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A response to the rise and fall of Dapper Laughs

It’s been a bad week to be a misogynist. First the vine star, comedian and self-titled “proper lad” Dapper Laughs saw his ITV2 show, Dapper Laughs: On the Pull, cancelled after footage from his stand-up tour was posted of him telling a girl she was “gagging for a rape”. Last Tuesday, the “character” was indefinitely retired by his creator Daniel O’Reilly, who appeared on Newsnight in a black turtleneck and with messy hair, like an earnest student about to put on a production of The Caretaker at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Then, the pick-up artist Julien Blanc was deported from Australia, after a video surfaced of him giving advice to a room of men on how to sexually harass Japanese women. Over 100,000 have signed the online petition demanding he be banned from entering the UK. It has been a rapid rise and even faster fall from grace for Dapper Laughs and Julien Blanc, although how permanent such a decline will be remains to be seen.

Dapper Laughs became famous through his vines — six second “comedy” clips featuring his own brand of “banter” — in which he makes jokes about girls, mostly, but also makes knob gags and cheesy one-liners. The tone of the vines is hard to place. Sometimes he presents himself as the archetypal lad, able to charm any woman. At other times, the joke seems to be that he doesn’t know how to talk to women at all.

Either way, it is unclear whether Dapper Laughs is presented as someone to laugh at or with. Julien Blanc refers to himself as the “international leader in dating advice”. He became famous, like Dapper Laughs, through his online presence, but also travels the world giving talks as a professional pick-up artist. Much of the advice he offered men bordered on assault. In one video he describes how, in Japan, white men had carte blanche to do what they liked, “I’m just romping through the streets, just grabbing girls’ heads, just like, head, pfft on the dick. Head, on the dick, yelling, ‘Pikachu’.”

In the wake of the past week, there has been much discussion about whether “lad culture” is to blame for figures such as Dapper and Blanc. A much-used but frequently misunderstood term, “lad culture” is often seen as coming out of the 1990s. In its more innocuous form, it was epitomised by the England Euro ’96 song “Three Lions”, in which two university-educated comedians, Frank Skinner and David Baddiel, sang a beery song about football. In a parallel more sinister development, the rise of “lad mags” such as Loaded and FHM signposts the emergence of a casually misogynistic culture appropriating the worst stereotypes of male, working-class culture.

Dapper Laughs represents the final stage in the lad-culture takeover; a figure from Hogarth’s Gin Lane with a pair of Ray Bans. He is the caricature of every chino-wearing, “wife-beater”-sporting, WKD-swilling, lad that you’ve ever met. His now-cancelled show opened with the line, “Dating is out, pulling is in.” Defenders of the former estate agent have argued that Dapper Laugh’s antics are simply a joke, and that he is ironically mocking the ridiculous lengths some men will go to in order to “pull”. This was certainly O’Reilly’s defence when he appeared on Newsnight and retired the “character”. However, unlike other comedy creations it is much less clear where the boundary lies between the creator and the character.

Both Dapper Laughs and Julien Blanc made a living appealing to a certain audience. It would be wrong to dismiss figures such as Dapper Laughs and Julien Blanc as charlatans who got lucky. Undoubtedly their material is crass and misogynistic, but they knew there was a market for this sort of material, and they exploited it ruthlessly. But what sort of people make up this audience? Judging from YouTube comments, tweets and other social media interaction defending Dapper Laughs and Blanc, the picture is more mixed than one might imagine.

True, it is undoubtedly mostly male, but there is a spectrum of people, from the Men’s Rights Activists through to those who are mostly ambivalent, who see such material as simply a joke, or, in the case of Blanc, legitimate dating advice. The success of their material tells us that there are a large percentage of British people who, at least tacitly support Dapper’s views, or believe that culture exists in some sort of vacuum, removed from the real world, where what people say or do have no consequences.

It seems fitting, for two stars of the internet age who rose to prominence through their online presence, that both were taken down by videos posted of them online. Their downfall reveals the transitory nature of success gained through social media; in both cases online petitions brought about public outcry. Cancelling Dapper Laugh’s show or rejecting Julien Blanc’s visa applications won’t bring an end to misogyny. The ways in which keyboard warriors sprang to the defence of their two fallen heroes this week makes that clear. However, if the backlash against Dapper Laughs and Julien Blanc leads to greater accountability both in comedy and in culture more generally, we need never see the likes of Dapper and his apology turtleneck again. 

 

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