What takes precedence? Free speech or misogynistic humour?
I’ve been wondering whether I’m a hypocrite this week.
Dapper Laughs, aka Daniel O’Reilly, has decided to make a comeback on the back of a BBC interview on Radio 1’s Newsbeat.
Last year, you may remember, there was a huge furore over his particular brand of sexist humour that provoked such animosity on social media, that he was forced to kill off the Dapper Laughs character.
Popular on Vine, the video streaming site that restricts video to a duration of 6 seconds, Dapper Laughs could often be seen walking along the street, directing shockingly vulgar comments at unsuspecting women in what he would describe as ‘banter’. It was this brand of misogynistic humour that was judged to be inexcusable by a large number of very vocal protestors, and so Dapper Laughs was no more.
But now he’s back.
Despite having apologised at the time for the nature of the humour, Daniel O’Reilly now says that he was bullied by the media mob into giving up his comedy against his wishes, and wants to continue in the same vein as before. He cites the press support for free speech that came out of the Charlie Hebdo attacks as being hypocritical, since his right to free speech was curtailed. Does he have a point?
I attended the wake in Birmingham for the victims of Charlie Hebdo. I was also fairly scathing about Dapper Laughs when it all kicked off about him last year, and was pleased he’d stopped. So can those two actions sit comfortably side-by-side?
I would say yes – but it’s not an argument about humour. It’s more about consent.
Where Dapper Laughs crosses the line for me, is when he videos himself targeting women in the street with misogynistic lines in an effort to capture their reactions.
This way of delivering humour has become more frequent on TV over the past 10 years. It all started out in the 50s and 60s with Candid Camera, of course, and continued up to the 90s in the UK with Jeremy Beadle and Noel Edmonds honing their versions to the delight of millions of Saturday night TV viewers.
But even then, there was something a bit too easy, and a bit too ‘cheap’ about humour that relies on engaging an unsuspecting ‘victim’ for laughs. The examples from the 80s and 90s were quite puerile and didn’t have any particular theme, apart from perhaps the use of slapstick and the ‘practical joke’ element. They didn’t just make women look stupid – they made everyone look stupid – and so the only charges you could level at them was that they were cheap, unfunny and occasionally a bit cruel.
Recent examples have become more targeted, and have become part of a character’s specific repertoire rather than just generic ‘stunts’. Jocelyn Jee Esien was using hidden camera stunts while in character in her BBC3 show ‘Little Miss Jocelyn’ back in 2006. Dapper Laughs is the latest incarnation of this, albeit in the 6-second format required for Vine. Because the character is extreme, the interactions are often toe-curling; funny to some, no doubt, but probably crossing the line for many who don’t readily relate to that kind of ‘banterised’ humour.
My problem with it is that there’s no consent from the victim of the humour. If you go to a Frankie Boyle concert, you are actively choosing to be in his audience. There’s a chance you may get picked on, and there’s a chance that a lot of the humour will be near-the-knuckle. But you can have no complaint when you’ve chosen to be there. If, for some bizarre reason, you didn’t have a clue what you were getting yourself into, you could still leave and not have your embarrassment witnessed by millions of viewers on social media.
Maybe that’s why it’s been so easy for many to accuse Dapper Laughs of supporting rape – because millions of viewers see him repeatedly humiliating women on his Vine feed without their consent. I’m not saying that in a hysterical way – I’m just stating fact. The humiliation there is real – they’re not actors. If he claims to be in it ‘for the laughs’, why humiliate women for real? Surely it’s easier for knuckle-headed misogynistic men to ape what they see him doing because it does target women for real. If it was staged as sketch comedy, we might be able to see some irony there, and he could turn the ‘humour’ back on himself.
Free speech doesn’t come without boundaries and responsibilities. And no popular comedian should underestimate the potential for humour to find its way into the national psyche, and for people to use it as a green-light for inappropriate behaviour.
But people are also ultimately responsible for their own actions. Comedy should occasionally challenge and offend – it’s what makes it so rich and interesting. If there are idiots out there that think making women feel uncomfortable in the street is funny, then they shouldn’t be surprised if they get a slap on the face or a knee in the groin. A comedian is not responsible for the actions of an imbecile.
But the comedian should also realise that reinforcing stereotypes can affect behaviour in society in a bad way. That’s why we don’t see sitcoms such as ‘Mind Your Language’ any more. The public has rejected them – but that has happened organically over the years, as people have slowly rejected intolerance and prejudice.
The world works much quicker these days. Reaction can be swift and painful. Mr O’Reilly had to put up with more than a few irate letters to the Radio Times – his family was subject to inexcusable hate mail. Times have changed.
Daniel O’Reilly can and does write some funny stuff. His persona is cheeky and could be a lovable rogue with a wider appeal if handled more skilfully. I hope his comeback allows him to make his audience laugh in the spirit of free speech that we can all embrace. There’s just one question to answer: how should he go about doing it?
He knows.
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Season’s Tweetings
As we enter that weird Christmas-period which consists of not knowing what day it is, and spending a weekday morning eating mince pies in nightwear while watching reruns of ‘Don’t Do That, You’ll Go Blind Charlie Brown’, it’s time to wish you a ‘Merry Christmas’.
Two weeks off work is valuable time to make progress on substantive projects, and so I may not blog for a couple of weeks. However, I will be posting daily content on Twitter, which at the moment includes festive audio poems and rhymes, captioned Victorian pictures and the usual mix of observations, self-penned gags and occasional links to the arts and anything else I like the look of. Please follow me there – it would be great to have you along.
In the meantime, thank you to everyone who’s subscribed and reads these posts. My creative journey will continue next year with some exciting challenges, and I hope you will gain a lot from reading my updates about them.
Thank you for your support, and have a very Happy Christmas and New Year.
-Gary
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Six-Monthly Review
July is here already, accompanied by its rather fine weather, so it’s time to reflect on how the year is going creatively, and musing about where I should direct my energies for the rest of the year.
This time last year, I was quietly terrified about the prospect of putting on a stage show. This year is much quieter, but it’s still been a creatively satisfying time.
The first 5 months were a bit of a write-off really, because the bloody inspection at work was looming, with no definite date. Stress levels were high and I found it hard to focus on anything else. I enjoyed starting a novel, which I took very seriously, and from which I learned a lot. However, if Im honest with myself, I thought the idea was a bit low-rent and it eventually lost the battle for my attention. I’m now mulling over story ideas, with the intention of getting it right before I embark on the whole planning process again.
So, the result from the novel? A wealth of knowledge about character archetypes and plotting that will be invaluable next time I give it a go.
The rest of the 6 months since the inspection – so just the last 6 weeks really – have been great fun, as if all the creativity that’s been suppressed by the inspection has come out to play.
I’m learning new skills:
I can play the ukulele. Or at least I can get a tune out of it. And a few chords. And I’m loving it. I love the fact there’s no time limit – that I can just pick it up and put it down whenever I like, and that it straddles that line between easy and challenging perfectly. I would love to incorporate it into an act at some point. For now, it remains a hobby.
I’m also learning to draw cartoons. (See previous post.) This is my most exciting project, because it opens up a huge world of possibilities. It means I can take my comedy writing to an audience in a variety of new ways – and what’s more, it involves short-form comedy, that I find much easier to write than the longer-form scripts. More importantly, it opens up a very specific channel through which I can sell my work. More about this as it happens.
I’ve produced my first comedy zine:
For me, this is the real triumph of the year, because I did it on weekends as a therapeutic escape from all things ‘inspection’ and managed to turn it into a completed project. No-one but me and a couple of interested friends really gives a shit about it, and yet again I have a good end-product that is reaching precisely no-one, but there it is: a completed printed booklet that I made. And I think it’s funny enough to be proud of. Go me. 😉
What excites me about the zine is the potential. If I can produce a 16-page zine in the middle of the busiest period of my career, then I can do pretty much anything. (Although I should have already learned this by now.)
So how have I been doing on my new year resolutions? Here they are, with my comments on them in italics:
1. Concentrate on fewer, substantial projects.
The zine is a good example of how this approach can pay dividends. Perhaps it was a good thing that the inspection forced me to focus on just the one project. Lesson learned.
2. Surround yourself with a good team of talented supporters.
This is in development. Apart from a core group of people I can truly rely on, I need to discover new ‘patrons’. I’m hoping that patreon.com can help with this. They claim to want to make the site work for quality content producers, rather than it being a popularity contest. I hope they follow through on that.
3. Keep yourself fit and healthy.
I need to re-motivate myself exercise-wise, but I’ve stayed on top of it, just. Overall, I’m happy with the balance I’ve struck.
4. Enter writing competitions in order to learn, not just to win.
I’ve had no time for competitions. I don’t see them as a great use of time, and they’re seldom creatively useful or satisfying.
5. Write something every day.
This has morphed into ‘do something creative every day’, which I do. I also do write every day, although some days it’s just a joke, or the first line of a poem.
6. For god’s sake, man – SELL YOURSELF!
Yep – I’m working on this!
So what about the other stuff? The podcasts, stand-up and sitcoms?
Well, the stand-up has changed into character-driven YouTube videos, although I can see me doing more stand-up in character next year. The stage show needs third- party input, and so that’s for another day. Podcasts won’t be back anytime soon. Nice to have options, though. For now, they’re on the back burner.
My aims for the rest of the year:
– develop Patreon and Twitter followings ( Twitter has been going well lately, with a series of well-timed memes getting retweeted and favourited).
– complete another zine -style publication. (But not necessarily a zine per se.)
– continue to develop cartooning skills
– continue to produce YouTube videos
– kick off project M ( which is for ‘monetise’)
In a couple of weeks, I’m spending a few days in Haye-on-Wye, book-shop capital of the UK, with the sole intention of chilling out. I’m taking note-books, pens and pencils, and am hoping to find inspiration while I’m there.
Please stick with me on this great ride by reading and interacting on this blog. There are so many things to do! 🙂
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Adobe Ideas
It’s a frustrating experience for me that I love visual art, but can’t actually produce anything decent of my own. Words, I can do. But ask me to draw you a picture of a horse, and it will doubtless end up looking like something totally unrelated, like a teapot. Or a mouse. Or a 1970s Triumph Dolomite.
For a long time, I’ve pondered about learning the art of cartooning. It would certainly come in handy. Even writing long-form comedy such as sitcoms can produce material that can be useful in other forms, such as cartoon strips. And I often have disjointed ideas that don’t exist as part of a larger project that I would love to slot in somewhere without having to shoe-horn it into other work.
So – I’m learning how to draw cartoon characters with the aid of a superb book by Christopher Hart entitled ‘Modern Cartooning’. It takes you through different techniques step-by-step, so that by the end of the book, you are equipped with enough knowledge to draw cartoon characters with confidence – from developing appropriate facial expressions, to getting the body type right, and most importantly making everything as funny as it can be.
This type of step-by-step book suits my learning style perfectly. I wrote Spectrum games as a teenager using one, as well as HTML back when roll-over images were the height of sophistication.
So, having bought a sketch pad and some artists pens and pencils, I sat down to learn how to draw. Which is when I realised how technology really can help make things much easier. Because a couple of weeks earlier, I’d downloaded an app onto my iPad called ‘Adobe Ideas’, which is a drawing program. It was fun to use, but I dismissed it after a while because it was too difficult to draw with any kind of accuracy. That was a massive error of judgement.
Because after a while sketching out my cartoons with old-fashioned paper and pencils, I realised that drawing is a very messy business. Instead of a clean-looking cartoon face, I’d be producing a face, yes, but a face covered with the scars of rubbed-out lines and smudged graphite. It’s the sort of thing you don’t see much of on ‘The Simpsons’.
So I began to think: what if, once I’d finished a cartoon, I could upload a copy of it to this app, which I could then use to clean up the image. I could even colour in areas of the drawing without having to resort to felt tip pens (which I always thought looked crap at school, because you could see all the pen strokes, as well as where the pen had started to run out, which made it look rubbish.)
And happily, it turned out that I can indeed do just that. In fact, I can do more. Because Adobe Ideas lets you import an image and keep it on a separate layer, so you can trace over that image from scratch – meaning that you can produce variations of the same drawing – very handy if you want to produce the same character with different expressions in three panes of a cartoon strip. Cheating? Nah. It’s called using the resources available to you. So all I have to do is take a photo of my drawing with my iPad, and then upload it to the app to then alter. Easy!
Now let me reassure you that I don’t suddenly believe I’m an artist. But what I can now do is produce drawings that are good enough to back up my writing – that I could either use as end products in themselves, or as ways of supporting the presentation of my ideas.
See what you think. The character is my own creation and is the first of two that illustrate a set-up/punchline gag. The first picture is the real sketch, and the second is the final result made on Adobe Ideas. I think it works really well!
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Good F***ing Morning Britain
Flicking quickly through the TV channels this breakfast time, I was disturbed to briefly catch Susanna Reid on ‘Good Morning Britain’ calling someone a f***ing w***er live on air! Surely, I thought, this is not the way for ITV to improve flagging ratings. So I flicked back and was relieved to find that she was just reading a story about the abdication of King Juan Carlos.
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Getting It Together
This week is my last week of pulling ideas together to make a coherent script for the live show on July 19th. By the end of this week, I hope to have a script that runs over 50 minutes, and that has plenty going on to keep an audience entertained and laughing. I’m getting there.
At the moment, I have a mish-mash of ideas and script that simply isn’t detailed or funny enough to form the final piece. I’m not stressing about it not being funny enough – more ideas will come from the script read-throughs – my main aim at the moment is to get a workable structure to the piece so that there is enough going on, and the piece holds together in a logical and coherent manner.
It’s really important that I get any big set-pieces sorted out in the next week, because I’m going to need clearance for any pieces of commercial music that I might need to use. At the moment, the only piece of music I’m using is royalty-free, so there are no issues to consider there, but I may need to use the themes from Top Gear and James Bond. It’s difficult to do an entire show without any commercial music at all.
Props-wise so far I need a specially-printed T-shirt, a period costume, two tables and a hostess trolley. Oh, and a pair of bespoke comedy glasses that I’ll need to make myself.
I’ll also be performing a rap, which is written, and which I’ve been busy learning, both in the car and at home. To make it as funny as possible, I need to also learn a dance routine to do while rapping, but there is one drawback to that – the rap is pretty full-on, with very few spaces for taking breaths, so any vigorous moving about leaves me out of breath and unable to rap! So basically, I also need to get fit before opening night too. Talk about suffering for your art!
There are quite a lot of lyrics to learn for the rap, which is why I’ve started early. I will have to know it back-to-front, because the pace of it is such that if I hesitate on any line, I could lose my place and screw up the whole thing. I might see if there’s a stand-up slot I can practice it in before the big night.
So – it’s writing week! Lots to do – and more updates later in the week.
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Bad Blog Post!
This is a very, very bad post! Because I absolutely should be writing comedy, not writing a blog on how well the comedy-writing is going. Oh well – I’ll get this out of my system and get back to it.
It’s been a productive week. The contract for the theatre hire for the live show has come through, and so I now have a date to work towards. It’s scarily close. There is a huge amount to do. But, from a viewpoint of 9 weeks away, it is all doable.
There is a small problem with the contract, in that the name I’d chosen for the show is identical to the name of a company that’s in the same business as the one I want to spoof. When I picked the name, I wanted it to be as naff as possible, and so didn’t give a second thought that someone might actually have used it in reality. I could probably get away with it, except for one thing: the company in question is based in Edinburgh – the very place where I hope the show will eventually be performed! You couldn’t make it up (although I did).
My water-proof pad (see previous blog post) is proving its worth. I now have three pages of ideas that would have dissolved into the ether had it not been for the opportunity to write them down in the bath. In theory, you can use the pad under-water, but I’ve not tried that yet. Although it’s comforting to know that, should I ever think of a cracking comedy idea while snorkling in the Atlantic, there’ll be every opportunity to write it down.
So – what am I writing at the moment?
As well as brainstorming ideas for the show, there are two set-pieces that I am trying to finish early, because they will take a lot of perfecting to get right.
The first is a rap that I will be performing during the show. If that’s sounds potentially painful and cheesy then great, because that’s exactly where the comedy will be coming from. Because not only is it a rap, it’s a ‘disco rap’, with actions to accompany it. I have the accompanying music track, and have the first two minutes of lyrics – just the last minute or so to write. Once it’s all written, I’ll do a rough recording on CD and then put that, along with an instrumental version, into the CD player in my car. A month or so of singing along to it while driving should embed the lyrics nicely and firmly into my brain. Which is great because it means no extra effort required as there is a hell of a lot of it!
The second is a short film that I need to get produced for showing on-screen during the show. This was Jonny’s idea and follows on from some regular slots on our ‘Comedy Fix’ podcast where I voiced some imaginary black and white footage with a Pathe news-style voiceover. This time, it’ll be aimed at encouraging young people to be safe drivers.
Apart from these two elements, there’s still a huge amount to do, although the show is gradually taking shape. The pace needs stepping up, though, without a doubt. Two more weeks until the final script is due.
I’m on it!
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