INTERVIEW: Comedian Jimmy Carr

He’s performed the first ever stand-up show in online nerd world Second Life. Indeed, if you add together all his live shows over the last seven years, assuming an average of three gags a minute, you’re looking at well over a thousand jokes.

And if you doubt the three gags a minute thing, see how long it takes you to trot out these one-liners to your mates:

My dad's dying wish was to have his family around him.

I can't help thinking he would have been better off with more oxygen.

My girlfriend said she wanted me to tease her, so I said: "All right, fatty."

Throwing acid is wrong,¬ in some people's eyes.

There is also the telly work – 8 Out of 10 Cats on Channel 4, appearances on QI, Have I Got News For You, The Flight of the Conchords radio sitcom, but he did find the time to chat to Stephen Armstrong about his act.

SA: So why do you do so many gigs every year? Aren’t you tempted to do fewer, bigger arenas?

JC: No, there’s nothing else really I want to do. I wake up in the morning, might play a game of tennis or have meetings or TV stuff to sort out but generally if I’m doing a gig, I drive there, which takes a couple of hours. I then mooch about, look around the town, have a coffee and a bite to eat and wherever I go in the country I meet people. People come up, say hello and have a chat. If you’re on TV, people think you’re very approachable. I’m not a movie star or a singer or someone who’s impossibly talented, I’m just a bloke with some jokes. It’s nice; it makes the world very friendly. If I’m eating, people wait until I’ve put down my knife and fork before they come over. It’s great.

The nicest thing is when you meet young guys and girls coming to comedy for the first time. What’s slightly strange is that they’re clearly expecting me to insult them. It must be difficult if you’re a beloved comedian like Peter Kay who has to be super nice the whole time. For my audience, it’s a pleasant surprise to find I’m polite.

SA: You don’t get people who are intimidated?

JC: In showbusiness I’m the lowest tier aren’t I? Just one step above the clown. If you do well at stand-up maybe you’ll go on to do something else. No famous actors go, “you know, I really fancy doing a bit of stand-up.”

SA: You say one level above the clown but I read recently that in the medieval court that the jester was the only person who was allowed to mock the King.

JC: I think you read that in my book!

SA: Even so!

JC: Well, yes, for instance, the emperor who built the Great Wall of China initially planned to paint it as well and it was the jester who basically said, ‘are you crazy?! Do you realise how much that is going to cost?’ So the jester stopped him doing the stupidest job in history.

SA: So doesn’t that mean that being a comedian is a really important job?

JC: I don’t agree at all. I don’t take the piss out of the government. I don’t do political stuff; I don’t feel that I’m part of that tradition. People like coming out, watching a show and not being preached to. The reason comedy attendance is up and church attendance is down is that I’m not telling anybody how to live his life. If you don’t think this is funny, don’t come again.

SA: I’m not saying your job is to bring down a government.

JC: Although I could if I wanted to.

SA: Well, yes, of course, but it can only be healthy to have a society where people go out and tell jokes where people aren’t taken too seriously.

JC: I suppose the best you could say about us is that we are an embodiment of the freedom of speech. As soon as you stop doing jokes about one thing then that’s the thin end of the wedge. I’m an equal opportunity offender. Which religion would you like me to be rude about? ‘If we are all God's children, what's so special about Jesus?’ Or¬ ‘suicide bombers - what makes them tick?’ SA: So if you tour a show for a year, how do you keep the timing tight every night?

JC: It’s tougher with my stuff than observational jokes because if you’re just trying to paint a funny picture with words in people’s minds, that’s fine. With mine, it’s very often the exact order of the words that make them funny. If you mispronounce a word or get the order wrong, it’s not funny. Like, ‘I'm not worried about the Third World War - that's the Third World's problem.’ SA: Do you ever lose focus?

JC: No, you’re literally terrified all the way through. And you’re also in a heightened state -¬ you’re watching everyone all the way through. It’s a weird thing when you can tell when an audience is having a good time, especially when it’s the same show that you’ve done loads of times on the same tour. You try to get a feeling for what the reaction is going to be to a joke¬ like, ‘when I was a kid I was scared of the dentist. He was a paedophile.’ Now, I know what reaction that should get from the audience if I time it right from my end. If I don’t get the right reaction, I have to up the level of the performance, change my game.

SA: Don’t you ever think¬ ‘sod it, I’ll just write a sitcom.’ JC: I feel that’s such a different thing. It’s a Herculean task. I could try and do a sitcom,¬ I could unpick my jokes and work them into a sitcom, but it would seem a waste.

SA: Why do you love jokes so much?

JC: It’s almost autistic, isn’t it? A really boring guy might be obsessed by crosswords, right? How they work and how best to do them. I’m exactly the same except I’m obsessed by a slightly different bit of word play. My father always used to say: ‘What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. Before the accident.’ SA: So what got you started? Comic heroes?

JC: Eddie Izzard was very big when I was at college. I remember seeing him at the Cambridge Corn Exchange - I still get goosebumps even just walking into the building. But what he was doing was essentially the same thing: a man on a stage telling jokes. He’s dressing them up as whimsy, but they’re just one-liners with a surreal element.

SA: And so you started at college?

JC: No, not Cambridge Footlights. After college I went to work for Shell. I didn’t like it - I was a bit bored by the whole thing. So I was looking for something, a few people said, ‘you’re funny, maybe you should be a performer.’ And I suddenly thought oh yes, maybe I should. My first gig was called the Tut ‘n’ Shive, which is no longer going. ¬ It’s a little pub on Upper Street and the gig was upstairs. The guy gave me a go, five minutes.

I thought I had all the jokes I could ever think of. In fact, there was one joke in there that’s still passable. ‘You hear about all these working class kids making it because there was only one way out. When I was growing up I was very middle class. I lived in a cul-de-sac. There really was only one way out.’ You can see that that’s obviously a joke.

SA: It’s obviously a Jimmy Carr joke too.

JC: Well, that’s because you can see the mechanics. I started with ‘one way out’ and went, ‘oh, cul–de-sac, that’s quite funny.’ SA: In your book you say that in a room of 300 people the comedian is the one facing the wrong way.

JC: What's true about comedians is that we've all got a hole in our personalities. I have a desire to get up on stage and perform. Most people don't need that. I suppose it's a desire to be loved. I don't see that as a psychological failing. I mean, I like to think there’s very little gap between my show and the kind of jokes I tell with my friends, and that’s a good thing.

SA: True. I’ve used this one in the pub loads of times¬: ‘A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day. She said: "Can you spare a few minutes for cancer research?" I said, "Alright, but we won't get much done.'"

JC: My favourites are the jokes where the laughs roll around the theatre, followed by ‘oohs’ as people realise what they’re laughing at is a little bit wrong. Rude jokes are titillating in the same way as pornography and that makes it curiously intimate.

There’s one joke in the new show that you couldn’t do at the start. I have to break down their moral sensibilities before they’re ready for it. It’s only in interviews where you suddenly feel like the bastion of taste and decency. Putting comedians in charge of what you can and can’t say is like giving the job to The. Least. Responsible. People. In. The. World. There are certain rules that are simple as a comedian; don’t be racist, don’t hate anyone, don’t say anything with malice.

But in terms of protecting minorities and social rights, I’m literally just saying the funniest things I can in the shortest possible time. I plan my gigs so that people come away going ‘those were very funny jokes’ rather than ‘he was a very nice man,’ just because that’s what I like. I love jokes. I love material you want to use the next day because there’s no higher compliment to a comic than people telling their mates your jokes.

Jimmy Carr – Joke Technician, Fairfield Halls, Croydon. June 12 and 16. 8pm. 020 8688 9291.