Jimmy Carr Natural Born Killer review – An hour of hits and misses and some hard-hitting stuff too

3/5

Jimmy Carr Natural Born Killer story: British-Irish comedian Jimmy Carr’s latest Netflix special is just as unapologetic as his earlier ones. In his hour-long show, Carr tells his audience a bunch of stuff that he thinks are likely to get him cancelled, or at least have people baying for his blood. He doesn’t care though, and has an ‘apology’ all planned out for those who do get offended by his jokes.

Jimmy Carr Natural Born Killer review: The last time I watched a Jimmy Carr Netflix special, I was not in the least amused. His style of humour - edgy, dark and offensive – is not for me; or so I thought, until I caught his latest special over lunch. This was meant to be casual viewing; I would not pay much attention to his material, yet have him drone on in the background. Yet strangely enough, about a minute or two into the show, I found myself rewinding to the very beginning because something had caught my attention and I wanted to hear it from the start. That, I thought, was a good sign.

Jimmy Carr – His Dark Material review: An excruciating hour of ‘terrible’ jokes and nasal laughter 

Hold your horses, I’m still not team Carr, and didn’t find a lot of his punchlines funny, but this time, I did let out the occasional chuckle. For the most part, the special is a collection of one-liners, as he jokes about wokeism, transgenders, porn, paedophilia, and consent, among others. He even has some jokes about Christianity, because he’s not worried about any retaliation from them. Not a sentiment he shares about Islam jokes, though. He’s smart, he says, and doesn’t even try.

The comedian packs in quite a punch in the final 10 minutes of the show, as he addresses consent, which is actually the best bit of the show. Carr picks a 19-year-old member of the audience and proceeds to give him ‘the talk’ about the cardinal rules of ‘consent’ and when it would be appropriate to have sex on a date. There’s also a bit about rape, which is also brilliant and perhaps why I’ve begun to warm up to Carr comedy. His nasal laughter is still annoying, but he doesn’t unleash it as much as he did during His Dark Material.

The problem with Natural Born Killer is that Carr, like most comedians worth their salt, dips into the same pool of buzzwords and ends up doing multiple jokes on some of them. Paedophilia in the Church, for instance, is an oft repeated issue, whether it is Carr saying that he seriously thought about going into the service of God for a while, but that he then realized that having a ‘fascination for kids’ could not be a full-time job or when he explained the reason behind the relatively small male organ on a Michaelangelo statue at the Vatican.

Some of the jokes will have you wondering where you’ve heard it before – was it another comic or was it on social media? Either which way, they didn’t feel very original. Also, Carr’s obsession with dissing the cancel culture only felt like he was trying too hard to state he’s important enough to warrant such a reaction.

Jimmy Carr Natural Born Killer verdict: Just for those last 10 minutes, Jimmy Carr’s new special should be on the must-watch list, even if you are likely to get offended by most of everything else he says.