The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Mantis]

I get it intermittently too, it's not too noticeable most of the time and only in my right ear (which is still deaf incidentally) so it's not a particular bother. It's more a case that I'll only even really hear it half the time if it's very quiet. I started wearing earplugs at gigs and band rehearsals a long time ago so think I've managed to avoid any further damage.

[Rusty]

What are all these snippets of 'being on stage/hanging around bands' all about? Am I chatting on a forum of band members that are famous?

[Wrathbone]

I will neither confirm nor deny whether I am secretly 90s pop sensation Whigfield.

[Snowy]

I will neither confirm nor deny whether I am secretly 90s pop sensation Whigfield.

I always wondered why you would perk up whenever anyone mentioned what happened to them on Saturday night...

[Sly Boots]

[Wrathbone]

This Jimmy Carr debacle over his holocaust joke is getting tedious. The real problem here isn't what he said and whether it was tasteless (of course it was, it's Jimmy Carr for crying out loud, what were people expecting?), it's how the news invariably reports the argument as "IT'S OFFENSIVE!" vs "CANCEL CULTURE!" without ever actually delving into the matter and stopping to think about it for a second. Do people not understand that saying something in a comedy routine does not mean the comedian holds that belief? If Jimmy Carr really thought that the genocide of thousands of Roma gypsies was a positive then he wouldn't be using it as a punchline.

I keep coming back to Stephen Fry's thoughts on people who get easily offended, as it applies here:

It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what.

[Hatredsheart]

Exactly. He actually warned people before that part of his set that these were the jokes he called "career enders".
Honestly, if people get offended what the hell were they doing watching Jimmy Carr in the first place?
Personally I laughed my tits off at the whole show.

[Rossell]

I always remember him saying he was determined to make a joke that nobody in the building would be able to laugh at because it was so offensive.

[Mantis]

I feel like the majority of his audience will laugh at his jokes whilst simultaneously thinking how they can't believe he actually said it. That's basically been his act for his entire career, its shock value as much as it is comedy. It's not like he's playing to a gallery of right wing racists who embrace his jokes as some gospel hate speech.

I think the government ministers going on about this on the news are just desperate to deflect from their imminently collapsing Prime Minister. It's very disappointing to see so many Labour MPs also being outraged on Twitter and the like also calling for Jimmy Carr to be removed from Netflix.

I really loathe cancel culture. If the government actively legislated to allow themselves to force third party platforms to remove content that they personally didn't like or found offensive then we'd be on very very dangerous ground of living in a true Orwellian nightmare.

[Wrathbone]

It’s not just politicians, I’ve seen a bunch of comments from the public going on about how offensive it is, as though jokes about raping a baby are on one side of the line and holocaust jokes are on the other. I’m willing to bet most of the people condemning it haven’t even watched it, which is a disturbing situation. I totally understand someone choosing not to watch a Jimmy Carr show because they find his humour offensive, but if they choose to avoid something and STILL get offended by it then how the fuck do they expect to manage when life delivers some actual problems on their doorstep?

[Raid]

I'm not going to watch it because Jimmy Carr really grates on me (that sodding laugh is unbearable), but was the humour stemming from the joke itself or the fact that he dared tell it?

[Mantis]

I always find it to be a case of both with him. He's very hit and miss for me though, a lot of the time I find that it's just shock factor and I don't actually find the joke part all that funny.

I generally wouldn't watch his routines normally. In this instance I watched the segment out of curiosity when it hit the news and it is quite a funny joke, albeit obviously hugely "offensive" too.

These shock factor comedians do use it as a crutch when they're actually not all that funny a lot of the time in my opinion. I think Frankie Boyle does it better than Jimmy Carr.

[Snowy]

I also hate cancel-culture, too much credence being given to the gutless whinings of cunts. I find them offensive, now will someone please silence them?

Watched it, laughed my arse off, move on please.

[Wrathbone]

I'm not going to watch it because Jimmy Carr really grates on me (that sodding laugh is unbearable), but was the humour stemming from the joke itself or the fact that he dared tell it?

Mostly the latter - he prefaces it by telling the audience to brace themselves. But the joke itself is playing on the fact Roma gypsies are still disliked by a lot of people, and while antisemitism is usually condemned, abuse against gypsies is often sidelined. I'm not going to pretend he was making a subtle or nuanced point about it, but it's clear from the delivery that suggesting the genocide of gypsies in the holocaust was a positive thing is meant to be an abhorrent and patently ridiculous stance, and yet loathing of gypsies is a stance taken by a disturbing proportion of the British public.

It's a joke made for shock value. That's what Jimmy Carr does.

I also hate cancel-culture, too much credence being given to the gutless whinings of cunts. I find them offensive, now will someone please silence them?

Yep. I find Nadine Corries' comments about it offensive, suggesting that something should be censored because she doesn't like it. I find the government's constant lies to the public and general incompetence offensive. Turns out being offended doesn't mean you get to make things exactly as you'd like them, otherwise Boris and his chums would have been lured underground and sealed in with tarmac many years ago.

[Raid]

Alright, I went and tracked it down just to see what the fuss was about, and I have to agree. In no way did I think that Jimmy Carr thinks the holocaust is funny, he was making a point. The humour stems from bringing up a reference to one of history's biggest atrocities at a comedy gig, not from the atrocity itself. The "joke" that people are talking about wasn't even the joke he was making; the tone of voice, the context, that was the joke, not the bit about people being murdered.

I still don't like Jimmy Carr much, but this feels like offense for the sake of it.