As I’m sure you’re aware, Carr has been roundly criticized for a joke about the holocaust. In a Netflix special he suggests that the upside of the genocide of 6 million Jews is the killing of thousands of Romani people. Carr defends his joke directly after and many comedians have come out to argue that comedy should be judged by different criteria.

Ricky Gervais has argued a kind of extreme intentionalism in saying that jokes are just ‘wiggly lines on a paper’ and it’s the intention that matters. What do you think? Do you think it matters what Carr’s intentions were, or is the subject matter intrinsically offensive?