Petition to remove Jimmy Carr's Holocaust joke from Netflix reaches 14,000 names

A petition urging Netflix to remove a segment from Jimmy Carr’s latest stand-up special has been signed over 14,000 times.

The comedian has faced intense backlash in recent days after a joke from his December 2021 Netflix special, His Dark Material, went viral.

In the clip, Carr, 49, says people ‘never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis’ in the Holocaust, because ‘no one ever wants to talk about the positives’.

Carr, who himself described the joke as a ‘career-ender’ on stage, has been condemned by Traveller and Roma charities, anti-fascist organisations, several MPs and even Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

A petition by charity The Traveller Movement is urging Netflix to remove the joke from His Dark Material, describing it as ‘nothing short of a celebration of genocide’.

It goes on: ‘Hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, Roma, and Traveller people were killed in the Holocaust. Roma people call it “Porajmos”, meaning “the devouring”.’

A spokesperson added: ‘We appreciate that comedy is subjective but in our view when punchlines are indistinguishable from the genuinely-held views of fascists and Neo-Nazis, a line has very clearly been crossed.’

Launched on Friday, the petition has so far garnered over 14k signatures and continues to gain traction online.

Following the Prime Minister’s spokesperson condemning the joke, The Traveller Movement wrote on Twitter urging him to do more, writing: ‘Boris Johnson has called @jimmycarr’s “joke” deeply disturbing but has not called on @NetflixUK to tackle and remove harmful and racist content!’

They asked followers to sign and share the petition, as ‘the more people we can get to sign, the more pressure we can put on @NetflixUK and @jimmycarr to apologise and take down his comedy special’.

The petition, titled ‘Jimmy Carr: The Genocide of Roma is Not a Laughing Matter’, has seen major support from other charities such as Show Racism The Red Card and The Runnymede Trust.

‘When people talk about the Holocaust…’ he began, as the audience gasped and he looked down at them, nodding.

He continued: ‘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.’

This statement prompted shocked reactions from his audience, as well as laughter and clapping.

Carr went on to explain why he thought it was a ‘good joke’, saying that it was ‘f**king funny’, ‘edgy as all hell’ and because it had an ‘educational quality’.

At the start of the special, Carr warned his audience about the contents of his show, saying: ‘Trigger warning. Tonight’s show contains jokes about terrible things.

‘Terrible things that may have affected you and the people that you love. But these are just jokes. They’re not the terrible things.’

It is estimated that between 200k and 500k Roma and Sinti people were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Metro.co.uk has reached out to reps for Jimmy Carr and Netflix for comment.

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