British-Irish star standup comedian told a Holocaust joke on his most recent Netflix special and is now learning that Cancel Culture has added Holocaust jokes to the list of career killers. By a government official.
Nadine Dorries, the UK’s Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, described the joke as “shocking” and promised new laws that would punish Netflix and other streaming sites for airing similar content.
She told Sky News: “We are looking at including those video on demand, streaming organizations such as Netflix. We are looking at including those into the scope to look at the kind of comments that Jimmy Carr made subject to a new law which will impose sanctions on those organizations.”
Big Brother has no sense of humor.
Carr, 49, specializes in shock humor. He is an equal opportunity insulter of women, minorities, children, you name it, and he is as hilarious as he is offensive. His audience knows what to expect from his appearances, they pay good money to see him. Netflix has been streaming several of his concerts not because he is an advocate of being nice to your neighbor but because he is very funny and on occasion very raunchy.
This is a disturbing step forward of the cancel culture, which no longer destroys comics for their misbehavior, but for the things they say in their acts. What began as the annoying PC culture of the 1990s is now devouring whole sections of our right to free speech – and the fact that the Holocaust has become a plaything in this assault on our free speech should disturb all of us.
Free speech is not intended to protect sweet songs about sunshine and rainbows. They are intended for Jimmy Carr, who manages to release our anxiety about the harsh and brutal world that surrounds us by telling jokes about it. No one is forcing us to watch Jimmy Carr. In fact, if not for Culture Minister Nadine Dorries, most of us would not have known about the comic or his joke. But Nadine Dorries wants to monitor the stuff we get to watch through a law that would chill our freedom to read, hear, and watch what we want as grownups.
The joke is a shocker, of course, and absolutely offensive (as it was meant to be): Everybody is talking about the suffering of six million Holocaust victims, Carr says, but no one mentions the thousands of Gypsies who were killed by the Nazis – because no one wants to talk about the positives.
I don’t know what I should be more gutted or disgusted by here.. the kind of Racism that us GRT people are forced to live with every day.. that’s it’s still absolutely ok to demonise us & our demise as a joke…or the reactions of whooping & cheering from the audience.. pic.twitter.com/nZnJslasX2
— Mikey Walsh (@thatbloodyMikey) February 4, 2022
And there, in Carr’s shock-joke gallows humor suggestion of a calm evaluation of the pros and cons of Hitlerism, lies the pain and consequently the humor of our innate inability as human beings to comprehend the evil of Nazism.
Politicians like Nadine Dorries should calm their urge to outlaw what they don’t understand.
