The furore surrounding comedian Jimmy Carr and his Holocaust joke has made me question my own views.
I’ve always found him very funny – he pushes the boundaries and his sheer audacity makes me laugh out loud.
But many people thought he went too far on his recent Netflix show when he joked: “Thousands of gypsies died in the Holocaust...no one ever wants to talk about that because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.”
His fellow comedian and friend David Baddiel tweeted that the joke was “cruel and inhumane and mean-spirited and racist”.
Other prominent names who voiced their deep disgust included Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries and Health Secretary Sajid Javid.
There have been calls to boycott Carr, for Netflix to remove the content from his stand-up show and for him to publicly apologise.
Others, however, feel that by cancelling him, it endangers free speech. I’m a huge advocate of free speech.
I would rather people made their views public – that way it’s easy to know who they are and what they stand for.
If you disagree with them, you are then able to hit back and show them why in your opinion they are wrong. You can’t argue with people who go underground – and that hinders debate and progress.
When I look back on my life as an Asian kid growing up in 70s Britain, jokes about black and Asian people were two a penny.
I had to endure comedians such as Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson, as well as shows including Mind Your Language, It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum and Love Thy Neighbour.
Their jokes about the colour of our skin, our accents, the food we ate and the clothes we wore were standard Saturday night entertainment – and boy did people laugh.
These jokes then got repeated at school and in my parents’ workplace.
I can’t describe that feeling of humiliation when someone makes a joke about you and everyone laughs. Even now at the age of 52, I still remember the pain.
But if I could go back and cancel these jokes and comedians, would I? No, I wouldn’t. Why? Because these jokes made us all test our own moral compasses and gave rise to black and Asian comedians such as Lenny Henry, Adil Ray and Shazia Mirza, who took the racist narrative away.
Do I think Jimmy Carr is a racist? No.
Do I think his intention was to hurt and offend the gypsy community? No.
Do I think he wanted to shock and test the boundaries of cancel culture and free speech? Yes.
I agree that perhaps his choice of subject matter wasn’t ideal, but we have to allow people to go on challenging sensitivities so that we can debate, evolve and develop into a fairer, more rounded and more equal society.
