Racist - The Bear and Badger

RedDave2

Wife made a fair point (and she likes Carr). Given he called these jokes "career enders" if c4 takes him off countdown or whatever, he can't complain at all. Not even a bit. He can't use comedy to defend himself. He called the section aptly so therefore knew the possible outcome.

Yossarian

Yep. He seems to have been expecting this to happen for a while now. To be fair, I’d expect he’d take it quite well and fuck off to live in the Bahamas or something if he really does get cancelled.

davyK

Like any stand up he can always make a living in small clubs. Harder than grinning on TV but a living.

Funkstain

Just so I’m clear on my view: I think he’s an arsehole of the same ilk as Gervais. It’s all hide behind the “you’re a hypocrite see haha” ‘clever’ shock stuff but there’s that distasteful cakeist “but they are funny objectively, those [insert minority group here]”, like gervais and his mongs.

It makes the world of difference if it was a person of Romany descent making the joke because the hypocrisy claim lands totally clean of any nasty undertones. Just like the Irishman making a joke about the famine.

This reinforced Jon’s point about making the same joke about Jews: he wouldn’t get away with it and he wouldn’t make the joke, which proves the point that it’s a cake-and-eat-it joke for me

Yossarian

davyK wrote:

Like any stand up he can always make a living in small clubs. Harder than grinning on TV but a living.

I expect he’s made more than enough to retire. It seems like he’s hosted about 50% of all the comedy programmes shown on British TV over the past 15 years.

Funkstain

tigersgogrrr wrote:

I watched the special ages ago and that joke barely registered. It's in a section full of Those Jokes, and he clearly makes it known he's on very thin ice with it all.

Kow wrote:

I think for most people it's just not a very good joke and that's about it.

And fair enough. But there’s this queasy feeling I have with jokes like that, like Gervais style stand up amongst many others (again to be 100% I think Carr is a much better stand up than gervais, but it’s the style of joke) using the “can’t offend anyone these days” or “it’s all being clever about hypocrisy or selective outrage” of whatever and I like getting to the bottom of that feeling. Reckon I have now thanks forum

RedDave2

Funny you mention Gervais, I think he skirts that issue a bit too much for my in tastes. I find I like 90 percent of a show but there will be one joke which is that bit too nasty.

davyK

Yossarian wrote:

davyK wrote:

Like any stand up he can always make a living in small clubs. Harder than grinning on TV but a living.

I expect he’s made more than enough to retire. It seems like he’s hosted about 50% of all the comedy programmes shown on British TV over the past 15 years.

Suppose.

davyK

RedDave2 wrote:

Funny you mention Gervais, I think he skirts that issue a bit too much for my in tastes. I find I like 90 percent of a show but there will be one joke which is that bit too nasty.

Gervais can be "challenging" One or two comments relating to the Holocaust were on the line (over to me).

JonB

tigersgogrrr wrote:

I watched the special ages ago and that joke barely registered. It's in a section full of Those Jokes, and he clearly makes it known he's on very thin ice with it all.

So as long as you do that you can say really nasty stuff?

It reminds me of straight up vicious racist jokes I heard when I was a kid about Pakistanis, Jews or black people. Things I didn't even laugh at back then. Underneath the veil of irony, it's the same joke, and there's no way it would barely register if he told it about one of those groups now. But gypsies are still fair game, it seems.

JonB

GooberTheHat wrote:

JonB wrote:

mistercrayon wrote:

Do you think it’s giving him too much credit to observe that we do conveniently (and generally) forget about portions of tragedies when they are inconvenient to our narratives. He’s not wrong to point out it’s almost always an after thought as part of the discussions about the holocaust and that is disgusting? And what good reason is there for the forgetting to even happen? My casual observation is that the only people who bring the discussion about the Romany up in popular discourse is leftists, which makes you wonder why does that discussion get forgotten about otherwise? Is it because we’re not meant to be sympathetic as a result of the culture we’re in - and what cultivates that culture? Maybe he’s doing that publandlord thing?

But if you really wanted to be edgy and make that point you could I guess make the joke at the expense of the Jews. Would he dare?

I'm not sure how you could.

I mean, he could make a joke about Jews monopolising the grief over the Holocaust or something (I'm not saying that, to be clear). In a way that's less nasty while being closer to the point, but still more of a no-go area.

JonB

One more thing, I think this is an interesting point about the kind of laughter you get at jokes like that, which might tell you something about how they're being interpreted and whether people are enjoying them for that surface level nastiness:
https://twitter.com/MisterABK/status/1454545724478210048

OK, I'm done.

Kow

There have always been comedians who do nasty, racist jokes and really, so what? The good thing is that those jokes are far less funny and acceptable to people these days, hence this discussion. The Irish, Paki, whatever jokes have all but disappeared but if some comedians want to keep at it, then let them plug away. Ultimately they're going to sink their own careers, not because we should ban them but because nobody really wants to hear it anymore.

RedDave2

https://youtu.be/nNwxyxdKXh4

There's the clip, worth going to about 3.20 where he makes the point that sitting in a theatre full of black people having to watch trailers for movies with only white people, no wonder they feel disenfranchised. He fucks up at the start (and he calls himself on it) but hard to say his observation is that of a racist.

Edit : shit, this is meant with the rogan chat. I'll leave it here anyway.

GooberTheHat

I'll move my reply in here too. It's probably the better home for this discussion anyway.

GooberTheHat wrote:

He describes the community as the planet of the apes. He is also very surprised that he had a positive experience there, which inferes that for whatever reason he didn't think he would have in a black neighborhood. Why is that?

That he felt it appropriate or acceptable to use those terms to describe black people, and the fact that he assumed that going to the cinema in a predominantly black neighborhood would be a negative experience speaks volumes about his actual attitude. And why didn't his co-hosts/guests immediately pull him up on it? It's telling.

The fact he even thinks it's a story worth telling (I went to the cinema in a black neighborhood and survived, this is my story) rings alarm bells.

RedDave2

I think we have taken the same story a bit differently.

The trip over Africe at the start - yeah, thats off. He calls it straight away. But thats out of line. No defending that and I dont think even today he has.

After that, he isn't saying that he expected a negative experience - he was saying it was a different and enjoyable experience because of how their community interacted with the movie going experience in a different way.

The only time he "feels nervous" is the trailers and thats where he says he gets the black experience of feeling disenfranchised. And he is not saying that because he feels threatened. He actually makes the comment of how he used to just shrug off the complaint off how people say there arent enough black roles etc (3:35) but now he understands how they are removed from the mainstream experience and how justified their anger is (4:15)

At no point in that clip does he infer "I went to a cinema in a black neighbourhood and survived". Find me the point in the clip where he says anything close to that.

JonB

Kow wrote:

There have always been comedians who do nasty, racist jokes and really, so what? The good thing is that those jokes are far less funny and acceptable to people these days, hence this discussion. The Irish, Paki, whatever jokes have all but disappeared but if some comedians want to keep at it, then let them plug away. Ultimately they're going to sink their own careers, not because we should ban them but because nobody really wants to hear it anymore.

I'm not following. Surely the old racist stuff is less acceptable these days because people pushed back against it, not because they said 'so what?'

Kow

Sure. But Carr isn't really comparable to that old stuff. I remember that comedy really well and it was never for shock, it was almost it's funny because it's true. Carr set out to shock and the fact that he did is a pretty healthy response really. People like him and go to his shows because they want that shock, not because they're racists or paedophile sympathisers or whatever. I doubt many listened to that joke and thought haha yeah, it's true I never thought about it before. I mean, do we want him to be punished in some way for shocking us?

RedDave2

I think thats a fair distinction - the older racist comedian made racist jokes because they thought they were right as well as funny, Carrs joke is meant to be seen as something that is wrong to say. I'm not sure if that justifies it (and as Funk said, would be very different if it came from someone making the joke from the Roma community, maybe) but it is a distinction none the less.

But I think the older comedians you speak off did need to be called out. I dont think the general populace suddenly decided thats not right. Both those racist commedians and their audience had to be called out and its worth noting that while they have shrunk, they haven't truly gone away. They still have their fans who will claim "you cant say anything anymore" to justify a genuinely racist joke.

Kow

I don't really remember old comedians being actually called out. Maybe because Twitter etc didn't exist, so it was more difficult to gauge backlash. I think society just moved on and their popularity dwindled.

tigersgogrrr

JonB wrote:

tigersgogrrr wrote:

I watched the special ages ago and that joke barely registered. It's in a section full of Those Jokes, and he clearly makes it known he's on very thin ice with it all.

So as long as you do that you can say really nasty stuff? It reminds me of straight up vicious racist jokes I heard when I was a kid about Pakistanis, Jews or black people. Things I didn't even laugh at back then. Underneath the veil of irony, it's the same joke, and there's no way it would barely register if he told it about one of those groups now. But gypsies are still fair game, it seems.

No?

It is clearly, clearly just for shock value. That doesn't make it ok, but I don't think it puts him in the same category as Davidson and the like.

I recall Carr talking about being trying to get cancelled / potentially getting cancelled recently on the Parenting Hell podcast (I think?) a few months ago but I can't remember what he was saying on it. Might revisit and find out.

Armitage_Shankburn

Lord_Griff wrote:

I think I could do surgery.

FF 10 years

" Lord Griff" tattoed on half of London's transplanted organs

JonB

Kow wrote:

Sure. But Carr isn't really comparable to that old stuff. I remember that comedy really well and it was never for shock, it was almost it's funny because it's true. Carr set out to shock and the fact that he did is a pretty healthy response really. People like him and go to his shows because they want that shock, not because they're racists or paedophile sympathisers or whatever. I doubt many listened to that joke and thought haha yeah, it's true I never thought about it before. I mean, do we want him to be punished in some way for shocking us?

I don't know. When you hear people laughing and clapping at it, rather than the nervous giggle you might expect from something so uncomfortable, maybe you have to think who you're appealing to.

As for punishment, I don't think I've said anything about that. But there should be backlash, not merely 'so what?'

Kow

What's a backlash if it has no tangible effect? I'd imagine if you go to a Carr show you expect to be shocked in the same way you expect to be scared by a horror. I don't think it makes people complicit in racism really. But hey ho, I'm not really easily offended I guess.

tigersgogrrr

There is a nervous giggle / groan when he says he's going to make a joke about the holocaust, isn't there? I suppose you'd to still expect another one when the content becomes clear, but the audience are somewhat primed that it's going to be beyond what is deemed acceptable, and I guess that impacts the laughs after?

JonB

Kow wrote:

What's a backlash if it has no tangible effect? I'd imagine if you go to a Carr show you expect to be shocked in the same way you expect to be scared by a horror. I don't think it makes people complicit in racism really. But hey ho, I'm not really easily offended I guess.

OK, well, I don't think you're making much sense, but I can't be arsed to explain what I think anymore.

Rev

He seems to always do a section on wanting to be cancelled in his shows. The last Holocaust joke he did was in relation to the Jewish number of deaths. It got the same groan and apprehension in the audience. But not the big backlash.

dynamiteReady

On the other side of it, another comedian (Whoopi Goldberg), went all out, and suggested the Holocaust was only for white people (paraphrasing, of course).

So how can Carr joke about something that didn't happen?

dynamiteReady

Edgy?

dynamiteReady

Not racist either...

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