Jimmy Carr: Funny Business

This is excruciating. I couldn't manage it all the way through. It seems to have been cobbled together from jokes that have been doing the rounds for years. It's lazy comedy. If you have been living in a bunker underground for the past few decades it might be amusing, but then again, so might a urethroscopy.

Jimmy Carr has been described as "the hardest working man in comedy" but apparently didn't seem to have put much original effort into his latest show Funny Business which came across more like a best-of than anything else.

With a timid crowd today in the Netherlands, Carr just seemed to be working through his routine, offering little in the way of freshness or unexpected pun. With at least a quarter of the jokes coming from previous shows, Carr failed to impress his audience with his all heard before routines and curious lack of oomph. Especially his patented laugh, ordinarily a source of amusement, seemed off timed and calculated which added to the staleness of the performance.

It was especially the second part of the show that failed to impress; jokes were often either something he already did or an obvious variation of them. As a result, the audience didn't seem too eager to offer him the heckles he could work with. Some were so painfully terrible, even Carr must have noticed he simply wasn't reaching us with his rehashed material.

Truly disappointing..

My early memories of Jimmy Carr are that he was consistently offensive and crude, often uncomfortably so. While his latest stand up is both of these, I don't feel he is as edgy as he used to be. Don't get me wrong, he is much more offensive than your average stand-up comedian I just feel he has curbed it slightly.

He has a knack of dividing audiences; he is very much a love him or hate him kind of comedian. His approach to jokes is to appear very sensitive and then follow it up with a crude punchline. He is consistently good at this, making the build up to each joke tense, as you know he is about to produce something that will make you laugh but at the same time make you cringe!

Jimmy Carr has a history of performing to small audiences, despite being a big enough name to sell out arenas, he chooses to do smaller, intimate gigs to interact with the audience on a more personal level. Funny Business is no different; he often uses the audience, involving them in jokes and embarrassing them. He has a section where he shares jokes with the crowd which the audience have sent in themselves and also invites the crowd to openly heckle him, this is easily one of the funniest parts of the show.

If you like previous Jimmy Carr stand ups, you will enjoy this – there is no question about that. It's shorter than most gigs with a run time of around 60 minutes, I would have liked for it to be a little longer as it really did fly by. Some of his jokes don't quite hit the mark for me, but when they do, they do so really well. He's crude, edgy and offensive, if you're easily offended, don't bother watching this. Thankfully, I'm not, so for me it was a solid show – not his best, yet still comfortably above average.

7/10

If you get easily offended, you won't like this show. If you sometimes get offended, you won't like this show. If you never get offended, you'll absolutely love this show.

Jimmy Carr is a notorious divider of audiences. With his jokes he severely pushes the limits of ethics and morality, and makes jokes of subjects that most other comedians (even in today's society) wouldn't even touch with an iron rod. And for the most parts of the show this approach works brilliantly.

I'm not generally a big fan of stand up comedians that uses explicit sexual contents as a basis of their stand up routine. Mostly because I find that jokes on the subject usually's delivered in a very crude and unsophisticated manner. But Jimmy Carr manages to turn a simple sex joke that normally would be used for shocking effect and cheap laughs into comedy art. His confidence and timing is just that good.

In this routine he involves the audience quite a bit via his amazing observational comedy, which he is very well known for in Britain. He asks audience members a bunch of mundane questions and perceives to destroy them after receiving their answers. Perhaps not very original, but nevertheless very amusing. He also does a bit where he includes the audience in a way that I for one haven't seen before. I won't reveal the gimmick in this review, other than to say it worked fantastically and made me laugh out loud.

Personally I've never much enjoyed heckling in stand up routines, and Jimmy has quite a big segment in the show devoted to it. This was the only part of the show that really didn't work for me. Not because of Jimmy's abilities to cope with the material being thrown at him, but rather that people in the audience only shouted stuff where the only correct response would be: "something, something 'Your mom!'". And for the most parts that was what his response was.

All in all a very entertaining show, good for loads of laughs. I think I can say with a fair amount of certainty: You'll either love or hate this show. I, for one, loved it.

He got heckled. His response was a "your mum" joke.

This was a schoolboy making jokes kind of trash. Not a supposedly professional comedian. The other part is that his entire performance seemed forced, his laugh was terrible and he specifically mentioned it - was it supposed to be some sort of joke? And 70% of the jokes were sex jokes, which is where we get back to the schoolboy. Utterly boring.

Dave Chappelle, Jim Jeffries, there are infinitely better Netflix comedy specials out there.