Jimmy Carr

"I suppose my ambition is to be rich and famous." Jimmy Carr looks unapologetically at us. "It's not very fashionable to say that these days, is it? You're meant to be a slacker. But I only wear suits and I'm very ambitious and I want to be rich and famous, so fuck 'em."

In the past year, a frequently recurring new face on our television screens has been that of comedian Jimmy Carr. You may have caught his appearances on the 11 O'Clock Show, where he cast his topical eye over the week's news. You may have seen him presenting E4's magnificently shambolic Drunk Review, in which he chaired a number of debates as other people cast their topical and inebriated eyes across anything they could think of. You may have seen him talking about current events on BBC's Liquid News, outshining the incredibly irritating Christopher Price. And you may even have been lucky enough to catch his recent outing on Channel 4's Comedy Lab, presenting Jimmy Carr's World Of Corporate Videos. So, just who is this incredibly ambitious, sharply dressed man, armed with killer one-liners and a permanently confused expression?

It's difficult to believe, given his current omni-presence headlining comedy clubs around the country, that Jimmy started in comedy a mere three years ago. Before that, he was working for an oil company, and was, as he puts it, "your typical middle class, uptight, doing quite nicely, career orientated, ex-Cambridge kind of nonsense. A parent's wet dream essentially." However, he was "very, very depressed" in his life, and following therapy and qualifying as a psychotherapist - "quite by accident" - he decided to try his hand at comedy. "I thought, I'm just going to go and do what I want. I got into this whole hippy dippy nonsense about wanting to have a life that I really liked and really enjoyed, and doing something that I thought was fantastic." He states categorically that he has never regretted making that decision. "If you can ask yourself, if you had a million pounds would you still be doing exactly the same thing? I can say with all honesty that I would."

Displaying a determination that he describes as "obsessive compulsive", Jimmy spent the first year of his comedy career going out "pretty much every night" to two or three different comedy clubs, watching other acts, performing in open spots and honing his on stage character. "So you get good quite quickly because you get four year's experience in the space of a year because you just keep going out and obsessively writing." He became quite interested in the science of comedy and the construction of jokes. "That's where the one liners come from," he explains, "the idea of cutting down the fat and just doing the funny lines. Not even needing the connection."

Following in the footsteps of comedians such as Steven Wright and Emo Phillips, Jimmy's publicity now proudly declares that he produces 'more one liners per minute than humanly possible' ("that's four, by the way"). However, in terms of his comedy influences, he cites people like Jonathon Ross, Clive James and Dudley Moore. "I think they're fantastic. really interesting and quirky and just very themselves." He says he recognises the limitations of the style of comedy he works in. "The really weird thing with Steven Wright is that he's absolutely the best comic in the world for 20 minutes. For an hour, he sinks down a few paces. With any of the one liner merchants - and I count myself among them - 20 minutes is what you can do. You need something else, rather than just bang - bang - bang. It's not an accident that it's ended up being 20 minutes; it's organically the time that people's concentration spans fit."

With that in mind, Jimmy has been branching out into television for the past couple of years. He began as a writer on the 11 O'Clock Show, where he also occasionally appeared on camera with his deadpan reports from political conferences. Working on the show, he met Ricky Gervais. "He is from Reading, I'm from Slough and he took the piss out of me and I took the piss out of him in a crazy comedy way." He began writing with Ricky, Steve Merchant and Robin Ince on the Meet Ricky Gervais show, and also worked with them on Come Together With Ricky Gervais for Play UK. He continues to write for various television shows, including Lily Savage's ITV vehicle Lily Live.

His favourite foray into television so far has been Drunk Review, which he worked on for E4. "I'd do the Drunk Review again in a heart beat because I think it's funny." On this show, Jimmy presided as chair over four people who debated social and political issues, with the twist that all the panellists were incredibly drunk. "I'm tee-total and a bit austere with people at times and I often appear to be very very rude when I actually genuinely don't mean to be. But it lends itself nicely to the Drunk Review." The producers of the show are currently considering developing the format of the show to become a game show, but, Jimmy says, "legally it's quite difficult getting people that drunk." As an example, Jimmy cites one of the Reviews recorded covering the topic of religion. "We could never ever air it, and it was the funniest one. Because it was all blasphemous - and really quite blasphemous and horrible - this girl on there was just so drunk. She was just wittering on about the fact that Mary Magdeline had obviously fucked Christ, that much was clear. it was just the most blasphemous thing."

More recently, Jimmy appeared on the most recent series of Channel 4's Comedy Lab, with Jimmy Carr's World Of Corporate Videos, which also elicited his "proudest moment". At the end of the programme, which showed clips from genuine corporate videos from the 1970s, they ran a spoof trailer for a soundtrack album, 'Best Corporate Video In The World Music Ever Volume 2'. A couple of weeks after the programme aired, the producers received a hand written letter that had been forwarded by Channel 4, from someone asking for a copy of the album. "I can't believe someone watched that and went, 'yeah, that'll be real'. And not only 'that'll be real', but 'that would be quite good music, I'd imagine. I wouldn't mind sticking that on in my Cavalier'."

2001 has been a particularly busy year for Jimmy, as he also appeared for the first time at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, as part of Rubbernecker. "I think the best review that we got was that someone called me an 'ersatz Steven Wright', which was great. Because no one knows what ersatz means. It was in Metro and they've used the same word three times in that issue. It's clearly the guy with word for a day toilet paper. I'm thinking of putting it on next year's posters, because although it means 'a cheaper, lesser version', who's to know?" He has big plans for his 2002 Edinburgh appearance, when he plans to bring up his first hour long solo show. At the time of the interview - early December 2001 - he had already done three previews of the show (at a time when most comedians are still struggling to recover from the previous festival). He has recognised the limitations of only performing an hour's worth of the material he currently performs on the circuit. "There are quite a few people that do an hour of stand up really well, but it's their style. You watch Ross Noble for an hour, an hour's not enough. If you watch me for an hour, I think you'd be reaching for the valium, or maybe something a bit stronger." He is remaining secretive about the content of his new show but promises that it's "all hilarious".

So, as to his ambitions for the future - does he really aspire to richness and fame? "A by-product of this job is that you get famous. It's almost a way of keeping score. If someone recognises me on the street, that means I must have a bit of a following. It's difficult to tangle them out. I suppose I see being rich and famous as being a successful comedian."

Check out www.jimmycarr.com"

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