I’ve written about the phenomenon of superficially “edgy” yet conformist, pc comedians here (and elsewhere) but you guys go right ahead, too!
Seriously, though, it looks like another one has bitten the dust:
At the end, Carr finally addressed the Unspeakable Subject about which he’d earlier refused to wisecrack. He asked us if we knew about Charlie Hebdo. He said that its editors had been killed for doing just what he does — making jokes. And who had killed them? Muslims? Jihadists? Terrorists? No, Carr didn’t use any of those words. I don’t remember exactly what word he did use; it was some general term like “maniacs” or “jackasses.” He then announced that his last joke would be a tribute to Charlie Hebdo. So he went ahead and told it. And I didn’t get it. It involved a reference to some children’s game that I’d never heard of — perhaps it’s an English game that never made it to the States, or an English name for some game I do know. In any event, the thrust of the joke was that when you go into a mosque and you see the rows of men prostrated in prayer, it reminds you of kids playing that game.
And that was it. That was the joke. I didn’t find it side-splitting, to say the least, and even the rest of the audience, which had been eating out of his hand all evening, plainly found it anticlimactic. But the main point is that he genuinely seemed to think that this feeble gag amounted to a courageous poke at the Religion of Peace. At a time when Norway, Britain, and most of Western Europe are experiencing what (it’s increasingly clear) can only be called conquest, this was as close as this supposedly fearless comic dared come to making the invaders a butt of his humor.
