David Baddiel says Jimmy Carr is his ‘close friend’ but Holocaust joke was indefensible
metro.co.ukDavid Baddiel has described Jimmy Carr’s joke about Roma and Sinti people being murdered in the Holocaust as ‘indefensible’.Baddiel, 57, spoke out against his ‘close friend’ after Carr’s Holocaust joke, taken from his Netflix special, went viral in recent days.In the special, which was released on Christmas Day 2021, Carr says people ‘never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis’ in the Holocaust, because ‘no one ever wants to talk about the positives’.Carr, 49, who himself described the joke as a ‘career-ender’, has faced severe backlash from Traveller and Roma charities, anti-fascist organisations and even several MPs.Now fellow stand-up comedian Baddiel, who is Jewish, says Carr’s joke was ‘cruel and inhumane’.Writing on Twitter, Baddiel recalled telling audiences during his Trolls: Not The Dolls Tour: ‘You can obviously tell a Holocaust joke that is cruel and inhumane and mean-spirited and racist.‘Or you can tell one that targets the oppressors, or draws attention to the fundamental evil of it, or shines a light on the humanity of the victims.’He added: ‘Clearly, Jimmy’s was the former.’In the Twitter thread, he described Jimmy as ‘a close friend of mine and a brilliant stand-up in general’.However, he said, how he feels about Jimmy ‘makes no difference to how I feel or think about this specific joke’.Baddiel argued that ‘it’s not the subject matter of a joke’ that causes it to be indefensible but ‘the specifics of the individual joke’.He referred to an old joke by comedian Devorah Baum on a Holocaust survivor meeting God after their death, and said, ‘unlike Jimmy’s I think [it is] defensible]’.This is the joke I was leading to, which is, unlike Jimmy’s, I think defensible.
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