Or, for those with a bigger English vocabulary: Is Jimmy Carr a misogynist?

The short answer would be: NO

But I’m sure you would like to see some more evidence, from the defence. Below is just a collection of stuff that I’ve picked up, while bimbling around for my research.

It’s tricky to write something like this without sounding sycophantic – but what the heck. It’s intended as an antidote to the plethora of text written from the other perspective (explained a little more in the final paragraph, about myth-busting posts).

Origins?

The problem we have is that the people that think he is a misogynist are a mixture of (1) can’t separate the person from the stage persona and/or (2) haven’t watched a decent amount of his work and/or (3) have never actually met him.

In fact, it’s often just the one video that forms their opinion.

Example: Couple of years ago one of his crowd work clips featured him roasting a lady about her job. Someone that wasn’t a fan and didn’t really know a lot about what he does saw it and circulated it around her group – with the scream of misogyny!!

She didn’t have the perspective of looking at a clip that he’d posted a couple of days before of him having a very similar “conversation” with a bloke.

If a comedian tells you that he’s an “equal opportunities” offender then you cannot just watch ONE interaction or joke and then pass judgement. A bit of research is needed.

And the other thing they are overlooking is that for probably getting on for 25 years he’s ENCOURAGED crowd engagement. There are interviews from his early days where particularly aggressive heckles have occasionally thrown him a little (being heckled ON to the stage can surprise anyone!) – but he soon toughened up, got a bunch of responses in his arsenal and then built on that.

The people that buy tickets to his shows KNOW this interactive element is there and enjoy it. You can read comments on every platform that say “going to see Jimmy tonight and have front row tickets – wish me luck”. It’s basically a badge of honour to verbally spar with him, even if you do get called a C U Next Tuesday at the end.

And let’s not overlook the (rising) number of female audience members that demand that he “get your c**k out”. Or just flash their naked undercarriage at him (see this video).

Which all means, regardless of who you are, if you call out, at a show, then you are entering into a kind of verbal contract and have to accept that things may not go the way you might hope.

Supportive of Women?

How about behind the scenes? Apart from his long-term partner (more on her, below) what do his female working relationships look like?

• His Manager – Hannah Chambers – been with her since she first signed him in 1999 (here)
• Best friend at Cambridge? – Lucy Greeves – co-wrote The Naked Jape with her (here)
• Before & Laughter – the audio book director role and work on 92bpm presentation rhythm – Amanda Baker (here)
• Rosetta Stone of Comedy – code name for a soon to be released book he’s been working on, re how to write and perform comedy (here) – Amanda Baker and Abi Grant
• Career advancement? – Katherine Ryan, grateful for him helping her get involved in great projects (here). Made many, many TV shows with him (here).
• Stepping aside – he handed his Cats Countdown hosting role over to Katherine Ryan, for S16 Ep1 (2018). To mark 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage the show was ALL female.
• Women in comedy – he’s spoken several times about encouraging more women into comedy (both live and on TV). Here, in 2011, he’s praising Sarah Millican.
• Generosity with material – Nikki Glaser. Told Howard Stern that Jimmy had given her a great joke, for the Roast of Tom Brady (here).

Out in the real world there are also posts / comments from all kinds of people, from all walks of life, saying how kind and polite he is in person. The Instagram Series (here) has a lot of examples – as do the posts from young women that have had him in their Pilates / Lagree classes, posting enthusiastic, smiling selfies and accepting tickets to a gig.

No one that actually knows the man has ever called him a misogynist.

Here are a couple of longer colleague “testimonials” …so to speak

Sara Pascoe – Predators in Entertainment

2023 Daily Mail article (here) after several female comedians spoke out about predators, within the entertainment industry:

…she stresses that the vast majority of people working in comedy are decent people – even going to some lengths to defend Jimmy Carr, whose comedy she clearly has ‘issues’ with…

‘He is a fascinating person,’ she says. ‘You won’t find a female comedian who doesn’t have an example of Jimmy helping them. There are people who do lip service and people who actually help.’ 

It was Carr, she says, who encouraged her to interview sex workers while she was researching material on sex as opposed to simply talking on their behalf. ‘

He said: “Use your platform for good.” No one would ever think that’s what Jimmy Carr is talking about backstage at 8 Out of 10 Cats”

This was slightly abridged – see the link if you want the full length version. Sara’s TV appearances, with Jimmy, are here.

Sarah Millican – BFQ story

In Sarah’s 2017 book – How To Be Champion she tells a story about the 2014 Big Fat Quiz promotion and trying to pose, to look smaller, in a group photo.

Jimmy was in the middle with Sarah and a “wafer thin” Mel B on the other side. Sarah explained:

…I tucked a boob behind Jimmy Carr. And because I love the man and thought he would like to know, I told him.

I said quietly “I’m just tucking a boob behind you, Jimmy” and he said “Oh, good Lord”

Sarah has worked alongside Jimmy, on TV, for 20+ years (here) and is also with Chambers Management. Not just work colleagues – there’s clearly also a lot of affection there.

G K Barry – appearing on Jimmy Carr’s Am I The A**hole?

Yahoo article – here. She said:

“I was so nervous when I met him. But he was lovely to me, and we managed to get off to a good start as he also met my dog Noodle, kindly stroking her.

“When we started shooting, it was obvious how nervous I was, but Jimmy tried to help me out. He would ask for my opinion because I was a little bit scared to interject.

“He made me feel comfortable so I could relax and say my piece.”

And some other things…

Menopause & older women in society

Start of this compilation – talking about maiden, motherhood and the crone. Celebrating older women and the mothering instinct.

Natural Born Killer, 2024, “Consent”

In his 2024 Netflix special, NBK (here) he did a piece that he’d been honing on the tour about consent. Each night he picked a young man from the audience to talk through getting consent. I’ll let you watch the video.

2^nd Wave Feminism

He’s outed himself as a 2^nd wave feminist (here) and these other videos (here).

These are videos with lots of comments underneath about “he doesn’t think <<insert minority>> should have the same rights as white women”. Pretty sure he supports ALL women and is just not a fan of having complicated hierarchies that cause division.

Regularly recommends Mary Harrington and Louise Perry (see Booklist here), especially to young men in his audience.

His mum…

Yes, he tells a lot of “your mum” jokes, but he was very close to his mother and devasted when she died. Posts containing a mention of Nora are here.

Sweet Karoline Ba Ba Baa

Last, but not least. In his book Before and Laughter (here) the epilogue chapter starts with a story about how his manager, Hannah, called to tell him that Thames TV wanted him to audition for a TV show pilot.

He describes himself as “…just starting out, a jobbing stand-up doing the circuit” and, as he went in, he saw Karoline, who was a Producer at Thames, back then (around 2001).

For him, he knew that she was “the one”, whereas she took some winning over and wrote notes on him that said he was a “one note comedian with the eyes of a rapist”.

He describes calling Hannah afterwards and said he couldn’t work with the girl because she’s fantastic but he “couldn’t concentrate around her”.

Hannah’s response was “Who is this? Put Jimmy on the phone”.

There’s more to the chapter (if you haven’t already read it, buy the book!) but does any of this sound like a man that hates women?

For 25+ years he’s told jokes about “my girlfriend”, some of which he’s said “she’s not going to like that one”. And yet they have children, dogs and cats and regular date nights…if he took his persona home at night, would their relationship have lasted so long?

And finally…

Still think he’s a misogynist?

If I’ve not convinced you then all I ask is that you watch a variety of his comedy and put some thought into how many different angles on people and situations he deploys, in his material.

May 2026 this clip was posted about “who is your favourite Lord of the Rings character” and there is an astonishing number of people getting upset about him “insulting Tolkien” with the joke. Clearly, they haven’t seem Fackham Hall, but this is a good example of how some peeps will laugh along with a comedian – until a joke is told about “their thing”.

Remember…equal opportunity offender. Loves his job. Just trying to make you laugh.

Myth-busting – why?

People ask search engines (old school) and chat bots all kinds of questions. Things like is Jimmy gay? Is he sexist? Has he had a hair transplant? You get the gist.

The problem is that those responses could have a biased slant as many of the chatbots have been shown to predominantly trawl left-leaning sites and social media. Not wanting to get into the political weeds here – but this is a comedian that is NOT popular (generally) with left-leaning media.

These myth-buster posts attempt to find videos, quotes etc. (from both Jimmy and other people) and then present some actual factual evidence.

As the number of posts was growing, I’ve incorporated a tag of Myth-busting. This is a slightly different subset to those posts about Factual Inaccuracy (here) or Nonsensical AI (here).

Click here to view Myth-busting all posts.