New laws would hold Netflix to account over Jimmy Carr’s Holocaust joke, minister says
The culture secretary has suggested new laws would hold to account streaming sites from airing jokes such as those made by Jimmy Carr about the travelling community and the Holocaust.
Carr issued a “trigger warning” to the audience at the beginning of his one-hour special, admitting his performance for a Netflix special entitled His Dark Material contained “terrible things”. In a widely-shared clip from the show, Carr joked about the horror of the Holocaust and “six million Jewish lives being lost”.
As a punchline, the 49-year-old then made a disparaging remark about the deaths of thousands of travellers at the hands of the Nazis.
Nadine Dorries, appointed culture secretary last September, has now suggested that in the future new laws would “hold Netflix to account” for such content.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast she said: “We are looking at legislation via the Media Bill which would bring into scope those comments from other video on-demand streaming outlets like Netflix.
“So it’s interesting that we’re already looking at future legislation to bring into scope those sort of comments.”
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Ms Dorries said the comments were “abhorrent and they just shouldn’t be on television”, but it was put to her that in a tweet in 2017 she had claimed that “left-wing snowflakes are killing comedy”.
She said: “Well, that’s not comedy. What Jimmy Carr did last night is not comedy.
“And you know, I’m no angel on Twitter, nobody is, but I just would like to say that nothing I’ve ever put on Twitter has been harmful or abusive.
“But that last night… Jimmy Carr’s comments, no one can call that, you know, snowflake or wokeishness, that’s just… it was just appalling.”
She said the comments were “shocking and abhorrent and unacceptable, not just because he was making fun on the basis of people who died in the most appalling circumstances, but on the pain and suffering of many thousands of families”.
The culture secretary told Times Radio: “We don’t have the ability now, legally, to hold Netflix to account for streaming that but very shortly we will.”
Historians estimate that between 200,000 and 500,000 Roma and Sinti people were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.
Many more were imprisoned, used as forced labour or subject to forced sterilisation and medical experimentation.
In a tweet referencing the joke, The Traveller Movement – a charity supporting the traveller community in the UK, said: “This is truly disturbing and goes way beyond humour".
The charity have now launched a petition to Netflix calling for the “removal of the segments of His Dark Material which celebrates the Romani genocide”.
In a tweet, Nadia Whittome, Labour MP for Nottingham East, has also urged Netflix to remove Carr’s “vile anti-GRT and antisemitic material”.
A representative for Carr has been contacted for comment.