Explained: Why comedian Jimmy Carr’s Holocaust joke has sparked outrage

Carr’s controversial comment was made during a Netflix special show titled ‘His Dark Material’, which came out in December 2021. However, it is provoking outrage now after clips of him making the joke started circulating widely on social media. Many people have strongly condemned Carr’s statements and want action to be taken.

What did Jimmy Carr say on his show?

In this show, which Netflix describes as “Raunchy”, “Unfiltered” and “Witty”, Carr started out with a trigger warning. “Before we start, a quick trigger warning. Tonight’s show contains jokes about terrible things. Terrible things that may have affected you and the people you love. But these are just jokes. They’re not the terrible things,” Carr cautioned.

Later in the show, with just over five minutes left, Carr said, “Right. This should be a career-ender. When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of 6 million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one talks about that because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.”

So far, neither Netflix nor Carr have commented on the issue.

What was the reaction to Carr’s statement?

Carr’s statement has drawn widespread condemnation, including from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, which called his joke “abhorrent” and considered it to be a hateful remark. The trust also made note of the “gales of laughter” that followed Carr’s remarks on the show, stating that they were “horrified” by the audience’s reaction.

“We are absolutely appalled at Jimmy Carr’s comment about persecution suffered by Roma and Sinti people under Nazi oppression, and horrified that gales of laughter followed his remarks. Hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti people suffered prejudice, slave labour, sterilisation and mass murder simply because of their identity – these are not experiences for mockery,” its chief executive Olivia Marks-Woldman was quoted as saying by The Guardian.

UK Labour MP Nadia Whittome has written to Netflix, requesting that the show be taken down.

Has Netflix ever removed content from its platform?

In its 2020 Environmental Social Governance report, Netflix noted, “In some cases, we’ve also been forced to remove specific titles or episodes of titles in specific countries due to government takedown demands.”

In 2019, two titles were removed (one of them was an episode of the “Patriot Act”, which was removed from its service in Saudi Arabia) and in 2020, four titles were removed. All of these requests for removal came from Singapore and Turkey.

Turkey requested that Netflix remove an episode from the series ‘Designated Survivor’ and the French film ‘Cuties’. Singapore demanded the removal of the series ‘Cooked with Cannabis’ and the film ‘Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics’.

Netflix published the first such report in early 2020 and has said that it will be reporting government takedown requests annually from 2021 onwards. It said in 2020, that as of 2019, the streaming service had complied with just nine takedown requests since 1997, the year it became operational.

Even so, how Netflix regulates its content remains opaque. While social media companies such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook now have rules to deal with hate speech and misinformation, the same kinds of pressures are not faced by streaming services as of now.

This also holds true for audio streaming services such as Spotify, which was under fire recently after musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell withdrew their recordings from Spotify to protest its streaming of Joe Rogan’s podcast, which had featured anti-vaxxers.

Newsletter | Click to get the day’s best explainers in your inbox