Hi mate, I once dissed you years ago on your video on your youtube channel for heckling Jimmy Carr. If that was you, then please accept my apology for being so rude to you. Genuinely. I'm a Christian now and regret what I said to you, so I'm sorry. Take care!

i love jimmy carr!

Just watched Jimmy Carr's Netflix special - it contains all these same jokes, and every joke I can ever remember Jimmy Carr telling, so I guess it really is a "greatest hits" standup, rather than all new material like most stand-up specials. It also had more offensive jokes, and a lot of reference to Shane's Mum.

Yep....word is that an idiot driving with a flat tire on a trailer caused a car fire at Carr Powerhouse Road and 299 sparking the wildfire. The name is confusing.
I live on highway 299. It's not that funny to us.

When I first heard about the Carr wildfire, it was on the radio, so the explanation seemed to be that a "car fire" started a devastating wildfire. Then when I got home, I saw that the location was Carr, and rolled my eyes at my dumbness. THEN we learned that it was started by something very much like this, someone driving on his rim. So, yeah, funny/not funny.

Your video, Carr Fire Vortex - Firenado, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Oh yeah, Jimmy Carr? My mum may be a prozzie, but someday this video will be on the 'sift and it will have the wrong thumbnail.
*findthumb

For all the talk of the general unattractiveness of the UK, Aisling Bea is very hot. Almost as hot as Jimmy Carr's laugh.

That was a leap. He's no Jimmy Carr, but at the same time, I wonder if this would have been better if Jimmy Carr had delivered it?

See the second comment.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Jimmy-Carr-s-Amazing-Anagram-on-QI

Jimmy Carr's Amazing Anagram on QI has been added as a related post - related requested by bareboards2.

I believe that you are correct, and Carr was not actually fined or otherwise legally penalized for his remarks.

However, it *was* a possibility that he would be, according to the first line in the article I linked to in my first post in this thread:
"Jimmy Carr could face sanctions for making a joke about dwarves during an appearance on BBC1’s The One Show."

I believe that I read other news articles that suggested that was a possibility at the time it happened, but I can't find anything with a real quick search now.

Going outside of the scope of that single incident, I definitely have seen quite a few reports of things that I would consider to be fairly trivial incidents like this being looked at by the UK government as "hate speech" and therefore potentially subject to "fines, imprisonment, or both" (according to that wikipedia article).

Samples from a quick search include a politician being arrested for quoting a passage about Islam from a book by Winston Churchill, a young man who was jailed for 12 weeks because of "some offensive Facebook posts making derogatory comments about a missing child" (it doesn't say what the posts were exactly; I am not saying I would defend his posts but I don't think anyone should go to jail for being an idiot and running their mouth on the internet), and another young man who was fined for saying that "all soldiers should die and go to hell". Plenty more incidents beyond those as well, it seems.

So while Jimmy Carr didn't end up actually facing any legal repercussions for his joke, I think it is not far fetched at all to suggest that he might have (and there seems to be some evidence that legal repercussions enacted by the government were being considered in that particular incident).

That is what seems crazy / wrong to me. That is NOT freedom of speech; it is freedom of benign speech, with an increasingly narrow view of what speech is benign.

I'm 100% OK with their being "consequences" for Jimmy Carr for his joke. But the government shouldn't be involved in that (and again, to be fair they DID end up staying out of it in that case). The consequences that I think are fine include:

* Ofcom or the BBC passing on some/all of any fines that the government levels against them on to Carr (ie., IF they get fined for breaking broadcast decency standards, make Carr foot the some or all of the bill for that).

* Ofcom or the BBC electing not to invite Carr to appear on any more programs if they are concerned about preventing fines / protecting their image / whatever. They are a business, they gotta look out for themselves.

* Individual people who were offended by Carr's joke boycotting programs that he appears on, refusing to pay to attend his live performances, etc. Obviously. If you don't like what he has to say, you are are of course not obliged to continue to listen to him.

Anything beyond those consequences is going too far in a society that claims it is democratic and free, in my opinion.

Presumably you are able to recognise that Ofcom's pronouncements carry the weight of statutory force.

It is impossible to conceive of a free-speech doctrine that includes government agencies issuing rulings on whether a comedian's jokes are funny or not.

The BBC is obliged to take account of Ofcom's broadcasting code, including its worthless stipulations on supposed offensive material, or suffer sanctions which include fines; they have indeed been fined for violations of the very section upon which Carr is accused of trespassing, in the trivial Andrew Sachs answerphone affair for example.

Frankly I would prefer Jimmy Carr skin a dwarf and wear its shrunken hide as a scarf in his next appearance on The One Show than have our treasured public service broadcaster at the mercy of PC crybullies and the government guns that back them.

@gorillaman @MilkmanDan

Please explain to me exactly what horrible consequences Jimmy Carr suffered.

Ofcom upheld a complaint against him. That's it.

How was he "assailed with the force of the state"? They didn't even fine him.

There's a big fucking difference between saying "you can't say that" and saying "you're kind of a dick for saying that".

Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences.

It kind of is. Incarceration, torture, and execution are not on the table, true (although in the UK it sounds like incarceration for making remarks deemed to be "offensive" due to racism, discrimination, etc. isn't ALL that far-fetched).

You can think that Carr's joke was lazy and unfunny -- that's fine. Personally I like it, and find it at least mildly clever in that he said it was trying to come up with the "shortest" joke possible. But anyway, some/many people in the UK agreed with you and made complaints to the station. The station/broadcaster came back with that statement you linked to, in my opinion mainly just to cover their own asses in the event of Government intervention (which I am led to believe by several news stories was / still is a real possibility).

The idea that there is any possibility of the Government intervention being required to punish Carr or the station -- purely because some people took offense to some nonsense that he said -- is what I find to be ridiculous.