Driven to distraction

During his inexorable rise to the premier league of British comedy over the past four years, Jimmy Carr has deservedly earned a reputation as being a peerless exponent of the brand of ultra-wry, one-liner comedy that has made American comic Steve Wright one of the most popular stand-ups of recent times.

To his credit, Carr has also given a uniquely English twist to the genre, adopting a naughty, haughty, indeed – there’s no other way to describe it – fundamentally Monkhouse-esque public schoolboy persona as means to deliver his clever, Wodehouse-indebted style of mirth. But as many a commentator has observed with regards to Wright’s humour, one-liner propelled comedy is immensely difficult to sustain over the course of an hour.
Is Jimmy concerned at the extent to which his minimalist repertoire is adaptable to the variety of pace and rhythm demanded by a full-length show?
“It is difficult to do,” agrees Carr, manifestly delighted that I’ve inadvertently provided him with a feed-line for one of his patented, hilariously tongue-in-cheek flourishes of bravado (which, frankly, reduce me to hysterics more than once during our tête-à-tête). “But the thing is that I’m so good at it, it ultimately becomes quite a trivial matter. I mean, I’ve seen Steve Wright and Emo Phillips do two-hour shows, and they’re great, but I do like to do different kinds of things in amongst the one-liners.
“I have different kinds of conceits; some of the jokes are a lot longer, they’re more involved and a bit more about storytelling, and there’s other stuff which is based in the real world to a far greater degree, and a lot less surreal. So, I think there’s a diversity of styles in there.”
Carr’s versatility is at least partly explainable by his background. The son of Irish emigrants from Limerick (“They’re both doing time for plugging somebody,” he deadpans. “As I always say: you can take the boy out of Limerick, but you can’t take the knife out of the corpse”), his comedy career began in earnest when he was recruited as a writer for the Channel 4’s Eleven O’ Clock Show. Although the programme itself was a regrettably under-par attempt at topical news parody, it nonetheless played midwife to the careers of, amongst others, Carr, Ali G, and an obscure comedy writing duo known as Stephen Merchant & Ricky Gervais.
“Where are they now, eh?” laughs Carr. “I actually met Ricky at a party about four years ago, and subsequently went to perform at the Edinburgh Festival with himself and Stephen. I suppose when we started working on the Eleven O’Clock Show it was good timing, since we’d both only really seriously started in comedy about six months previously, and it was a good learning experience. I also wrote for his chat-show, Meet Ricky Gervais, which – given that I worked on it – was naturally an incredibly accomplished piece of broadcasting.”
Carr himself has become increasingly aware of the pressures of a growing public profile over the past twelve months, with the Perrier Award panel in Edinburgh even adjudicating last summer that he was “too famous” to be in contention for the coveted prize, a fate which also befell our very own Dara O’Briain. What was Jimmy’s reaction to the judges’ verdict?
“Well, Dara was gutted,” he reflects. “I was gutted as well, but less so. I suppose the thing is that Dara’s show is really hilarious and he definitely deserved to be up for the award. I mean, he did present the Live Floor Show on BBC2, but that was essentially a cult programme and not massively mainstream. I was starting to make inroads into that area at the time, so for me there was a probably a general feeling of, ‘Oh well, fair enough’. In the end, the award was won by a good friend of mine, Dmitri Martin, so that took the sting out of it a little bit.”
As does the fact that Carr’s career trajectory continues on an upward curve. Recent turns in the world of TV include a virtuoso performance on Stephen Fry’s panel game QI, a brief stint as a host of Have I Got News For You, and his triumphant role as presenter of Channel 4’s brilliantly sadistic game-show-from-hell, Distraction.
“It started with the idea of, ‘what can we do with contestants that’s more interesting?’” remembers Jimmy. “And then the format literally grew out of us wondering how we could put people off as they were attempting to answer the question. So then we started to think what we could and couldn’t do legally. We tried laughing gas at one point, which was a bit of a giggle.
“But the great thing about thinking up new ideas for the show is that we get runners and students in and use them as sort of surrogate guinea pigs for the games. And, I mean, when you take something like the rat-traps that they’re catching their fingers in, we’re usually wondering, ‘Do these actually break fingers or not?’ So, the situation is fraught with peril. But we have a tightly run ship – the motto on the show is, ‘Get the signature on the disclaimer and everything will be fine’.”

Jimmy Carr plays Vicar St. in Dublin on february 13