If you’re in the audience at a Jimmy Carr show, you should already know exactly what to expect. The British comedian—and host of popular UK comedy panel show 8 Out Of 10 Cats—has spent 20-odd years crafting clever, technically brilliant gags about the grubbiest of subjects. No topic is off limits, no joke too un-PC. Even so, Carr wants to make sure you know what you’re getting into. The ticketing page for Terribly Funny—the show he just brought to India for a three-city tour—warns you that it contains jokes about “terrible things”. But it’s okay, they’re “just jokes” after all. “Having political correctness at a comedy show is like having health and safety at a rodeo,” it reads (rodeos do have health and safety, but let’s leave that for another day).

The warnings continue once you’re inside the auditorium. Before Carr walks onto the stage at the Mahakavi Kalidas Natyamandir in Mumbai—two hours late, thanks to a school function that ran too long—we’re greeted by a two-minute text-on-screen video that includes a few jokes to test the audience’s limits. One about violence against mothers-in-law draws the most cheers (never change, Indian men). When Carr finally walks on, he continues testing the waters with a rapid-fire torrent of off-colour punchlines about rape and pedophilia, occasionally punctuated by his signature cackle. The crowd eat it up, revelling in every filthy, taboo-flouting bit of casual racism, transphobia and misogyny. The rules are clear from the start: this is a safe space for the sort of people who don’t like safe spaces. If you’re offended, that’s a “you problem.” What are you even doing here anyway? 

How sympathetic you are to that premise—that a joke is just a joke, no matter how vile the subject matter—will largely determine how much you enjoy Carr’s comedy. There’s no denying the 51-year-old’s scathing wit, or his abundant talent as a performer. From his first dig at any blondes who might be in the crowd (“don’t worry, I’ll talk slowly”), he has the audience sitting on the edge of their seats, waiting to see just how far the comedian will take things. His inventive wordplay and mastery of tension and release keep you engaged through a relentless barrage of loosely connected one-liners—mostly simple setup-and-payoff jobs, with the occasional misdirect thrown in for variety. 

It helps that Carr—unlike many of his contemporaries—has no ideological axe to grind, no grand crusade against liberalism (the one direct reference to “wokeness” is a misdirect). Whereas Dave Chappelle treats every pugilistic line about trans people as a “surgical strike” against his detractors, it’s easier to believe that for Carr, it really is just a joke, that he’s still a nice bloke at heart. As cringe as some of the lazier one-liners got (the infamous joke about little persons that the BBC had to apologise for, a bunch of tired old “my girlfriend” bits), there’s no real menace behind them, and it’s hard to work up the energy to take offence. 

The problem, though, is that there’s only so much shock-jock humour one can take before it becomes tired and predictable. You crack one dead baby joke at a party, and it’s a blast. You crack three, and you’re the centre of attention. But by the seventh one, you’re the weird guy at the party with a dead baby fetish. That same principle applies to Carr’s set. Half an hour in, by the time the 20th joke about raping a minor rolled out, even the most risible punchline became mundane and humdrum. Is this going anywhere, you find yourselves asking? 

His inventive wordplay and mastery of tension and release keep you engaged through a relentless barrage of loosely connected one-liners—mostly simple setup-and-payoff jobs, with the occasional misdirect thrown in for variety. 

It’s a shame, because when Carr does engage with an idea for longer than it takes to fire off a one-liner, he shines. There’s a bit about him becoming a father, and his anxiety over whether that experience will soften his edges as a comedian, that’s a masterful bit of comedic story-telling. Another extended segment, in which he has a long discussion about the rules of sexual consent with a 19-year-old kid in the audience, is both hilarious and verges on the wholesome (or what passes for that in the Carr-verse, at least). It’s even educational. 

The fact that the young man Carr picked on for this bit was Amal Tandon—the son of comedian Amit Tandon, who was sitting next to Amal and laughing his ass off—added an unintentional layer of situational comedy to proceedings for many in the audience. Carr kept calling him Aman (“Aman? A man?”), so he probably didn’t know. How often do you see a comedian who isn’t in on (a facet of) his own joke? 

The best moments of the show though, came not from the tightly scripted set, but from off-the-cuff crowd-work. This is where Carr is most in his element. You can feel his joy as he responds to a heckler with a clever put-down and a shit-eating grin, or asks an audience member if he would fuck his fiance’s mom (the correct answer, according to Carr, is “yes”). There was a little bit of local flavour—like a redneck incest joke adapted to fit audience members from Ambernath—and a double-barrel evisceration of an anti-vaxxer in the audience. The mean-ness of his putdowns is undercut by the fact that his victims are laughing along, that we’re all in this little tasteless adventure together. 

None of it is particularly edifying, but that’s not what you come to a Jimmy Carr show for. You come for the subversive thrill of breaking taboos without consequence (and though Carr brings up “cancel culture” in the set, it’s hard to argue that this world-famous comedian has faced any real consequences). He delivers that thrill in spades. On his own terms then, Carr’s Mumbai shows were a great success. It’s not exactly my cup of tea, but that’s a “me problem”, not a Carr problem. I’m tempted to leave it at that, but then I remember two particularly charged moments from the set that have stuck with me. 

Halfway through his set, Carr announces that he’s turning his attention to religion. The audience—who have been game for plenty of pedophilia, rape and sexual violence jokes up to this point—immediately falls silent. There’s a ripple of fear, everyone waiting for the moment the desi Gestapo burst through the doors, till Carr defuses the tension by saying he’s taking aim at “my God, not yours.” Five minutes later, after a no-punches-pulled bit on Christianity, he makes a milquetoast joke about the intolerance of some Muslim radicals that is met with a lusty, full-throated roar, perhaps the loudest of the night. 

This little encapsulation of India’s political realities—on the eve of the Ram Mandir’s consecration—has nothing to do with Carr or his set. But it did make me look askance at some of the people in the audience a bit, wonder at their motivations. What do any of us get out of two-hours of jokes poking fun at society’s vulnerable—rape survivors, trans people, the differently abled. Is everyone here just appreciating a cleverly written joke, or are they here to see a famous person attack the same people they attack on the daily, with far less wit and much more violence? If the latter, is that something we—or Carr himself—should be concerned about? 

I don’t have the answer to these questions, but I can’t shake the feeling that they’re important ones to ask. In lieu of an answer, here’s a case study. In 2006, Dave Chappelle walked away from a critically acclaimed TV show and a $50 million deal, in part because he was worried that people were laughing at the wrong thing, that his show was reinforcing racial stereotypes instead of satirising them. In 2024, Chappelle is the flag-bearer for anti-trans comedy, aligned with the very people who missed the point of his blackface caricatures. I guess where you land on these questions—on ‘offensive’ comedy, and the comic’s responsibility for his jokes—depends on which version of Dave Chappelle you want to be. Choose wisely.