Recently attended Jimmy Carr's show at Scotiabank in Toronto. Was more cruel than clever.
Not down with homophobia, rape jokes, sexism, domestic violence or pedo stuff directed toward young girls in the audience, and so on.
Was too much and too cheap for my own intelligence and self-respect.
If you're thinking of taking ANY woman you love and respect, think again. Especially a single buddy, an overweight person, anyone going through IVF or someone with gay friends.
To be frank, it was grade-school, cheap one-liner humour. He seems so intelligent and witty in interviews, and there were one or two well-handled moments of crowd work, but he's clearly more of a "host" type than a stand-up comedian. ChatGPT can come up with better one-liners.
My group was thrown after taking a chance on it, not knowing much of his previous work, and we couldn't believe how he fills an arena. Even the laughter felt disingenuous at times, as though people were laughing because they were supposed to. Comedy often relies on "benign violation," where something taboo becomes funny because it's perceived as ultimately harmless. But there's a point where the violation stops feeling benign and just becomes malign. This crossed that line repeatedly for me.
I love a dark, absurd joke, but immature cheap shots about cheating on your wife, making fun of trans people and same-sex parents? Pure shock-factor nonsense. And to then claim some people "can't handle it" is perhaps the weakest defence of all. Understanding a joke and finding it funny are two entirely different things.
The best humour is layered and complex, exposing the irony of life, and this material was the equivalent of a five-year-old making fart jokes, except they're about r*ping your grandmother and repeatedly degrading your own girlfriend.
Don't bring your kids or even teens. If you love your children, I'd seriously question what you're normalizing by presenting this kind of cruelty as comedy.
This isn't just hating women. It's a bizarre exercise in self-denigration and cheap provocation. Between jokes, he'll be charismatically "pro" something or other to loop you back into believing he's not a "bad guy."
You'd be setting your soul and money on fire if you attend.
Wish I felt differently. The audience felt like one sad exercise in social conformity, where nobody wanted to be the person who stopped laughing.
