Jimmy Carr

James Anthony Patrick Carr was born on 15 September 1972 in Isleworth, London, the second of two sons in an Irish Catholic family from Limerick, and was raised in Farnham Common, Buckinghamshire, where the local culture was more suburban Home Counties than the clubland he would later conquer. He was bright enough to read Social and Political Sciences at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating in 1994 with a first-class degree and a conventional future already mapped out.

That future was marketing. Carr spent his early twenties as a marketing executive for Shell, living a life of suits, presentations and grey skies. It was not a disaster, but it was not him. After a close friend died in a car accident, he reassessed the comfortable path and, in the late 1990s, began attending a stand-up comedy course and writing jokes on index cards. After starting stand-up in 1997, Carr became a regular on the London circuit, including the Up the Creek club in Greenwich, and quickly gained recognition on the new-act scene.

The breakthrough television years came quickly. Channel 4 made him the host of The Big Fat Quiz of the Year in 2004 and then gave him the chair of 8 Out of 10 Cats in 2005, the show that would define him for more than a decade. He also fronted the US-style roast show Roast Battle, the relationship quiz Your Face or Mine?, and Netflix's The Fix. Meanwhile, his live career grew from club rooms to theatres to arenas, with tours including Funny Business, The Best Of, Ultimate, Gold, Greatest Hits, Terribly Funny and Laughs Funny.

Carr's career has not been without controversy. In 2012 he was revealed to have used a tax-avoidance scheme and was publicly criticised by the Prime Minister; he apologised, paid the tax, and joked about it ever after. In 2019 he and his partner, Channel 4 commissioning editor Karoline Copping, had a son. Known for an exceptionally high joke rate, he has become a fixture of British comedy — the high-speed joke engine with the strangulated laugh.