Boris Johnson's spokesman calls Gypsy joke 'deeply disturbing'

Downing Street has waded into the row over Jimmy Carr’s joke about the genocide of Gypsies in the Holocaust.

Boris Johnson's official spokesman said today: ‘Those comments are deeply disturbing and it's unacceptable to make light of genocide.’

However, The Traveller Movement have accused the government of hypocrisy over the issue, saying that while speaking out over the joke, it is pushing through laws on policing, nationality and elections which would ‘have disproportionately negative impacts’ on the community.

Campaigns manager Greg Sproston told The Guardian: ’If the government is serious about protecting and supporting these communities, they would scrap this discriminatory legislation.’

Asked whether Netflix should pull Carr’s stand-up show His Dark Material, which contains the joke, the No10 spokesman said: ‘That will be a matter for them. We are clear that mocking the atrocities of the Holocaust is unacceptable.’

Johnson himself, of course, has a long record of controversial comments about minorities made in the name of his idea of humour. He has called citizens of the Commonwealth ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ and said that women who wear burkas  ‘go around looking like letter boxes’

The Jimmy Carr controversy has also led to renewed calls for Ofcom to regulate streaming services such as Netflix. Its chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes said there would be ‘real value’ in the move.

Asked about Carr’s line on Channel 4 News last night, she said: ‘I can really understand why a lot of people found that very offensive.

‘We don't regulate Netflix at the moment, they're underneath the Dutch regulator. And I think that is a concern because it means that for viewers, it’s really confusing that they've got different standards applied, for example, to Channel 4 News than they have to YouTube and other services, including Netflix, that come streamed on to our TVs.’

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries has also indicated support for an expansion of Ofcom’s powers and said Carr’s comments were ‘abhorrent’ and ‘just shouldn't be on television’.

She has previously hit out against censoring jokes, claiming that ‘left-wing snowflakes are killing comedy’.  When challenged about this, she decided that what Carr said is ‘not comedy’.

There have also been calls for Carr to be prosecuted over the line.

Before telling the joke on his special, Carr said it could be ‘career-ender’ – and afterwards defended it as ‘educational’ for highlighting the Nazi massacre of Gypsies.

The line was: ‘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.’

Published: 8 Feb 2022