Jimmy Carr at the Palace Theatre review: Wit with the gasp factor set to maximum

There seems to be two Jimmy Carrs these days. There is Carr the clean-cut guest on primetime television shows such as I Can See Your Voice and Carr the touring comedian who is anything but clean. Onstage at the Palace, bringing stand-up back to the West End last night, he was so filthy I felt I needed a bath after being in the same room as him.

Carr calls himself an “equal opportunities offender” and that is a fair description of his current show, Terribly Funny. From the mother-in-law joke in the intro to the gynaecological gags about sex and paedophilia no topic is deemed unacceptable for the former marketing executive.

This is wit with the gasp factor set to maximum. His material is hardly woke, but as he points out, albeit a little disingenuously, they are just words – they are not the terrible things. Having political correctness at a comedy show, he has said, is like having health and safety at a rodeo.

To his credit, words are very much his strength. Carr has a whipsmart mind and can spot double meanings at a thousand paces. His interaction with his fans was second to none. And he certainly had a fertile socially distanced crowd to work with, from some chatty vegans and a porn actor to a paramedic recently called out to an unspeakable incident involving a woman and a cat.

Yet Carr was at his most intriguing when he strayed from his smutty path. There was a welcome foray into topicality when he discussed the latest changes to lockdown as if the government was “hoping to confuse Covid into submission”.

And at the start of the second lengthy half there was even some Peter Kay-style nostalgia when he championed actual going out and meeting people over Tinder and recalled rewinding Blockbuster Video tapes. Compared to his stream of juvenile wisecracks about Michael Jackson, Countdown’s Rachel Riley and various members of the Royal Family, this was like a veritable palate cleanser.

There is clearly an audience for this kind of comedy that mixes the slickness of Bob Monkhouse with the sickness of Bernard Manning. Maybe we have been through such a brutal time in the last year that we need something brutal like this as a kind of escape valve. If the unsayable is not said maybe that would be worse.

The lingering thought though is that even when Carr is on a roll, as he undoubtedly was onstage, one cannot help but wonder why he chooses to mine such dark matters for laughs. There is plenty to enjoy here and also plenty that feels relentlessly crude.

Tonight & tomorrow then June 18 & 20 (0330 333 4813, nimaxtheatres.com)

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