You can always find some bloke in the pub who is a conspiracy theorist about Jimmy Carr’s laugh. I encourage you to find this person wherever you can. It is a peculiarly British delusion: a collective belief that Jimmy Carr somehow altered his own laugh for reasons that are unclear. (“It means he gets more time on screen, mate. It means the editors cut to him doing the laugh whenever there’s messy footage they have to clean up. It’s not a real laugh, mate! Yeah, Peroni please if you’re having one.”) There is something magical even about the words “Jimmy Carr’s laugh”. Just by typing them I can make you hear an echo of it in the back of your mind: like a seal bark refracted through the horn of a clown car. You can detect it, can’t you? Sit in a silent room and try it. Listen closely. Now: “Jimmy Carr’s laugh”. There it is. Ah ah ahh!
Anyway, he’s back this week, doing another one of his shows. You know how it goes: he stands there in a suit, makes that hand gesture you watch to know when he’s about to hit a punchline, he says some of the most soulless jokes you’ve ever heard in your life, he takes too long to explain what’s going on. The format this time is called Battle in the Box (23 July, 9pm, U&Dave) and, like many British TV shows that don’t ever get renewed, it’s based on a Korean format: two teams of celebrities are locked in a long container for 24 hours with nothing but a toothbrush. The rival groups can hear each other speak, sort of, and can almost banter through the partition wall that separates them. They do little party games and whoever wins gets to earn “Boxcoins” to buy luxuries like a bed, a takeaway, a massage, a sound bath. They also get to move the wall into enemy territory, squashing them in. They try to do banter through the wall again. It feels like two separate floors of a halls of residence having a squabble because no one is old enough to know how to flirt. After an hour, Jimmy Carr sits at a table, does one of his jokes (“The box is 10 metres long, three metres wide, and with less privacy than your mum’s OnlyFans account” – mmm, OK, yeah, good one), and you are encouraged to return next time, for more.
I think I am biased against Battle in the Box because it contains one of my pet peeve TV tropes: I just hate watching people be in bed. This has always made me feel strange, ever since the early Big Brother days, but it continues into many reality formats where I have to watch someone yawn while wearing a necklace mic beneath a flimsy single duvet. Entertaining television is made when people with a lot of energy are having a conversation they are 100% committed to, and barely small talk-level stuff is made when people are sat in their pyjamas and chatting on that strange grey-black night vision. That’s quite often what opening contestants Seann Walsh and Joe Swash descend into when they are waiting for their next game. I say “game”; one of the things they have to do in the box is not touch the floor and not laugh, and every time they do they lose a point. I remember going to sixth birthday parties (to clarify: as a six-year-old) that had more entertaining games than this. It makes your body hum with craving for just one little bit of Taskmaster.
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I am also biased against Battle in the Box because of, well, the presence of Jimmy Carr. This is my conspiracy theory about his laugh, by the way: you only notice its honking omniscience if you have personal feelings against Jimmy Carr, which I very much do. I just don’t understand how he’s the only host for stuff like this. There are 67 million people in this country: is there really no one else about? But then I suppose the modern surge for “TV formats young comedians can be sort of funny on” is the path forward here: the United States has a clear structure to build comic superstars (basement dive bars>SNL>billion-dollar sitcom) where we’ve always struggled to put our funny voices on screen. Formats such as this, however flimsy, do at least do that. We’re building the person who will eat Jimmy Carr’s career by making Jimmy Carr host the show that will eventually make them famous. I can take some solace in that, at least. One more time, shall we? Ah ah ahh!