In the not-so-distant past, you would have had to bribe most people to get them to confess to being committed users of the social media site Reddit. As a Redditor of several years, let’s just say that I didn’t use to be particularly vocal about my daily consumption of “subreddits” (individual communities on the site) such as Malicious Compliance (mistakes people make at work, passive-aggressively), or the fairly self-explanatory Am I The Asshole? (AITA). These days, though, Reddit isn’t just for people who live in basements – everyone seems to be on there, rubbernecking in threads like Open Marriage Regret or just indulging in TV fandom. And now they’re even making TV shows based on it.
Jimmy Carr’s Am I the A**hole? (asterisks aside, no one in the programme can decide whether it’s pronounced “asshole” or “arsehole”) isn’t the first television show based on a subreddit – that award goes to the CW’s Two Sentence Horror Stories – but it may just be the laziest. The concept is simple: members of the public, who may or may not be online content creators, tell a story of possible assholery to host Carr and panellists GK Barry and Jamali Maddix in front of a studio audience. The trio then decide who is the biggest asshole (arsehole?) of the day, gently ribbing them in the process (sometimes not-so-gently, too – this is Mr Bad Taste, Jimmy Carr, after all). Imagine if Would I Lie to You? was 50% less wholesome and you’ve got the general shape of the thing. It is, says Carr, “the show that does for arseholes what Naked Attraction did for, well, arseholes”.
The issue, though, isn’t that Am I the A**hole? often verges into shock territory (Carr is seemingly contractually obligated to make a paedophile joke at least once an episode), but rather that none of it makes any sense whatsoever. In no particular order, here are some of the things that might get you dubbed an asshole/arsehole on the show: going halves on a first date; purposely ruining someone’s haircut because you think they’re an arsehole; dumping someone via text; riding an electric scooter to work; putting pubes in someone’s food; and giving psychic readings that have ended friendships. Clearly, some of these things are more consequential (and mean) than others. But in the topsy-turvy, weirdly judgey world of Am I the A**hole? they all get equal billing and solicit the same impassioned debates between the panellists. Two episodes in, I became convinced that the original title of the show must have been Am I Being Unreasonable? (AIBU), another subreddit similar to AITA, but also the title of a Daisy May Cooper comedy. Because there’s absolutely no way that telling your little sister that Santa isn’t real – or, er, vaping – makes you an arsehole in the same way that blocking your fiancé on social media or telling your date that they’re fat does.
As with much TV these days, the presence of online content creators (including a pair of identical twins that Maddix likens to Jedward) cheapens the whole thing, and feels unnecessary. Really, this is a show about the internet that seems to have no meaningful relationship to it at all, instead occupying an almost-dated corner that made me think of Cards Against Humanity or early Vice, when being ironically cruel and outre was par for the course. By the time we got to the arrival of “nude butler slash personal trainer who works in finance and lives off quadruple vodka Red Bulls”, I started to wonder whether I had genuinely teleported back to 2011.
Strange and retro as it may be, I do think Barry, Maddix and Carr – yes, even Carr, as he makes another joke about pervy stepdads – are great at what they do. Barry in particular is a perfect mix of hype-woman for the more put-upon contestants, while also being brilliantly deadpan (“I think that’s how Covid started,” she says, flatly, when a woman recalls putting her finger into the drink of someone who had jumped the queue at a bar). Maddix is characteristically straight-talking, as he is on almost every other panel show you’ve seen him on. On the topic of a man who steals bits of his co-workers’ lunch, he doesn’t miss a beat in coining the phrase “scumbag tapas”. When faced with a woman who kicked her friend down a hill (yes, really), he reckons that “sometimes you’ve got to listen to the intrusive thought”.
Am I the A**hole? makes little sense, but – then again – the world is weird, isn’t it? Still, the message is clear. Don’t put toenail clippings in your mate’s bolognese. Definitely don’t show anyone a picture of your dog. And talking about your air fryer?! You really are a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?
Jimmy Carr’s Am I the A**hole? is on Paramount+
