely doesn’t including weighing in on Jimmy Carr, also called for viewers to boycott the Netflix special.

Now, clearly we’re not currently blessed with a government particularly in control of the news agenda, but that doesn’t mean all sense should go out the window. Surely the logical end point of this is that we’ll soon have a ‘Minister for internet beef and posting hot takes’ because it's unfair to expect that work to be shared by all cabinet members.

As we’ve been reminded this week, against all rational thought, words from politicians still matter. It matters that the government spends its time trying to score points with Twitter instead of running the country, it matters that they’re choosing to focus on this relatively minor storm over offensive jokes whilst at the same time claiming to be champions of free speech.

You may not agree with Jimmy Carr’s jokes - I certainly don’t - but you don’t have to be a free speech extremist to worry when politicians seem to care far more about what you’re watching and tweeting than running the actual country.