Last night’s Newsnight featured an apologetic Dapper Laughs, sorry, we mean Daniel O’Reilly, talking to host Emily Maitlis about his just-cancelled TV show, following news that his entire UK tour had been pulled as well.
In the interview, he claimed that Dapper Laughs is ‘gone’.
Wearing a black polo neck and blazer combo and swishing his hair into curtains, he looked like a 90s boyband member at a funeral – and kind of behaved like one, too.
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Shown clips of what he does, Daniel made it clear that although he is the man who says the things Dapper Laughs says, and does the things Dapper Laughs does, and has, up until this point, made a shit load of money through Dapper Laughs, his alter ego – he is not Dapper Laughs.
‘I kind of got a little bit carried away with it, to be honest with you. If that was the first time that I saw that type of comedy, I would say that the character was not setting a good example,’ he told Emily Maitlis. ‘I thought maybe these people can see that’s not real, and obviously I don’t think that. I’m taking the mick out of what I thought men think. I thought the people that were viewing it thought it was ridiculous.’
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Which sounds like a lot of layers of nuance to digest when it comes to a 7-second video of going up to a woman and shouting out ‘SHE KNOWS’. Or that little joke where he advises that, if a girl cries when you show her your penis at random, ‘she’s just playing hard to get’.
Poor Dan exclaimed: ‘This week, with the bad press and everything, I’ve stopped it. It’s wrecked my life to a certain extent. I’m trying to hold back the emotion that’s attached to what it’s done… what the media has done to my life in the last four days. I didn’t realise I was causing that much of a problem.’
And that’s when we really did laugh.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.