The British-Irish comedian, 49, made the quip during his latest program on the streaming platform, His Dark Material. The special is one of a number of shows that Carr has released in conjunction with Netflix.

Despite being available on the platform since this past Christmas, the disparaging comment only received backlash following a clip of the joke being posted to social media on Thursday.

The controversy emerged following a joke made by Carr about what he called a “positive” of the Holocaust: That so many Roma and Sinti people—sometimes called gypsies, which is considered a slur—were murdered by the Nazis.

“When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy of 6 million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine,” Carr states in the special. “They never mention the thousands of gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.”

The joke is greeted by the audience with a large round of applause and laughter.

Carr goes on to call the joke “educational” because “a lot of people don’t know that the Nazis also killed, in their thousands, gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people and Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

Carr adds that it was a “very good joke.”

Most people associate victims of the Holocaust with the Jewish people. While the majority of those who lost their lives were indeed Jews, the U.K.’s Holocaust Memorial Day Trust notes that between 200,000 and 500,000 Roma and Sinti people were also murdered.

In the wake of the joke making the rounds on social media, outcry came from numerous parties, who lambasted Carr for his remark.

“We are absolutely appalled at Jimmy Carr’s comment about persecution suffered by Roma and Sinti people under Nazi oppression, and horrified that gales of laughter followed his remarks,” the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust wrote in a statement on Twitter. “Hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti people suffered prejudice, slave labour, sterilisation and mass murder simply because of their identity - these are not experiences for mockery.”

“The widespread ignorance of this recent history needs to be addressed and we urge everyone to learn more about the past and experiences of Roma people today,” the statement continued.

British politician Martin Docherty-Hughes tweeted that he was “utterly speechless at this disregard for the horror of the #holocaust & it’s impact on the #gypsy community of #Europe….@NetflixUK care to comment?”

Many people also called on Netflix, urging the streaming giant to remove His Dark Material from the platform.

Parliament member Nadia Whittome wrote a letter to company co-founders Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings, stating: “In funding, streaming and profiting from this material, Netflix is legitimizing and perpetuating racism. Material of the kind on your platform does not exist in isolation and it has real-life consequences.”

“I urge you…to do the right thing and immediately remove this program from Netflix,” Whittome continued.

This is not the first time Carr has been embroiled in controversy surrounding a joke in his stand-up routine.

In 2009, a joke that made fun of soldiers in the Middle East was received with anger from military groups.

“Say what you like about those servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re going to have a f**king good paralympic team in 2012,” Carr stated. He later apologized for the remark, stating that he had only wanted to make people laugh.

Marc Cave, the director of the U.K.’s National Holocaust Centre and Museum, told Newsweek in a statement that Carr “was deliberately tapping into a widely held bigotry - proven by the audience’s whooping laughter. Was he doing it to highlight that? If so, why didn’t he make that point? Now that would be in his words ’edgy as hell’. It would be a trigger for attitudinal change. It would invite people to question the dark reservoir of misinformed hatred he was fishing in. And maybe get better educated.”

“The best way I know of encouraging someone to change bad thinking is, sadly, not with the facts alone (e.g. Eugenics is provably a false science etc) — but by showing them they think like monsters whom they would hate to be associated with,” Cave added.

Newsweek has also reached out to Carr’s publicist and Netflix for comment.

Update (02/07/2022, 4:30 p.m. ET): This story has been updated with a statement from the National Holocaust Centre and Museum.