Horrific public shaming that put the JOKE ON ME
His acid wit has made him one of Britain’s top comedians. Now in JIMMY CARR’s self-help memoir, he lays bare his secret neuroses – none more profound than his greatest humiliation of all . . .
HERE’S the thing about being human: if we put off anything risky for long enough, fear will attach itself. Then the fear attracts even more fear, until fear starts to obscure the thing you wanted to do in the first place. And when I was 26, what I feared most was quitting my job. After finishing my degree at Cambridge, I wound up in the marketing department at Shell.
The first weekend before I started, I got a phone call from a woman saying, ‘Do you have black trousers and black trainers?’ ‘I think I can get some black trainers,’ I said. ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘It’s the Italian Grand Prix and we sponsor it and we think you should fly out to Modena and be with us in the pits to look at some of the branding.’ And I went, ‘Yeah, I should, I should totally do that.’ I met the Ferrari legend Michael Schumacher on my first day and remember saying to him, ‘Oh hey, how are you doing, I work for Shell,’ and shaking his hand. Flying back in business class, I thought, ‘This has gone well.’
I’ll tell you what, I wouldn’t have thought about quitting to do comedy that week.
They sent us on Away Days where we would do exercises to do with trust or personality tests. I ended up at the Polish Centre in Hammersmith, where a guy named Ian McDermot ran an NLP course. I got lucky, he was a great guy and a wonderful teacher.
NLP, which stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming, sounds smarter than it is — remind you of anyone? No wonder I liked it right away. Doing these courses was a way of doing therapy on the cheap. For me, it was a revelation.
The big transition I made was to work out what I really wanted: to live to work. I wanted to do something that would be a part of my life, not just something I had to do in order to do the things I really wanted to do.
Alongside the NLP courses, I was looking for something to do outside of work. There’s a place called City Lit (an adult learning centre) and it runs a comedy course. I thought it looked interesting, I’d get to meet people I didn’t already know and it would be a fun thing to do on a Saturday.
The course was made up of three types of people — nutters, people who had an interest in standup, and nutters who had an interest in stand-up. I fell into the latter category.
ALL of them knew more about it than me. They knew what ‘the circuit’ was, what the unwritten rules of comedy were and they knew the names of a bunch of comics I’d never heard of. I didn’t even know how to hold a mic.
But I liked it and I started getting more and more interested in stand-up comedy.
It was late 1999 the first time I got up on stage. I told a few jokes and could see this glimmer, like ‘Oh, maybe I could do this.’ Just as I was aware I was done with being a company man, Shell offered me £5,000 in a voluntary redundancy scheme. Talk about comic timing.
I talked it over with one of my bosses and he encouraged me to leave. He was a musician. His wife had just died and he was bringing up his kid alone. It was one of those things where he was broken-hearted so intimacy was allowed.
It felt like I was getting out of prison, like I’d personally dug a tunnel and escaped, naked, to freedom through 500 yards of sewer. It was like the Beatles song: ‘Out of college, money spent, See no future, pay no rent, But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go . . .’
EveN 20 years ago, £5,000 wouldn’t go far. Luckily, I was living at home so I didn’t have to pay rent. I was a millennial before it was hip.
After a year, I had £300 left. After another couple of years, I had a date on The Tonight Show.
I mean, where would you rather be? Would you rather have a nice quiet desk job with security and a pension, or doing stand-up on America’s biggest talk show?
The first time I did The Tonight Show, I was 30. Jay Leno was hosting. I get called a hard worker, but this guy . . . Among his favourite sayings is: ‘If you have time to complain, you don’t have enough work to do.’
The Tonight Show is taped in front of a studio audience and they tape it ‘as live’. The stakes are raised because if you mess up a joke, they won’t edit it out. You’ve got five minutes and that’s it.
I started getting nervous. I couldn’t settle. I couldn’t eat, didn’t want to drink, yet I peed 500 times, then I did a little dry-heaving before deciding to walk around.
The other guest that day was Cameron Diaz. She was there to promote Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. She walked down the corridor with her people towards me. I stood there staring at her.
She said, ‘Hey, can you do me a favour?’
She was wearing an incredible backless dress with just two small strips of material covering her chest. She said, ‘If I lean forward . . . can you see my nipples?’ And I went, ‘What?’
And then she leant forward. Her dress sagged a little. And there they were, I could see her, uh, perfectly pert, uh boobs. I said, ‘Yeah, no, I can see them. I can see both, erm, both yer boobs.’ And she turned to her agent and said, ‘I’m gonna need some t** tape.’ They then proceeded to tape Cameron Diaz’s boobs to her dress. Again, she bent over to test the tape. And she was good to go. I gave her a thumbsup and made my face, the ‘I don’t know what to do with my face’ face which, incidentally, is the same as my ‘I just saw your nipples’ face.
My nerves? They were gone.
BUT my nerves came back when the Inland Revenue went after me for tax avoidance. What’s the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion? Two years in jail.
I got ‘the phone call’ from a paper on a Sunday afternoon in 2012. A guy says, ‘Hi, I’m a journalist, we’re running a story on you.’
I ran through every sin I’d ever committed. My immediate go-to is jokes. I’ve definitely said something terrible — that must be it.
But then the journalist says, ‘I’d like to talk to you about your tax planning . . .’
The story hit on Monday. At the time, I was recording a series of 8 Out of 10 Cats for Channel 4. That
morning, as I debuted on the front page of The Times, I walked into the writers’ room at 10 am as usual. Everyone took the mickey and that made the whole thing feel normal. There were lots of phone calls with accountants trying to work out exactly what I owed and how far back it went.
For the first time, finally, I was taking an interest in my accounts.
This was way too late. It was like locking the gate after the horse had bolted, been shot and turned into a glue stick.
Then things took a turn. On the Wednesday, the prime minister, David Cameron, broke off from the G20 Summit in Mexico. He came from a meeting with president
Barack Obama and 18 of the other most important leaders of the world, and he walked into a press conference where he spoke about nothing other than my personal tax affairs.
CaMErOn called me ‘morally reprehensible’. If a prime minister who implemented brutal austerity measures calls you ‘morally reprehensible’, you know you have a problem.
It is devastating to be the bad guy on the front page of the newspapers. I had an incredibly visceral response to being publicly shamed. I was having panic attacks, I wasn’t sleeping, it was overwhelming, I could barely function. all I could do was wander zombie-like through the week.
So you know what my partner and I did? We watched Downton abbey. It’s TV Valium. It was the comfortable, warm blanket I needed. Some people swear by heroin, but have they tried Downton?
Just to be clear, I was avoiding tax, using legal loop-holes. Whereas legendary comic Ken Dodd was a tax evader. Dodd got paid in cash for everything. When the police eventually searched his home they found a room full of banknotes.
In court Dodd said, ‘I told the
‘I still wake to panic attacks every day at 5am – my fall from grace ruined me’
Inland Revenue I didn’t owe them a penny because I live near the seaside.’ He was acquitted by a jury of his peers in Liverpool.
I admit, I may have indulged in some selfpity, because who else was going to pity me? What were people going to say, other than ‘Rich guy; pays what he owes.’
There’s a story about a prank Arthur Conan Doyle played. He sent out a letter to five of his friends saying, ‘We are discovered. flee.’ One of those friends disappeared and was never seen again. We’ve all done stuff.
I had to host a topical comedy show where the premise is: what’s the most talked about thing of the week? That’s not great, when you’re the most talked about thing that week.
You always think it’s the performer who did well on TV, but more often than not it’s the producer who has said something great beforehand. That person was Ruth Phillips, the producer. She said, ‘You just have to take it. Don’t come back with anything. You can’t win.’
That was good advice. In the end you just go, ‘Yup, sorry about that.’ Sometimes all you can do is a mea culpa. When it comes to money and super sketchy tax schemes, there’s very little compassion from anyone other than from people with more money than you. Insisting that what I did was not illegal was a weak-a** position and I knew it.
You want to know how much money I saved in tax? None at all. Despite a lot of effort. I was saving money for a rainy day. Hell, I was more prepared than Noah. They went back through everything. Everything.
I paid millions to HMRC for 12 years of back taxes. When you owe that much, if you walk past a homeless guy you think, ‘At least you’ve got nothing. I’m five years of solid touring away from being back at zero.’ (Incidentally, I’m not allowed to volunteer at the soup kitchen any more.)
And then HMRC told me, ‘You owe us interest on that money.’ And
I went, ‘But you only just told me . . . I only just got the bill.’ Jesus wept!
I tell you what I didn’t do when I got that bill, I didn’t stay at home and wallow. I couldn’t afford to. I called my manager and said, ‘Book 500 shows. And this time, don’t give me the money. Don’t even let me hold it.’
No one is complaining here. I took the phone call from my accountant about my impending financial ruin on my own tennis court.
However. There are moments in a scandal where you go, ‘Oh, I’m going to lose everything.’ When you realise you could lose all of it, you understand how lucky you are and how much you like your life.
SO, FOR that insight, thank you, HMRC. And I don’t even mind you charging for that life lesson, but may I humbly suggest your rates are a tiny bit, too unbelievably soul-crushingly high?
for me, the worry was less about the money and more about no longer being a comedian. Being someone that people come and see perform live is a privileged position. And that privilege is not for ever. I genuinely wondered if I’d ever be allowed to do stand-up again.
I still wake up to a panic attack every morning, around 5am. The disruption to my sleep pattern has stayed with me.
When shame is a part of an experience, it’s hard to feel like you have a right to anything.
I feel like I had a fall from grace but there was a bungee rope. So, I had the sensation of falling from grace, all of the sensation of losing everything, but then the bungee kicked in and I bounced back.
My experience has increased my powers of empathy and that’s no bad thing. Now that I know what that feels like, I’m very empathetic when people lose everything.
People f*** up. And people get crazy judgy when people f*** up. And here’s the thing: I will joke about anyone, I will joke all day long about s*** going down. But if someone’s your friend, if you know someone, you should be kind.
That experience gave me a new rule for life: be a good foul-weather friend. The world is full of fairweather friends. When you’re throwing a party, people will turn up. But who’s going to reach out when you’re being publicly denounced by your prime minister? Who is secretly happy you’ve been brought down?
James Corden called me around midnight that same day the story hit the papers. He was doing a Broadway run of his play One Man, Two Guvnors. He rang, just to check in, no judgement, just called to cheer me up. I wasn’t in great shape.
And then the next night, he called again. And the next night. He was and is a f***ing great guy. And frankly, I needed it. James Corden is a mensch.
So, a lesson I learned is if a friend is going through hard times, call, text, reach out. People don’t forget those friends. And if you don’t know what to say, just say, ‘I don’t know what to say.’ It’s all good.