English Evolves Without Authority, but Comedy Demands Precision
Jimmy Carr argues that English evolves without any central authority: words gain meaning, change or disappear through collective use, as Victorian slang demonstrates. In conversation with Chris Williamson, Carr links that same organic quality to comedy, where the right phrasing, rhythm and omission make an audience supply the image or double meaning. Writer Harry Dry offers a counterweight, arguing that language works best when large ideas are expressed in small, clear words.
English changes without anyone being in charge
Jimmy Carr treats the Victorian terms less as a historical curiosity than as a reminder that English loses parts of itself without a formal decision. He calls it “the best example of anarchy”: nobody centrally determines which words count, what they mean, or when they cease to be used. Language, in his account, emerges from the group.
You never notice when something disappears, because it disappears.
The terms Chris Williamson supplies illustrate the kind of vocabulary Carr has in mind: expressions that once circulated widely enough to carry a shared meaning but now need glossing. Williamson defines tickety-boo as being in perfect order or satisfactory condition. A muffin walloper, he says, is an idle person who sits at home eating cakes and gossiping instead of cooking. Evening weezes means fake news—a phrase Williamson says “should be brought back.”
Carr’s broader point is that no institution has to repeal a word for it to vanish. Usage changes collectively, and vocabulary can be made, retained, altered, or abandoned without an official declaration. He extends that thought beyond language: some solutions, he suggests, cannot be imposed from the top down and instead have to be allowed to develop.
Simple words can still carry large ideas
Harry Dry is more skeptical of linguistic novelty than Carr. Dry says that if a date used lots of new vernacular, he would politely end the evening. His preference is for simple language, expressed in the maxim: “big things are best said in small words.”
The Victorian terms themselves show that economy need not mean plainness. Butter upon bacon, which Carr reads as “a hat on a hat,” means doing too much. Mafeking, Williamson says, means becoming wildly rowdy in the streets. Both compress a judgment or a scene into an odd, memorable image.
For Dry, the test is whether a few words can carry a large idea. He recalls liberté, égalité, fraternité as an example of how three substantial words can do consequential work, and argues that one does not need much more language than that, whether the task is revolution or selling soap.
Carr agrees with the narrower principle. Being able to explain a complex idea to a five-year-old may be a mark of intelligence, he says. If someone needs elaborate language, they may instead be “some kind of huckster” selling “bullshit.”
Their positions on change remain distinct. Dry dislikes much contemporary slang, while Carr describes language as an organic, decentralized system. But Dry’s preference is not for old words merely because they are old; it is for language that says the large thing in small words.
A joke must make the listener draw the cartoon
For Jimmy Carr, economy in comedy is not simply a matter of reducing word count. It is a problem of transmission: the comedian may know an idea is funny, but must find language that makes someone else see it. Rhythm matters, as do exact word choices and the image they produce in the listener’s mind.
The purpose of language [is] getting space in their head. Getting into their head and making them kind of, making them draw the cartoon.
That account distinguishes brevity from comic construction. The short jokes Carr offers—“Dwarf shortage” and “Stationery store moves”—depend on a phrase that asks the audience to infer a situation rather than receive it fully explained. The six-word story, “For sale. Children’s shoes. Never worn,” works through a more severe form of omission: its force lies in what the reader supplies.
The same method appears in Carr’s wordplay. “Stepdads. Motherfuckers” turns an ordinary label into a description by isolating the implication inside it. Carr’s point is not just that the line is short; it is that the connection was already contained in familiar language and becomes visible only when the phrasing removes everything around it.
His Trump example uses the same kind of delayed recognition. Carr says an attempted assassination nearly succeeded because nobody wanted to shout, “Donald, duck!” The warning and the name collide in a phrase that initially sounds absurd, then reveals the double meaning. Rhythm gives the listener enough time to hear the ordinary phrase before its second sense changes the first.
Carr therefore describes joke-writing as a search for the wording that carries an idea, produces a picture, and permits the turn to arrive at the right moment. Sometimes, he says, the joke feels as though it is already there; the work is “getting rid of everything else.”