A big thing in the UK in the last couple of weeks has been the rise and fall of a moderately popular Vine user calling himself Dapper Laughs who ended up with his own TV show on ITV 2 (a secondary channel of one of our old commercial terrestrial channels that I can't remember ever consciously watching). His schtick was basically to cat-call and otherwise abuse women in marginally socially acceptable ways and… Hang on, I don't think there was an and. That was it. I mean, I spent half an hour looking through his Vines trying to work out what the fuss was about and honestly didn't really get why he was called a comedian in his Twitter bio, other than that his name had "Laughs" in it. It just seemed to be six-second snatches of some guy being a dick to strangers, which I know some people would laugh at but probably wouldn't call comedy. But I digress.
When the Internet heard of the fact that a well-established national TV channel (sorry, can't quite bring myself to call ITV well-respected) was giving a platform to this guy, a lot of people were fairly unhappy about it, to put it mildly. There were articles in online papers and people tweeting a petition to ask ITV to cancel the show (called Dapper Laughs: On The Pull, just in case you weren't cringing hard enough to rupture something before), in light of which (coupled with its star's attempt to release a charity single to help the homeless while mocking them backfiring spectacularly) the channel announced a few days ago that the show would indeed not be returning, and Daniel O'Reilly, the real name of the man starring in the videos, appeared on a news show saying that he had retired the character going on the recent public reaction to it.
To which I say, fair enough. In the interests of full disclosure, I signed the petition. I end up signing a fair number of petitions opposing the oppression of various societal groups. The thing is, I've seen people around the usual places (Facebook, Twitter, The World Away From A Keyboard) saying that they don't see what the harm was in Dapper Laughs' TV show considering his creator has since said that his character was a deliberate stereotype, and that the censorship of comedy like this is a mark of encroaching social fascism on the part of the PC Brigade (or their Internet counterpart, Social Justice Warriors). I think this raises some general points, so as I'm sure you've been missing I'm going to launch into some conceptual rant stuff.
Signifying Nothing [link]
I think the core issue here is whether the depiction of a behaviour should be judged in the same way that the behaviour itself is. This is the basic problem of creative censorship, which has a lively history going back at least as far, for example, as the Marquis de Sade, whose output delights in trying to disgust the reader in pretty much any way it can think of. I don't want to go into detail, but pretty much any remotely taboo behaviour you can think of is probably described in gory detail somewhere in there.
Semiotics (from Greek sēmeîon, "sign") is the study of the relationship between symbols and meanings. With an opener as woolly as that you can probably imagine it covers a huge amount of thought, so any single-sentence description will be extremely cursory at best. The reference in the first part of the title is to Ferdinand de Saussure's take on this by dividing language (in whatever form) into symbols and what they mean, which translated literally from the French is signifier and signified. (I don't think that’s a very helpful translation, as we aren't nearly so happy to mess around with participles as French is. Oh well.) This doesn't seem like such a revolutionary concept when stated as basically as that (and especially after the intervening hundred years or so of sociological work that you've probably been passively exposed to even if you don't take an interest in it).
The important part is the idea that symbol and meaning are separable. This is something that is actually fairly uncomfortable considering the fact that we consider meaning as expressed through language as something fixed by default. You give someone your word with the implication that it's trustworthy. You quote someone in their own words in order to express what they mean as fully as you can. A large swathe of the Abrahamic religions is that fundamental truths about the world are expressed in the word of God. Misquoting or quote mining is a particularly big deal because using someone's own words against them feels like an unnatural and vicious thing.
But it's true. While we frequently think of language as primarily a means of self-expression, it's really at root a means of communication (just as we like to think of ourselves as individual actors rather than single members of society - not that either pair can't be true at the same time, of course). If you have a language spoken by one person, and no-one else has the capacity to learn it natively, that language is considered dead in the water from a linguistic viewpoint. Language is in this way the only perfect democracy that we are ever likely to see - if you say a word has one meaning, and every other speaker of your dialect says another, then after you the word's meaning will have changed, as it has changed on countless other words before (random example - soon used to mean immediately until people used it enough that it got worn down to the current meaning).
What's this got to do with Dapper Laughs? Well, consider the material released under that name as a set of symbols (yeah, let's overanalyse it to death, I presume if you've got this far you've got nothing more exciting on). We see depictions of various kinds of misogyny without comment, and then are told outside the material that it's satire. The thing is, without being explicitly told that what we're watching is satire, I don't think it's at all apparent that it is, which is the problem - the usual expectation of satire is that it takes a particular behaviour or mindset and exposes its flaws by engaging with it, twisting it until it snaps under its own weight. So, for instance, Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal gradually shows that it's satirical as its horrifying suggestion for how to reduce the overpopulation of the Irish poor and their food shortage (hint: both would be resolved at once) is discussed completely deadpan, with no apparent thought given to the implications of the suggestion other than the logistical problems it would cause, and how they could be solved. We could suggest Voltaire's Candide or Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (even Blackadder Goes Forth, considering what year it is) as other examples where the overblown barbarity, pettiness and stupidity of the characters towards the protagonist and each other is never explicitly challenged by the narrative or the narrator, but the infuriatingly placid tone with which they are described suggests a deep sense of outrage (which in Catch-22 is openly expressed by Yossarian and in Blackadder by Captain Blackadder himself, though both are treated as though they are the ones with the problem). In the case of Sade, the impression I get is that beyond simply wanting to goad a reaction out of the reader (trolling is a art, after all) he's playing with the idea of the Enlightenment making reason overcome the so-called natural order of things by his characters thinking up and indulging in such "unnatural" acts, as well as, like Voltaire in Candide, trying to get the reader to show some critical engagement with the ideas presented (a mix of the socially progressive and the usual shock fodder) rather than simply swallowing vapidly optimistic rhetoric wholesale.
In short, satire is generally expected to pass comment on its target by, well, satirising it. Dapper Laughs doesn't seem to have any sort of ironic distance from the behaviour he's purportedly satirising. The joke seems to be on the women who are being abused; this kind of behaviour is actually so pervasive that but for the camera I don't think many people would be able to tell that this wasn't just some guy walking around and being a tosser. It's true that it's frequently quite hard to tell the difference between the extreme forms of any behaviour or mindset and its satirical imitation, but I'd argue that the lack of any sort of implied distance between the writer and the character kind of makes any claims to ironic imitation fall flat. In the absence of a symbol with an established meaning, the remaining semiotic text remains ambiguous and so open to the simplest interpretation via Occam's Razor, that the guy wandering around and acting like a tosser is, in fact, a tosser.
Noise Pollution [link]
If that was the whole of my problem with Dapper Laughs, I probably wouldn't be writing this post, and I suspect that a lot of people wouldn’t have signed the petition. Whatever the anti-PC Brigade Brigade say, those of us who objected to Dapper Laughs' show didn’t just not have a sense of humour. The tipping point as suggested in the body of the petition (i.e. that ITV should #canceldapper) was that the previous questionably-satire was put on national television.
Depiction doesn't equal endorsement. It's just a bit of fun, what's the problem? Why do you have to overanalyse everything? If you don't like it, then don't watch it. Language is communication - that means the things you and other people say affect every other person that speaks or is exposed to your language. If I habitually went in for spuriously gratuitous physics analogies, I'd compare it to the fact that every object in the universe exerts a gravitational pull (however small) on every other one. Just because you decide not to consume a particular piece of media doesn't mean it won't be able to affect you or people around you.
One really useful term I've come across since taking an active interest in Internet social justice is the idea of microaggressions. These are small things that make people of a particular non-privileged group feel unwelcome that might sound petty if complained about individually, but which when they occur hundreds of times a day build up a distinctly unhealthy atmosphere. I've mentioned the phenomenon of people using the word gay as a general-purpose insult: people usually protest that they themselves aren't homophobic, or that they think of it as a different word that happens to sound and be spelt the same way, but it nonetheless contributes to the overriding impression that gay equals bad.
If we want it to become socially agreed upon that cat-calling and casual objectification of women in general is unacceptable (that is, that it's not okay to consider women as anything less than people first and foremost with their own agency and autonomy, rather than a collection of publicly owned body parts) anything that promotes the latter should be challenged. Challenged, not banned, note, because we didn't storm into the ITV headquarters (wherever that is, or whether it actually exists as a single physical building) with pitchforks and flaming copies of
In Conclusion…
Depiction doesn't equal endorsement, fine. It does equal normalisation, though, and there are things that we as a society seem finally to be deciding shouldn't be normal. Transgressive humour (à la George Carlin, Jimmy Carr, Eddie Murphy and Frankie Boyle when still good) incorporates the abnormality of its subject matter as part of its humour. Dapper Laughs doesn't seem to have been incorporating anything in particular into his act. He's just been being a complete tosser.
(Hmm, now tosser doesn't sound like a word anymore. I imagine for anyone outside of demotic UK English it probably didn't to start with. Oh well. I'm thinking next time might be a music thing, but I don't know. See yous then!)
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