Revealing are the words "within the first five minutes of viewing".  Doesn't reflect much objectivity.  Much like Liberty Hodes letter which begins "For a while I have been aware of the vine star 'dapper laughs' and it's also come to my attention that he was been commissioned for a show which now plays on ITV2 I gave the idea the benefit of the doubt, despite being worried, knowing that Dapper's main joke is the objectification and mocking of women and women's sexualities, he is often seen non-consentually harassing women. The TV show itself has confirmed my worries...".  You can view it in full on the other page if you want.    Not that she doesn't have lots of good points to make but these people don't seem to be coming to Mr Dapper with a completely open mind.  It's more like a mind thinking "I've seen a small car crash ...and I'm expecting to see a bigger car crash".  Although to be fair it was a massive car crash but...

Both these people have tuned into a show fearing it will violate their moral code and discovered that it does indeed.  Unlike Mr Kern, Ms Gotch and Ms Hodes I'm something of an expert on transgressive art controversies and whereas they thought immediately of young people being corrupted I'm afraid I thought immediately of Dada and Croydon's other great sexist Allen Jones RA.  It's not that my mother set out to corrupt me it's just if your mother is researching art for work you're going to end up being exposed to some transgressive art and learning something of what really drives each political lobby and religious group to near distraction.  Believe it or not creating deliberately transgressive art that really shocks people is quite hard.  For example Un Chien Andalou the Dali Brunel collaboration was intended as a joke to shock as many people as possible by including as many nightmarish pieces of sadism as the two could construct between them.  They were massively upset when it became a classic of popular culture.  Daniel and ITV seem to have done the reverse.  Set out to make something popular only to upset the middle classes by mistake.  Still I think Dapper is a Dadaist classic and that's what counts.

As I say the great thing about comedy is that it's entertainment first, art second so you can avoid some controversy on the basis it's not entertaining enough.  That said it's kind of nice that there are some acts like Scott Capurro who are really out there.  Not that I'll be booking him.  I'm staying firmly at the let's-not-get-beaten-up edge of comedy.

That's not to say that the program isn't actually immoral just that it's violating a major ideological boundary - the modern Feminist sin of objectifying women.  Michael Legge assures me that this is wrong.  In all circumstances I guess.  So if you believe this there is no level on which you can morally approve of the show no matter how it's made.  There is no room for compromise.  It doesn't really matter how well or badly it is executed.  The central premise of the show is regarded  by its critics as so morally wrong it just shouldn't be on television... in any form. 

It's also breaking the ideological boundary that masculinity is learned according to feminist theory and therefore how we socially construct it is "very important" so by seemingly treating it as unimportant Dapper Laughs is breaking another feminist taboo.  I guess someone like Peter Jackson would say  "the form of oppression varies from patriarchal controls over women's bodies and reproductive rights, through ideologies of domesticity, femininity and compulsory heterosexuality, to social definitions of the value of work, the nature of skill and the differential remuneration of 'productive' and 'reproductive' labor."  To which I would say I'm bad enough at normal Geography without attempting Social Geography.  Maybe someone could patent a Social Geographic Satnav for me so I know how I'm supposed to relate to my gender wherever I am.

For those of you who haven't watched the show (my advice is don't it's like sticking pins in your eyes to prevent yourself from falling asleep due to boredom) the first five minutes of the show involve Daniel O'Reilly walking down a street telling the male viewers how he can help them to find love before turning to the camera and saying something like "am I bollocks I'm here to teach you how to pull".  And that's where the problems begin.  The program isn't just offensive or unpleasant to some people its whole message is heretical to a certain type of viewer - Feminists (well most of them).  And probably a lot of religious people too.  And Bridget Christie who manages the herculean mental achievement of being both Roman Catholic and Feminist - could there be an ideological crossover? ...with less religious people about to be consumed with the important business of managing sexual repression it's little wonder the void has been filled by ideological political pressure groups.  Whatever there is clearly a large feminist lobby who have been looking for someone to make an example of and “take down” for some time…

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/17/heard-one-about-rape-funny-now

…perhaps without realising it Daniel was made-to-measure for their ire as unlike other comedians who do similarly offensive jokes sex and casual sex were not just part of but the central theme of his act.  This acticle by Tanya Gold contains my favourite quote of all time about the open mic circuit and misogynist material ...

"It is most common on the open mic circuit where young comedians play for nothing and you can, if you wish, hear 20 comedians telling 20 rape jokes in one night"

...why I wonder would I bother to censor the acts if I'd going to get accused of promoting loads of rape jokes anyway.  Funny how the problem's always at the bottom, isn't it?

For one thing booking 20 people who are all male and each tell a rape joke must take some effort in social engineering ...one would have thought.  Of course the great thing about promoting comedy is that most of the censorship problems are self solving.  There are very few people who are both offensive and funny so you can not book people on the basis they're not funny and decieve yourself that you're not not booking them because they're offensive.  That still leaves the few that are funny and offensive who keep you racked with guilt one way or the other over whether or not to book them all the time but in the end it really doesn't matter they just go somewhere else.  That said Viz the Spoon who runs spoken word / music nights didn't of course have the get-out-of-jail-free card of just pretending someone wasn't funny enough to book and so he did have an explicit "no rape jokes" policy so I guess there must be a problem somewhere.  This is only London's 2nd Worst Comedy Club.  Competition for the number 1 spot is tough.

Dapper Laughs : On the Pull as the title suggests is a program that promotes casual sex for the sake of sex not love.  Someone at ITV compared Daniel's character Dapper Laughs to Cilla Black and it's easy to see the connection.  The format of Dapper Laughs is an inversion of the format of Blind Date.  In Blind Date a woman choses a man to go on a date with who she hasn't seen based on how well he answers her questions.  This is childish but supports the accepted social conventions of relationships being based on romance and personality and not dependent on looks.  On Dapper Laughs a man goes out to fuck a woman he has never met before with as little conversation as possible along the way.  It's not hard to see how this would violate feminism's moral codes and indeed the moral codes of many major religions.  The producers obviously aware of this problem have tried to address it in the first 5 minutes : this program is about pulling if you don't want to know switch over.  As Kenney Everett would have said "You've all got a knob there - use it!".  Kenny's unique brand of smut saw him sacked from just about every radio and TV station there was endlessly boosting his career ... but of course young people wont remember that.  Bless 'em.

Dapper Laughs is a pick up artist and the problem is not, as with say Jimmy Carr, that his jokes may be amoral.  It is that he is seen as promoting the wrong kind of morality... according to 44 do-gooders who signed a rather vomitty letter.  But ..what is really interesting is what this tells us about the power of words over images. Fellini’s Satyricon (packed with sexual objectification and perversion), Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (in which a woman mutilates her own vagina with broken glass) and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (in which a woman has her eye slit open by a razor blade) have all I think been on late night TV with little or no protest. Not to mention Channel 4 once broadcasting the infamous Penthouse funded Caligula with only some of the hardcore porn pixelated out.  And of course you can see the working classes actually having casual sex on Big Brother. But talk about pulling and fucking and the sky falls in on the middle classes.  Anyone remember when Terry and June were victims of a hate campaign for being too inoffensive.

Of course the argument for censoring Dapper Laughs is that he and his show promotes rape.  But really the rape jokes are just the easiest angle to promote censorship from. He told a rape joke, this might incite real rape – we should take him off air. Incitement is always the simplest argument you can come up with. Explaining the complex ways in which such jokes may fragment society in other ways takes too long.  So let's keep it simple - it's all a "rapist's charter".

However the truth is that his critics disagree politically not just with his use of language but with his message ...and to a profound degree  ...as I suspect now does Daniel himself. The feminist lobby disagrees that there is anything to be “learned” about pulling – and they may be right. A large section (though not all) of them disagree with the promotion of casual sex. Then there’s the ethical issues of catcalling. The program trod through all these minefields like an elephant carrying a block of concrete and the mines exploded. Quelle surprise.

But is there a way to explore male sexuality on stage or TV without the mines exploding?  Critics of Dapper Laughs claim that his character perhaps could have worked if it was made clear to the audience that the joke was on him.  I'm not sure that it would.  If Daniel had just been making fun of men that might have worked but the problem the PC brigade had with him is that actually he was trying to "help" men and it wasn't clear which bits of his act/show were meant to be genuine advice, self satire or nonsense.  For those of you who miss his advice here are Dapper's top 10 tips rescued from the Daily Star:

Dapper Laughs's Top Ten Tips For Picking Up The Ladies

1.  Be funny

"If you can make a bird laugh, you can normally get in her knickers."

2. Be confidence.

"You've got to be confident. If you're not interested in yourself, then no one is going to be interested in you."

3. Look after your appearance

"Nice clothes, sort your barnet out, look good. These days if you think you don't have to smarten yourself up you're just setting your game back because everyone else is ahead of you."

4. Be sociable

"You're not going to pull any birds sat in your room playing games consoles. Make sure you get out and about."

5. Have good wingmen

"Pick your mates carefully because a bird is going to be looking at you as a group at first. You can either have good looking mates that will attract the girls or have ugly mates so you looking amazing."

6. Hide your insults

"Compliment a girl and bring up, but bring her down a little bit too. Don't put her on a pedestal so she thinks she's got everything going on."

7. Physical contact

"If you can touch a woman while talking to her so its part of your conversation, without it coming across as sexual harassment, you're in."

8. Eye contact

"This is key. You have to drag out your eye contact a couple of seconds longer, then she knows."

9. Talk about sex, without talking about sex

"Have the ability to say anything to a woman but make her think you're talking about sex. Stare into her eyes, smile and make her know you're thinking about her naked."

10. Closing the deal

"You have two options - ask her to make the final step or tell her whats happening. Forget option 1, that never works. Whack her in the cab, off to the next bar - most likely to be your place. She loves the confidence and she's putting out."

Okay they're probably all bollocks but are they such dangerous bollocks that society needs to be protected from him?  The NUS certainly think so and a large body of feminists believe the whole Pick Up Artist scene which Dapper Laughs personifies is the epitome of evil.  They may have a point.  With the best will in the world you're on a sticky wicket, Dapper. 

Although Jimmy Carr tells rape jokes these are not disguised or confused with sensible suggestions.  It's quite clear Jimmy is talking bollocks from the start to the end of his set.... it's the removal of this conceit that makes Dapper Laughs: On the Pull so explosive.  As I said the refreshing thing about his show is that he likes the people who are on it.  Lee Nelson I'm not so sure likes all the people on his show but at least he's a more three dimensional character with a complicated back story who you can sort of believe in as a person... just.

The thing is this isn't the first case of a comic being slated for daring to explore the taboo area of male sexuality.   Fans of viceral Chortle reviews will remember Julia Chamberlain's review of Pete Jonas's show Dark Side of the Poon.  A show seemingly so awful that Julia gave it "no stars".

"Appropriately enough you’ll find this sorry little show in the Caves.  I’m reluctant to give this crock a considered review, but I’m probably not the target audience..  That small constituency probably won’t make it, as lockdown is at 6.30pm and a ten-stretch for hate crime would keep you away from the festival."

Now I haven't seen this show but according to those who I have met who have survived it ...it does seem to be something of an epic car crash on the scale of Dapper Laughs ... its highlight being a 7ft lifesize squirting vagina built by prop man Martin Soan.  But it says something of the mindset of the reviewer that they start off by telling us the whole show is hate crime and that it doesn't deserve a considered review.  Why not?  Jerry Sadowitz's latest offering which is no doubt bursting with racist gags but it still gets a considered review:

"Say what you like about Jerry Sadowitz, but he was way ahead of the curve. He was spouting racist, sexist, anti-disabled, homophobic, gratuitously sick jokes back in the distant days when comedy had a politically-correct face. Nowadays, every Ricky, Jimmy and Frankie uses the language of hate, only occasionally with a fig-leaf of irony."

To me this says that male sexuality is now so taboo it's simplest not to talk about it all.  Fortunately I have no sexuality myself so the problem doesn't arise.  However really I'd say Dapper Laughs is just ahead of the curve.  In the end Dapper Laughs TV show was sunk by what is known in the comedy industry as "the Sadowtiz effect".  Try as they might to tone down his content for television TV producers have always been undermined by the disparity this creates between Jerry's stage act and his TV act. 

According to the feminist lobby pick up artists like Dapper Laughs are very bad indeed.  It is according to the New Statesman a pesudo science (unlike feminism and gender studies of course which is all built on rock solid scientific foundations) and very bad. 

But can you actually learn anything about pulling?  Well, I found this article in a peer reviewed journal.... so maybe there are some answers somewhere.  However, saying so is heresy so best it stay in the back of pubs where old men tell young men and young men tell young men long convoluted old wives tales that don't work.  Like "don't get stuck in the friend zone" and "she aint your mate".

The New Statesman's demolition of the PUA community (of which I'm not and never have been a member conciously) starts off well reminding us of the PUAHate.com controversy in the states when a pick up artists forum schismed to create an anti-pick up artists forum which seemed to hate both pick up artists and women that ended in nasty things happening.  It claims that all PUA theories are cod evolutionary psycology.

The nearest thing to a respectable volume the genre has is Neil Strauss's best seller "the Game".  I'm not sure if this world is really dangerous or just deluded or a spectrum of dangerous to the deluded with the odd gem of good sense like "dont get too pissed" dropped in but at best it's all a bit Arnold Rimmer, isn't it?  ... then again Chris Rock said it worked for him.  Personally I'm too tight to pay anyone for any kind of advice but the main problem it seems to me that feminism would seem to have with the PUA world ...would seem to be the divorce of romance from sex.  ITV tried to square this circle by getting Dapper to take a lady out on the pull but it seems the format was still left at best an octagon.

That said it seems odd to me that there should be nothing to be learned from the animal kingdom that can be related to human sexuality when it comes to chatting people up.  The New Statesman's article on the subject starts to go a bit Pear Shaped for me when it starts on about "the neoliberal doctrine of rational self-interest".  It seems that perhaps in a very round about way the PUA community's rhetoric comes into political conflict of their own world view that actually everyone's altruistic at heart.... and that what they really don't like are ideas like women are attracted to men for their status and wealth.

When it starts going on about "we can be reasonably sure that prehistoric human societies were non-hierarchical, egalitarian and cooperative, as are the majority of today's hunter-gatherer societies that have survived, and that human nature still tends towards these instincts" I'm reasonably sure they're wandering into as much pseudo science themselves as the PUA community.  Picking out scientific papers that underpin their worldview rather than objectively looking at all the scientific evidence.  Indeed reading what both sides have to say on the subject is more painful than simply asking someone else out and being rejected and maybe that's the real reason the PUA community shouldn't be promoted. 

That said the PUA community clearly does exist and should be represented in some way.  While I didn't find Dapper Laughs funny I did find it interesting ... in the same way picking up a stone and seeing what's underneath is interesting.  It reminded me a bit of Cinatras nightclub in Croydon best described by Dave Dynamite as "a place where you can meet three generations of single mothers in the same night".  Cinatras before it closed tried to go upmarket too.  The owner who was some distant relation to the Richardson Gang (or so it was rumoured) once hired Roddy Frazer to put on a comedy night there.  They were really up for it.  Spent a fortune in flyering the gig and promotion.  Result 2 punters.  There are some turds you really can't polish.

Moving on to the issue of is it censorship?  Kern offers us his clarity on the subject over at the Huffingdon post:

"Cardiff University's student union have every right to choose who performs on their premises. He has not been censored. He is free to perform anywhere that wants him to perform. That is the right of any venue and a right we all have. If I had a man knock on my front door saying, "Excuse me - do you mind if I go to the toilet on your living room floor?" I don't have to say "Sure, I'll wait in the kitchen." In the same way, Cardiff University's Student Union don't need to invite someone who wants to crap on all their female students. If Britain First approached Cardiff and said, "Can we hold a white's only disco in your union?" the union doesn't have to say yes and they are not censors for exercising their freedom of choice."

The problem with this argument is that the NUS's campaign against Dapper Laughs hasn't just been restricted to its own venues.  Here's a petition to ban him from the O2 Leeds - not a University venue.  Replete with pictures of students claiming Tequila Promotes rape.

Years ago the RCC (historically the world's biggest censor) used to have the Index Librorum Prohibitorum - list of banned books.  It was great you knew exactly where to go get all the worst literature.  Growing up in a bohemian and artistic household like what I did we had them all next to the religious tracts. In 1966 Pope Paul VI abolished the Index. 

Why?  Firstly great PR and Secondly ...It didn’t work.  It was too long and had simply become a catalogue of dirty books for people with twisted minds like mine.  Of course these days the RCC still does censorship …it’s just subcontracted to characters like Deacon Nick Donnelly and  Bill Donohue of the US Catholic League who can run their hate campaigns at a distance with a level of plausible deniability …they use excuses like they are grass roots movements that enable those with authority to disown their activities when they go too far – a bit like Lee Kern neither signing nor condemning the petition against Dapper or the NUS claiming their students are just a grass roots movement and have no organised plan.  Eventually though the dots do get connected.  I try to avoid the subject of censorship on this site usually as some of these people are not very nice to cross and I dont want them picketing the venue or something ... but I believe Stephen Green is busy at the moment so I thought I'd chance it.

The truth is that these people do want censorship but as they're unable to get it for everyone they're engaged in symbolic campaigns over those that they are socially able to control.

Censorship hasn't gone away - it still exists it’s just done by social bullying.  Ask Cosimo Cavallaro about his statue of Jesus made out Chocolate. 

Yes the NUS banning him from their venues is censorship.  Anyone who wasn’t born yesterday knows so.  Years ago the BBFC would not allow the Exorcist to be seen except in a cinema.  It was banned from TV and VHS.  Just because your censorship doesn't extend over every platform doesn't mean it isn't censorship.  People in Opus Dei which still uses the Index and other monastic groups submit themselves to complex systems of self censorship.  It's still a closed idea system and closed idea systems create people who are devastatingly sure of their opinions.  The kind of people who underline words.

Still Lee Kern, Chris Coltrane, Nathaniel Tapley, the NUS and Abi Wilkinson are only responsible for getting the mob together like Jim Nolan in In Dubious Battle ...we can't hold any of them responsible for the end result.

No platform policies are censorship.  No platform policies aren’t stupid it’s what I do myself but if you apply them too widely you end up looking silly because there comes a point where it stops being relational aggression and just becomes isolating yourself.  Mind you if I ran a University I’d use the not being funny excuse not to book these people…

http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2013/11/controversial-university-speakers/

I mean come on … Creating trouble with platforms/venues is the oldest censorship trick in the book.  It's what Lee Jasper does to Exhibit B.  To be fair Exhibit B probably deserves it and I know this because I’m a big enough bastard to have done it myself so....  I’m not saying there’s no place for such action but if Django Unchained was a play Spike Lee would have caused venue problems … 

Kern further writes that:

"Dapper Laughs show wasn't banned. His series ran for it's full length on ITV2. The channel decided they won't recommission a second series. That is not a ban and to argue this is a way to reframe the debate and shift things from the true discussion about misogyny that should be taking place. "

But the truth is while it probably wouldn't have got a second series before ... now we'll never know.  Change can collect as many signatures as they like but art will never be a democracy because it's made by individuals.  Fortunately Dapper Laughs isn't just art it's entertainment and as it failed as entertainment it should go on that basis alone but the problem is now we'll never know quite why ... except Daniel fell on his sword anyway but ... it is disturbing he seems not to understand what censorship is.

"Moreover, free speech is a red herring here. No-one is saying Dapper doesn't have the right to say any of the things he says. But anyone suggesting that men and women who find Dapper Laughs abhorrent should sit back and let him say and do whatever he wants without any response appear to be the real people with an affinity for stifling free speech.  In fact, they actually appear to misunderstand the nature of free speech, democracy or the history of how human beings evolve ideas - namely - one person says one thing - another person says something in counterpoint. As a result ideas evolve and develop. In the tussle between ideas and values the better ideas and values will hopefully win. That's what's taking place here. An exchange of ideas."

Yes, we all told Daniel he was being stupid and he listened but none-the-less your understanding of free speech and art Mr Kern is dire.  Art does not have to be the evolution of ideas between the group and the individual.  It can be the individual evolving ideas on their own.  A piece of art is a piece of art and art is not necessarily a constant renegotiation of everyone's values.  Once created a piece of art exists and has a life of its own and artists may wish to compromise with their critics like Enid Blighton and Charles Dickens taking the racist words out of their works in later editions but they don't and shouldn't be forced to.  They don't have to.  If they have to there is no real free expression of ideas.  Picketing people out of venues and lobbying for their TV shows to be dropped is a sticking plaster.  It might alleviate the immediate problem but it doesn't follow they're actually going to change what they think.  Of course some people will never change what they they think and that's why we have hate legislation but you should at least try first...  Art is I create something - You look at it.  Not I say something and we have a debate about it.  That's a gong show.

If 200,000 people watch it and 70,000 complain how do we know it's been pulled because it's shit or because of the complaints?  Neither Kern nor the NUS nor anyone else can honestly answer this question but fortunately Daniel has had the moral pluck to admit that actually Dapper Laughs went Pear Shaped. 

Also frankly you can reframe your own bottom as far as I'm concerned I just write about what I like not what other people think is important.  Where's the fun in writing about what I'm supposed to?  Going back to the incident I recalled on the Lads page when I once booked an act who blacked up on stage in front of a black man with no warning. The thing that made the whole thing really awful was when the black audience member in question explained how his parents had been at the forefront of the decade long campaign to get the Black and White Minstrels off TV.  A deserving cause for censorship if ever there was one.  But of course in those days there were only 3 channels so it took them forever to change anything.  Now there are as many as the digital algorithum will allow.  So if you can knock down any program you don't like with a petition that raises the reverse issues...?  Also getting a program off TV might now be easy but what about a type of program...  if you want to do this sort of thing you should get together with mediawatch or something... and get a plan... and have some kind of organisation which sets out clear rules of what we can and can't do so at least we know when we're breaking them.  The problem with most people's complaints about anything is they're often so opaque it's difficult to get to the root of what their real problem is.  For instance if someone had told us from the start "the problem is he's a pick up artist", what one is and why it's so bad I wouldn't have had to spend 4 weeks trying to understand that.

I mean I know I'm supposed to be shocked by Mr Dapper but I would point out residents of Croydon have Ashley Inkz to put up with.  I took this up with Dom Jolly on twitter and we both agreed that some of his stunts are funny but when you start telling the public to "go eat ****" you've stopped being the reincaration of Jeremy Beadle and started being ...well, a ...well, let's say the whole thing's been waiting to happen, hasn't it?

In my view the question isn’t “is it censorship”? It’s –

Where do you draw your line?

Who do you take on?

Why?

Censorship isn’t black and white.  It is fifty shades of grey.  The problem with most censors or people who go into censorship.  Sorry I mean ... people who "believe that media producers should exercise their freedom of expression with responsibility" is they never seem to know when to stop...  there are quite a lot of identity politicians who when they run out of injustice seem to invent some ... but I suppose it's nice to know that they're actually there and ready for when a genuine injustice should arise...

For example there seem a few similarities between the arguments advanced against Dapper Laughs and the arguments advanced by the RCC against the Vagina Monologues... regularly the subject of attempted campus bans in the USA.

"For those readers who may not know, the Vagina Monologues were written by Eve Ensler, She said she wrote them “To celebrate the vagina”.  She also said that her “fascination” with vaginas began because of “Growing-up in a violent society”.  As their name suggests these “Monologues” are a series of stories, Sometimes they are read by the same person; sometimes by different people.  One of the Monologues is called “The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could” in which a grown-up woman is recalling with great relish and pleasure how she was raped when she was 13 years old by an older woman aged 24. This rape is remembered by the story teller as positive and healing experience; she says “It was a Good Rape”.  This is just one example of one of the Vagina Monologues. I expect the Heythrop Students’ Union will be seeing to it that the entire “set” of monologues is performed.  Surely this glorifying of Lesbian rape is deeply contrary to the Catholic faith?  How can such an appallingly evil performance be permitted in a Catholic theological Jesuit college?  If I were a parent I would have very deep concerns indeed about a child of mine who was at a Jesuit school."

Leaving aside the fact that Eve Ensler rewrote the rape scene in question as a result of protests and the problems between art reflecting reality and promoting unwanted unintended messages ... it is interesting how the writer infantilises the adult audience of the production.  Never mind that these are grown adults in higher education ... they are not to be treated as adults or trusted as adults.  The same theme runs through the NUS's "Lad Culture" rhetoric.  The students are not "young men" or "men" they are "lads".  That is to say they are other than the women.  They are still viewed as children incapable of adult thought.  Such are the devices needed to excuse censorship.  Some of us were thrown out of school at 16.  Now everyone is forced to stay in school till 18 and even after that in higher education they are still "lads" not men.  Exactly at what age do you trust them to make their own choices?  I venture the answer is never.  The problem with most censors is that their whole personality seems to end up invested in the idea system they are censoring in aid of.  They never seem to look at anything objectively to even try and find some good in it somewhere.  Then again you could argue that sexism and racism are issues on which one's mind should be closed.

It's little wonder that with such problems the NUS is suffering endemic structural problems.  For instance we read on publications like the TAB that Oxford University has now voted to leave the NUS.  That there is discontent is not hard to guage.  I've been aware of the Cheese Grater crowd who hang down the Fitzroy Tavern for quite some time.  Not all discontent at the NUS is as brainless as Dapper Laughs.  In the latest issue they write of the continuing poor turnout of student union elections - less than 6.1 per cent of the student body.  "It seems many candidates might have stood for election simply for the £100 campaign budget. On a Monday in Phineas, that could get you a hundred 275ml bottles of Tuborg, which by our reckoning is quite a lot of beer.".  Not a lot changes does it?

The history of censorship is won battles and lost wars and reading Elanor Mills article in the Sunday Times about how "YouTube is not an equivalent, or a replacement, for mainstream television. YouTube is an experimental Wild West. That’s fine and understandable — today’s youth are so penned in because of safety concerns that it is online where they can have the kind of adventures and try out the new identities that many of us from older generations did in the real world. They are entitled to an unregulated, adult-free realm."  ...I smiled and remembered when they thought they could exile DJs to Radio Caroline.  For what she's really written is "Shit!  They've broken out of their pen again!  Let's try and pen in what we can!".  The Mills of the world pretend they want an experimental sphere somewhere but they don't.  Really they just can't get what they want so they go for what they think they can get.  But it all seems to me as futile as the BBFC trying to ban Natural Born Killers ... it all ends up in the mainstream in the end.


For one thing No Platform polices that rely on relational aggression are hard to enforce.  Many years ago Mr Political Corretness himself Toby Hadoke tried to book Jerry Sadowitz for XS Malarkey.  Toby was and is Mr Avuncular.  He booked his club himself in the early days and was always available on the phone ...till he got an agent.  Toby would love to be a sociopath like me and capable of doing really bad things on stage and not being booked by that promoter for another 10 years ... but his inner Jiminy Cricket would probably prevent him doing this.  So what do you do if you're such a nice person?  You book Sadowitz instead to be naughty for you. 

Of course the problem was when Toby asked other stars to play his club they were always willing to cheaply because comedians are mostly sociable.  Sadowitz is an introvert and knowing that he was wanted and held all the negotiating cards kept renegotiating, pushing the price up, arguing about the ticket price he should be going out at ... using arguments like I use magic props they're expensive etc etc ... which may have been true or negotiating positions... until eventually Toby snapped and it all ended up in a huge row ...which I think I settled by pointing out that it's his labour and he can sell it for what he likes and no matter how much they wanted to be sociable he hadn't bought into their socialist ethos and didn't owe them anything.  After all he's never pretended to be what he aint?

I'm not sure what the point of this story is except that socially isolating people continually is very hard work.  Even when they're quite happy being socially isolated.  So the outside will leak in eventually.  Just as Burlesque has leaked back into stand-up despite Camden Council's best efforts to make them get an adult entertainment licence like Peter Stringfellow... maybe it's just a never-ending-battle.  And maybe whether you win or not doesn't actually matter.  At the end of the line I'm not that bothered by stupid women stripping under the delusion it's art and I wasn't that bothered by Dapper Laughs either.  But I was bothered about whether or not I should be bothered?

Am I bovvered?

Well, we all remember the clean up comedy campaigns of the past.  I particularly enjoyed Johann Hari's when he called Reginald D Hunter a "black Bernard Manning".  No, he can't be ... we all protested ... he's as cool as Samuel L Jackson?  The PFA however decided that he was more like Ordell Robbie.  Then again I also enjoyed it when Hari got caught out for plagerism and had to give back the Orwell Prize.  Then again ... then again ... who cares?  As my critics all over the internet would probably say...

"Anthony, these are subtleties! We are not concerned with motives, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down misogyny and with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons. Daniel will be your true feminist, ready to turn the other cheek, ready to be crucified rather than crucify, sick to the heart at the thought of killing a fly. Reclamation! Joy before the ladies of the NUS! The point is that it works".

I was cured, all right!