JIMMY CARR, whose sadistic vicar character and acid one-liners won him a Perrier Award nomination in 2002, has had a crazy year. He presented possibly the cruellest, most addictive show on TV, Channel 4’s Your Face or Mine (in which the audience decided if one half of a couple was too ugly for their partner), appeared on 100 Worst Britons and toured the world.
Carr is a clever sort and begins — after gently mocking the audience as they enter the room — by distancing his live show from his television career. Your Face or Mine is “as shallow as a tinker’s bath”, he later confirms. Fabulously un-PC, but clever enough with the construction of his bigoted character to get away with it, Carr is No 1 on the Comedy Offenders’ List.
This year’s puns and gags — all new — are better than ever. My two personal favourites: “Feminists say a woman’s work is never done.” He raises a bushy black brow. “Maybe if they organised themselves a little better . . .”
And: “I’d rather see a pregnant woman standing on a bus than a fat woman sitting down crying.”
Ouch! But Edinburgh requires an hour of material and you can’t spend an hour doing one-liners, back to back, however funny they are.
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Last year Carr structured the show so that he spent a major segment discussing the false letters he had sent to companies and celebrities and the bizarre replies they elicited. It was a little slice of Chris Morris, personalised by Carr.
This year he breaks up the punnery with a chunk of material about his endeavours to get the weirdest advertisements possible into various publications. So in the personals he placed: “Incurable romantic seeks filthy whore.” And, in lost and found: “Lost: Virginity. Yes! Get it.”
This worked excellently, although I would like to have heard more on the calls back he received. The only really weak link was near the end, when he asked the audience to act in his satire of a First World War movie. It’s an admirable risk: with the right audience it could have triumphed, but the night I went it fell flat and slowed down the show to a stagger.
Still, that’s a small complaint in a fabulous hour of comedy.
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