UPDATE: Daniel O’Reilly has told Newsnight that he will no longer be performing as Dapper Laughs. See the interview here
If there’s been one unifying theme among all the acres of coverage devoted to comedian Dapper Laughs over the last few days, it’s that nobody actually seems to know who Dapper Laughs is, let alone why he deserves all this attention.
And that’s easy enough to understand, since he was the star of an obscure, badly made series tucked away in the fringes of the ITV2 schedules, where it was variously beaten in the ratings by Jeremy Kyle repeats, the 1995 Casper the Friendly Ghost remake and two separate airings of the worst Matrix film. Dapper Laughs: On the Pull was so universally unwatched and unloved that it would have been a miracle if it had inexplicably managed to claw its way to a second series.
That definitely won’t happen now. On Monday, ITV2 announced that it will not be renewing Dapper Laughs: On the Pull. This was the channel responding to the outcry on social media over Dapper Laughs’ insistence on generally acting like the worst kind of sex pest, up to and including his insane decision to tell a woman at a live show that she was “gagging for a rape” while attempting to defend himself against claims that his show was “rapist’s almanac”.
Without all the well-intentioned protests and petitions, it’s likely that ITV2 would have quietly just set Dapper Laughs adrift, letting him slide down the EPG as he unsuccessfully attempted to find an audience for his awful brand of aggressive slack-jawed, finger-sniffing sexism on a series of increasingly hard to find channels before giving up and forlornly reverting to just shouting the words “TITS” at women on Vine until he died alone.
But now, I fear that all this attention will have the opposite effect. I’m slightly worried that not only has Dapper Laughs become known, but that he’s also become notorious. Instead of slipping away to obscurity as he should, there’s a very good chance that he’ll turn into a reality-show fixture instead. It’s probably too late for I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, but I’ll be amazed if he doesn’t appear on Celebrity Big Brother next year.
He’ll use this pseudo-cancellation in his favour now, too. If there isn’t a Dapper Laughs: Too Hot for TV live DVD in shops for next Christmas – snapped up by hundreds of thousands of lad bible-reading knuckleheads who didn’t watch his show but now hail him as the sort of anti-PC figure who’s unafraid to say what we’re all really thinking, so long as our thoughts are nothing but a stream of monstrous masturbatory grunts and cackles – something will have gone terribly wrong.
Then, when that approach starts to run dry, Dapper Laughs will attempt to redeem himself. He’ll change his name back to Daniel O’Reilly, and either model his comeback on Jim Davidson (who managed to shake off a history of racism, sexism, homophobia and domestic abuse by embarking on a hopelessly transparent quest for redemption on reality television) or Ricky Gervais (who responded to protests about his repeated use of the word “mong” on social media by writing and starring in a sitcom about a man with a mental disability). Imagine Dapper Laughs’ version of Derek. Imagine that actually happening. It legitimately doesn’t bear thinking about.
Whatever happens, one thing is certain. If you didn’t know who Dapper Laughs was, now you do. And the horrible truth is that he isn’t going anywhere.
