Jimmy Carr talks ahead of Birmingham show

The deadpan master of dark humour has also become a household name through his work on the Channel 4 panel show 8 Out of 10 Cats and The Big Fat Quiz of the Year.

He’s back on the road after gathering a selection of his very best jokes along with brand new material for the ultimate comedy show. Jimmy will headline Birmingham’s Symphony Hall tomorrow in The Best of, Ultimate Gold, Greatest Hits Tour.

A man who has devoted his life to crafting perfect jokes and has left a trail of laughter in his wake, his new tour will distill everything we love to laugh at and be shocked by, into one unparalleled night of entertainment.

During his years in stand-up, Jimmy has performed nine sell-out tours, playing nearly 2,000 shows to over two million people across four continents. He’s won the British Comedy Award for Best Live Stand-Up Tour and been nominated for the Perrier Award.

At the start of his career, Jimmy had no plans to work in TV. “I had no aspiration as a kid at all. If I’d known that it was possible to work in television, I would have wanted to be a producer; but I didn’t know anyone in that world. It wasn’t an option.

“Instead I took the line of least resistance. I grew up in middle-class Berkshire, so I was obviously going to do A Levels and try to get to the best university possible.

“The fact I’ve lost my Catholic faith would probably come as the biggest surprise.

“I got to Cambridge and then worked way too hard to get a job in marketing for a blue-chip company. It was amazing that at no point during those years did I think, ‘What the devil am I up to?’

“My young self would be a bit shocked that in my mid-20s I made a conscious decision to do something completely out of the ordinary. I left my well-paid job to join the circus.

“The whole being-on-television thing would seem a bit surreal to my younger self. I think I’d also be a bit concerned at the lack of work I do: I only have to do two hours a day max to be considered the hardest working man in comedy.

“I was a little bit melancholy as a youngster but I’m a lot happier now. Doing comedy makes me happy.”

Jimmy has taken his show around the world and has proved a hit in Japan. He was thrilled to fly out to the Land of the Rising Sun.

“I desperately wanted to go to Japan. My promoter friend and I are obsessed with food. So we were looking at places to go and tour with amazing restaurants so we can go and eat some amazing food. And Tokyo was number one on our list. We basically put it in the tour so we could eat incredible Japanese food. It is the best in the world. If you like watching documentaries on people making sushi, which I do, who doesn’t want to go to Japan?”

In an age of observational comedy, Jimmy is happy to go it alone and tell jokes. He has no axe to grind and just likes making people laugh.

“In this day and age people don’t do one-line jokes. There’s an American tradition of telling people about their lives. But I don’t mean it. It’s not like I’m telling jokes but there’s a message there. I have no axe to grind. I’m an entertainer. I’m not trying to be a wise man. My thing on controversy is it’s an easy story on a slow news day. I never apologise for jokes. At most I’ve said sorry you’re upset. It was a joke! I’m only joking. I’m not making a serious political statement; I’m just making you laugh.

“You have to be respectful of the right to be offended but I will joke about anything as long as the joke is good enough to warrant it. There’s got to be a gut-wrenching laugh. My favourite noise in comedy is a laugh followed by an intake of breath. Because a laugh is a reflex. A sharp intake is their conscience saying they shouldn’t have laughed at that. The audience regulate comedy in a way that doesn’t happen in other art forms. If the audience don’t laugh it wasn’t even a joke, it was just two sentences strung together. Ultimately they are the arbiters of taste and decency and what’s funny.”

Jimmy’s new show deals with many of the funniest jokes he’s ever told and he’s perfectly happy to return to that material. He thinks people will enjoy hearing the best gags again – just as rock fans love listening to their favourite band’s hits.

“I’m quite an old fashioned comedian in a strange way, because not many people do one liners anymore – not many people do jokes. They might do a long story that’s got a lots of laughs along the way and then a big punch line at the end and if you’ve heard that before, you know where it goes and the surprise is done. But when you’re telling three, four gags a minute, I think you can go back. People forget them.

“People tell me my own jokes. It’s one of my favourite things: at the end of the show there’s always a signing and people kind of go “I’ve got one you’re going to love” and you go ‘Yes – that’s from my second DVD!’ It’s a lovely thing when they live on in someone else’s head. It’s quite sweet. But I’m not frightened by it because I’ve sort of been doing best-of shows on the quiet for years – they’re called corporates.”

Perceptions of Jimmy have changed over the year. Once he was thought of as the dark prince of comedy, an enfant terrible who’d tell scandalous gags. However, opinions towards him have mellowed – even though his material hasn’t. He’s happy to no longer be in the spotlight – and even happier that he’s more successful than ever.

“I’m probably bigger now than I’ve ever been, but it’s less of a story. I can sell lots of tickets, I can play shows, but it’s kind of under the radar. But it’s when you’re on the up and you’ll be famous in a year, everyone comes to see you. I think it’s because it’s almost irritating: ‘Who’s this new guy? He’s come from nowhere!’ I was really conscious of this one year, when I was on Channel 4 like four nights a week and people were like ‘what?’. Now if I do that, people just go ‘oh yeah, course he is.’”

Jimmy’s appetite for comedy started at an early age. During his school years, he was part of a gang where the objective was to make one another laugh.

“If you weren’t funny at school, you weren’t one of our friends. That taught me to handle hecklers. Having a good sense of humour was how you’d be in the group. Everyone was just very, very good. That really has been a lifelong love of mine – taking the piss and knowing where to draw the line. If someone heckles me now I just think, ‘OK, here we go. I’ve been doing this for years!’” And though he’s now thought of as being one of the hardest working men in showbusiness, in fact, he used to work much harder.

“I really enjoyed working after university in advertising and marketing. I’d tell myself at 16 it is nice to have a relatable and normal life. If you go straight into showbusiness you are never really grateful for how easy it is. And it is really easy. When you start doing comedy it is the first time you are self-employed so you think you are never going to do any more gigs than this – so you do all of them. I remember for the first four years in comedy I was doing upwards of 300 gigs a year. If someone asked me if I wanted to go to Plymouth for £60 I’d say yes. I was paying my dues.”