The darting eyes are new. As a young man, Jimmy Carr never had so much trouble keeping his eyeballs under control. In Natural Born Killer, the comedian’s new Netflix show, his pupils bounce from one side to the other so frequently it is like watching a game of table tennis. Or, as Carr might say in his affected working-class voice: “Watchin’ a game of fuckin’ table tennis.”
Why does Carr think he needs to swaddle his punchlines in frantic eye movement? Well, the man’s material is so edgy that he actually has to scan the room in case the woke police are in. “This next joke might get me cancelled,” he says at one point, like a teenager smelling his farts and chuckling that he could get thrown out of a sleepover. If delivering material that might as well have been cribbed from a Jim Davidson set can get you “cancelled” (“There’s a reason men propose on their knees – they’ve fucking given up”), Carr might well be.
