As usual, someone else expresses my thoughts better than I ever could, so today I quote Dominic Lawson (with my emphasis),

“People seldom seem more pointlessly pompous than when they declare a joke to be "not funny"; and as for [Jimmy] Carr's career being at an end, I suspect he will still be doing successful stand-up long after everyone has forgotten who Patrick Mercer is – assuming that they knew in the first place.

 

Above all, I am certain that Jimmy Carr will be much more popular with the squaddies out in Iraq and Afghanistan than any of the politicians who sent them out there into harm's way. This is not least because Carr, unlike Ainsworth apparently, has been a regular visitor to the Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham and the neighbouring rehabilitation unit Headley Court, where maimed British soldiers – hundreds each year – are treated within the NHS.  He will have witnessed for himself the amazing moral and physical strength required to recover from appalling injuries and trauma – and also the remarkable skills of the medical teams giving the hope of some sort of tolerable life to men who in previous wars would have had little possibility even of survival.”