Jimmy Carr’s The Best of Ultimate Gold Greatest Hits Is a Safe Space for Brilliantly Evil Jokes
Jimmy Carr is one of my favorite comedy writers. He’s also not someone I would recommend for anyone without a firm warning. Over his nearly 20 year career in comedy, Carr has become an international success by carving the cruelest of ideas into perfect bite-sized bits. His latest special The Best of Ultimate Gold Greatest Hits collects his favorite jokes from across his career, packages in a few new ones, and dares the audience to laugh.
Carr isn’t for everyone, something he makes abundantly clear right from the beginning of the special. He opens with as close as he comes to a soft joke, a riff comparing himself to burn victims that ends with a line about how melted people stick together. “If you sat there thinking, ‘That was funny,’ you’re in for a lovely evening,” he says with a grin, before adding, “If you sat there thinking, ‘Well, that was a bit much, actually,’ it’s going to be a fucking long night for you, I won’t lie.”
What follows is a cavalcade of atrocities, each crafted with the loving care of an artist. Jimmy Carr relishes language, and part of the fun of his act is seeing how he’ll manipulate you into stumbling through the darkness. His weapon of choice is the one-liner. Some are simple word games like, “If you’re scared of pedophiles, grow up.” Others are laser-focused observations without a heart, such as “I had a friend who used to self-harm because he was bullied. I thought ‘whose side are you on?’” Occasionally it’s just playful: “Pornography! I’ll come to that later.”
This special is a celebration of jokes, often as much the mechanics of what makes them work as much as the jokes themselves. One small chunk involves Carr trying to write the shortest jokes possible, starting with a four-word joke, then a three-word joke, then two words. Each barbed hit trains the audience, wearing down your defenses against offensive content bit by bit until you stop thinking about the content and start embracing the rhythm of the jokes. Then when you’re neck deep in filth, he uses those expectations against you to pull out a cute bit like, “I was in a strip club and saw a woman do a thing with a bottle. I was disgusted. Red wine with fish!”
There are hundreds of jokes in this 57-minute special, taking the form of one-liners, callbacks, and crowd work. When a bit is too dark Carr joins in on the laughter with his mockingbird-like cackle. Carr’s laugh is a genuinely haunting thing, a disingenuous mocking pop that almost works like a joke tag when it appears. If we ever allowed a British person to play the Joker, Jimmy Carr’s audition would probably be blood-chilling.
One running piece of crowd work involves a bit about how Carr slept with the mother of a teenager in the front row. It starts with one brutal aside, “I still owe her 20 euro. That’s right, I paid for everyone,” and continues through the hour. At one point a heckler in the back row even gets a dig in on Shane’s theoretical mother. On a schoolyard, it’d be cruel, but inside the show, it’s not. The audience has accepted the difference between performance and reality, and Shane has his dad next to him for comfort.