Rob Rinder slams audience who ‘cheered’ over Jimmy Carr’s Holocaust joke

This week, a clip from Carr’s programme His Dark Material, which was released on Christmas Day last year, sparked fury as it circulated widely on social media.

In the scene, the comedian described his next joke as a ‘career-ender’, before saying: ‘When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of six million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.’

Carr has received widespread criticism over the remarks, sparking petitions calling him to apologise and for Netflix to remove the joke, with MPs also joining the calls.

Rinder, who is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, shared a statement on Twitter condemning both Carr’s comments and the reaction from the people watching the show.

‘Jimmy Carr’s “joke” suggesting the systematic genocide of gypsies during the Holocaust was a “good thing” is breathtakingly racist. The truly disturbing thing isn’t just the gag, it’s that on hearing it, instead of leaving, the audience clapped, whooped and cheered in approval,’ the TV judge said.

During an appearance on BBC Breakfast, Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries suggested that the Government would legislate to stop comedy people find offensive being shown on Netflix.

‘We are looking at legislation via the Media Bill which would bring into scope those comments from other video on-demand streaming outlets like Netflix. So it’s interesting that we’re already looking at future legislation to bring into scope those sort of comments,’ she said, adding that the comments made by Carr were ‘abhorrent and they just shouldn’t be on television’.

Metro.co.uk previously contacted Jimmy Carr’s representative for comment on the criticism, while Netflix declined to comment.

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