Comedian Jimmy Carr, speaking about so-called cancel culture in Dublin on Wednesday, argued that “the overproduction of elites” was to blame for what he termed “woke” attitudes.
Best known for his stand-up and role on panel shows such as 8 Out Of 10 Cats, Carr was speaking to Alan Shortt at the 2025 Pendulum Summit held in Convention Centre Dublin.
“I’d be known as being not particularly politically correct,” Carr said, “but if you think about what caused woke to happen, it was the overproduction of elites. Which is what we’ve done. We’ve sent everyone to university, everyone’s got a degree.
“It’s the overproduction of elites and then not giving those elites the lifestyle that they thought was guaranteed that’s caused a certain amount of upset, to say the least,” he added.
The comedian, whose parents are from Limerick, came under fire in 2022 for highly controversial comments he made about the travelling community and the Holocaust in Netflix special His Dark Material, in a widely circulated clip from the show.
At the time Martin Collins of Pavee Point said: “These comments from Jimmy Carr go beyond racism, he actually glorifies genocide.”
Back then, Carr issued a “trigger warning” to the audience at the beginning of the one-hour special, admitting his performance contained “terrible things”.
Speaking further on elitism and third-level education at Wednesday’s conference, Carr said he “wouldn’t recommend kids going to university now unless they are going to study STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics]”.
“It’s not like having a degree in the 1950s when no one had a f**king degree. You’ve got the same as everyone else now, that’s the chips at the table. I think to do STEM it makes sense to go to university … but I wouldn’t recommend kids going to university now unless they are going to study STEM. Anything else, the books are available. They print the reading list. Just read the f**king books.”
Asked about the first time he was “cancelled”, Carr said he found it to be “a great filter”.
“I think when you get cancelled, it’s a filter, so you filter out your friends. It’s like a Brita filter for water, you just go, ‘Oh I thought that guy was my friend but actually he was gleeful at me being brought down a peg or two.’ It’s not the words of your enemies, it’s the silence of your friends.”
“Some people like mild comedy, some people like really edgy stuff. I think a sense of humour is very much like your taste in food. Some people like the spicy stuff, some people like it really bland. It’s the same with sexual preferences …”
Carr also pointed to what he called “the podcast election” in the US and “the success of Joe Rogan”, host of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, reflecting on the shifting role of comedy in contemporary culture.
“A lot of our culture is mediated by comedians, because it seems to be the last authentic voice in the room. If you run a corporation with more than 20 people in it, I’ll wager there’s some very bullsh*t language going on. There’s something very authentic about laughter, people don’t tend to fake laughter.”
