I have a confession to make: I like puerile and even prurient humour, provided it’s funny.
Of course what’s funny to me may be offensive to you, tasteless to him and ought to be against the law to them. Fair enough.
But I’d rather a joke were puerile and even prurient than anodyne. Too many times have I been left feeling like a pariah in the company of clubbable gentlemen. One of them would tell a joke sounding as if he’d left the punch line out. All around me would be in stitches, while I’d be unable even to crack a polite smile.
Alternatively, I’d also feel like a pariah when, in a similar company, telling a joke I found hilarious and everyone else present felt like having me arrested.
Sometimes, when I’ve had a good night’s sleep, I can even come up with a decent one-liner myself. I recall some 30 years ago, when I had just moved from New York to London, talking about the race situation in America to the very embodiment of a clubbable gentleman (for the outlanders among you, ‘clubbable’ means fit for membership in a Pall Mall club, not someone you’d like to club, although the two may well go hand in hand).
Anyway, I remarked that most American blacks tend to be left-wing. “They are left-wing because they are black,” suggested my interlocutor. “It’s the other way around,” I replied. “They’re black because they’re left-wing.” (I’ll spare you some of my jokes that fall into the puerile and prurient category.)
This lengthy preamble is an attempt at self-justification. For I have another confession to make: I like Jimmy Carr, the comedian most of my friends find beyond the pale. Obscene, tasteless, foul-mouthed, is what they call him. All true. Yet, to me, also funny. Sometimes.
The other day he appeared on Desert Island Discs. For the outlanders among you, this is a radio interview show first broadcast in 1942. A guest is asked which eight recordings, one book and one luxury item he’d like to have as a castaway.
His selections say a lot about the man. For example, though I still have enormous respect for Enoch Powell, I took it down a notch when, back in 1989, most of the politician’s musical selections were by Wagner. One has to be mad, I thought, to want to listen mostly to Wagner his whole life, or for that matter at all.
What interested me about Jimmy Carr’s appearance wasn’t his selections, but the subject touched upon in the interview. Is there anything he wouldn’t consider a laughing matter?
Obviously the latitude Mr Carr allows himself is practically limitless, as some of his material shows: “They say there’s safety in numbers. Go tell this to the six million Jews.” Or, “My girlfriends keep telling me they’re pregnant. I say, hey, I’m not made of coat hangers!”
He defended such irreverence on the show: “Because people are offended, does not make them right. Nobody should be drawing a line…” No line at all?
Oh well, there’s one exception: the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, when 94 people were crushed to death at a football stadium: “You could never joke about Hillsborough, as it’s a tragedy that’s touched people in a very specific way, and I cannot imagine anybody coming up with a joke about that.”
So Mr Carr does draw a line, but he draws it in funny places. Why just Hillsborough, appalling as it is? Why not Dunblane? The Holocaust? Our mutilated soldiers in Iraq (“We’ll have a f****** good Paralympic team,” he once quipped.) Why just Hillsborough?
One can only guess at Mr Carr’s motives, although PR probably has a role to play. As a Cambridge alumnus, he’s seen as rather posh, which nowadays is a failing in need of counterbalancing. It’s conceivably to that end that Mr Carr loads his jokes with swearwords more than do many comedians who only ever went to the school of hard knockers.
It’s conceivably for the same reason that he elevated football fans, generally seen as downmarket, to secular sainthood, putting them off limits for jokes. God isn’t afforded the same exemption.
When offered the Bible as one of his books for the island, Carr said he’d burn it “to help start his fire”. That’s what made me think about humour and its limits.
I hope you won’t think me solipsistic if I again refer to my own experience, that of a lifetime wag. As I grow older, I find that the areas open to my wisecracks are getting narrower. At times I don’t even deliver a funny line because I’m scared of offending. Not so much my immediate audience – I fear offending God.
As a lapsed Catholic and now an atheist, Mr Carr is clearly immune to such concerns. I just hope, for his sake, that before tossing the Bible in the fire, he reads one verse:
“Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men, but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.”
Then, to be on the safe side, he may have a Pascal wager with himself – one never knows. Meanwhile, have you heard the one about…
“When offered the Bible as one of his books for the island, Carr said he’d burn it ‘to help start his fire’.”
Offer the man a Koran and see how he would handle it in the presence of Muslims.
“We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”