Jimmy Carr: I almost died from meningitis in Ireland as a child
Comic tells of ordeal with brain bug
JIMMY Carr has revealed he almost died from meningitis in Ireland when he was a toddler.
The comic, 51, whose parents are from Limerick, said he was treated in hospital in the city as a youngster and was told he “nearly didn’t make it”.
Speaking on the podcast, Where There’s A Will, There’s A Wake with Kathy Burke, he said: “You’ve got to be cruel to be kind... I think that is the first thing I ever said that my mother thought was funny.
“I had meningitis when I was a child. So my first memory is a lumbar puncture in Limerick in the General [hospital]. I was three, I think, and... I was always told it was very close to death.
“The doctor sort of went, ‘it’s going to be very painful’.
“And somehow I’d heard the phrase, and I went, ‘you’ve got to be cruel to be kind’, in a little child’s voice.
“And I kind of appreciated that thing of life, because I was always told, ‘oh, you nearly didn’t make it’.”
Discussing how he would like to die now he’s older, he said: “I want my kids and the people that love me to [be able to tell a story like], ‘Oh, Jimmy died... funny story. He flew to South Africa and he went on one of those great shark cage experiences and he forgoed the cage.
“He said, ‘no cage for me, thanks. I’ll just jump in there with a fish’. And I was ravaged by sharks. That would be a way to go.” Jimmy added he has already had a close encounter with a reef shark.
He said: “I was swimming with a friend in Key West [Florida] and there were sharks in the water. And one sort of flipped around. We’d been swimming with these small sharks all day and we slightly misjudged the size of this thing.
“It was enormous and it flipped around and came at us.
“And then we got back on the boat and the guys went, ‘these are just reef sharks’. I went, ‘yeah, with the black tip on the fin’, and they went ‘oh, mate. Whoa’.
“But I think [being] torn apart by sharks and wanting it and going ‘I’ll do that’. That’s a great story for everyone.”