Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby has joked that Jimmy Carr and Russian president Vladimir Putin are ‘interchangeable’.
The Netflix star waded into the controversy surrounding Carr’s comedy special His Dark Material, in which he joked part of the Holocaust was ‘positive’.
Carr told his audience that people ‘never mention the thousands of Gypsies killed by the Nazis’ because ‘no one wants to talk about the positives.’
Since the joke resurfaced last month, the comedian has faced protests outside his gig and a petition from a Gypsy, Roma and Traveller charity calling for the special to be removed and for Carr to apologise.
On Friday comedian Gadsby appeared on Channel 4 comedy panel The Last Leg, where she compared Carr to the Russian president and said the two are ‘interchangeable’.
She said: ‘I think at the moment Vladimir Putin and Jimmy Carr are interchangeable.
‘They both hate minorities, they don’t like contributing to the public purse, and they see the same plastic surgeon.’
In 2012, Carr came under fire after being accused of being part of a tax avoidance scheme, prompting him to apologise for a ‘terrible error of judgement’.
Meanwhile, the Putin regime’s demonisation and targeting of LGBT+ people has been well documented throughout his reign.
Gadsby’s joke came as the panel discussed the crisis in Ukraine at length, after Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of the country last week.
The show aired clips of some of the resilience shown by Ukrainian citizens, including the viral clip of a man moving a land-mine with his bare hands without dropping his cigarette.
But while Gadsby’s comparison drew a laugh from the live audience, it proved divisive online.
Some viewers condemned the joke as going ‘too far’, with one person writing that it’s ‘not funny’.
‘The silence with slight awkward laughter seems to suggest the audience feel the same way,’ she wrote.
Another Twitter user said he hopes ‘Jimmy Carr sues her or slander’, adding ‘what a load of b******s that was’.
One viewer suggested the joke ‘crashed and burned in a spectacular fashion’.
Others however defended the joke, with one person writing simply: ‘HANNAH GADSBY CALLING OUT JIMMY CARR F*** YEAH’.
Another said the joke was ‘more than ok… that was really funny’.
One person who said they are ‘descended from the Roma’ thanked Hannah for ‘standing up to Jimmy Carr,’ adding what he said about the Holocaust was ‘disgusting’.
It’s far from the first time Gadsby has spoken out against other comedians targeting marginalised people in their sets: in October last year she described Netflix as an ‘amoral algorithm cult’ following Dave Chapelle’s comments about trans people.
In his special The Closer, Chapelle declared himself ‘team TERF’, with the backlash prompting Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos to defend the streaming site.
He wrote in a memo to staff that Netflix is ‘working hard to ensure marginalized communities aren’t defined by a single story… so we have Sex Education, Orange Is the New Black, Control Z, Hannah Gadsby, and Dave Chappelle all on Netflix.’
Gadsby, who won an Emmy for her 2018 Netflix stand-up special Nanette, spoke out against her name being included in the memo, telling the CEO: ‘F*** you and your amoral cult’.
Comedian Carr recently returned to Twitter for the first time since the outrage began over his controversial joke, having not tweeted in three weeks.
Metro.co.uk has reached out to reps for Jimmy Carr for comment.
The Last Leg airs Fridays at 10pm on Channel 4.
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