Jimmy Carr has defended Lindsay Clancy during a stand-up set, arguing the accused child killer is “not evil” and suffered a mental health crisis.
The British comedian, 52, made the remarks during a recent live show when a heckler shouted Clancy’s name from the audience, prompting Carr to address the high-profile Massachusetts case that ended in a mistrial last month. The exchange was captured in footage shared online, drawing fierce backlash across social media platforms.
“Lindsay Clancy? Is that the lady that killed her babies?” Carr asked the crowd, according to the clip posted to YouTube. “I think that it’s a very complex thing to talk to, because I think most people see the headline ‘woman kills babies’ and they go ‘oh, she’s a monster, we should kill her,’ because they don’t understand what postnatal depression is. And they don’t understand what psychosis is.”
The former “8 Out of 10 Cats” host continued his defense by drawing a gender comparison that proved especially divisive. “If a man had killed three kids, it wouldn’t have made the local [expletive] paper,” he told the audience, earning cheers from some attendees while igniting outrage among viewers who watched the footage later online.
Carr’s core argument centered on Clancy’s mental state rather than legal culpability. “She went mad,” he said. “She’s not evil, she went [expletive] mad, and a terrible thing happened.”
The comedian also expressed solidarity with women who have experienced similar psychiatric conditions. “A lot of women who have looked over the cliff that she fell down feel an empathy because they feel like that could have been them,” he added during the set.
Clancy, a mother of three, admitted to killing her children — five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan — in 2025 but denied criminal responsibility for the deaths. Her defense team argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and was not in control of her actions at the time of the killings. The case went to trial in recent months, but jurors failed to reach a unanimous verdict despite 11 of the 12 panelists finding she was not criminally responsible; the single holdout forced the judge to declare a mistrial.
Online reaction to Carr’s commentary split sharply along predictable lines. Several commenters on the YouTube video challenged his gender-based comparison directly. “If a man did it he’d be locked up for life. Nobody would ever believe that new fathers could ever get depression,” one viewer wrote. Another argued: “If a man had done what she had done due to a psychotic episode, he’d have gotten life and there would be no debate. That’s a straight up fact. And yes he’d be in the news.”
A third commenter took particular issue with Carr’s claim about media coverage: “If a man did it, then it wouldn’t make the local paper?! It would make national news headlines for pity’s sake! Crazy thing to say.”
Others pushed back against Carr’s broader framing of Clancy’s actions. “Don’t agree on this take,” one person commented. “The fact that postpartum depression exists does not override the fact that she is a child murderer.”
The controversy marks the latest instance of Carr generating headlines through provocative onstage commentary, a pattern that has defined much of his decades-long career in British comedy.