Controversial comedian Dapper Laughs, aka Daniel O'Reilly, has spoken to online magazine Spiked about his views on modern comedy. In an in-depth interview he defends himself against accusations of sexism  and blames the outrage over him on society becoming too politically correct.

 

"People say I’m bringing it back to the dark ages, back to Chubby Brown. But maybe it’s not that we’re stepping back into the dark ages, maybe it’s that the UK is becoming too PC," he tells Spiked.

 

He goes on to accuse the comedy industry of double standards: "They were basically saying that my fanbase wasn’t intelligent enough to see that it was a joke. As if someone in my audience, as opposed to someone in Frankie Boyle’s audience, is more likely to go out and rape someone because of the subject matter". 

 

"If you don’t like a comedian, don’t go and watch him... There’s things I wouldn’t speak about. I’d never be racist. And I’ve never, actually, written a joke about rape. I don’t find it funny. My family’s been affected by sexual violence – that’s something we’ve had to go through. But if someone does find it funny, then fair play to them. I believe that comedy is a place where you should be able to speak freely, and to speak openly about what you want."

 

He is also critical of the comedy world's snobbery towards him: "I’ve created an audience that is willing to get up and pay for tickets and go and watch a live show and go and buy a comedy DVD, people who generally don’t like stand-up comedy. It’s a working-class, young audience that no one within the comedy industry are connecting with, because everyone wants to be intelligent and do political satire." 

 

'If I was a comedian who had been busting my arse for the last five or 10 years, and I’d only got a thousand followers on Twitter, and I was struggling to get my show up and running in Edinburgh and, in the space of six months, someone comes on to the scene, going on stage and doing a fucking dick joke and making a video about getting his fucking knob out and getting 25million views on it, then maybe I would have chucked my morals out the window, too.

 

It was the new feminism, and its intolerance of lad culture, that proved to be Dapper’s most enduring enemy: "I’m finding the way they use the term lad culture a bit sexist now. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with men talking about what they want to talk about: swearing, drinking, fighting with each other, having a laugh, going down the pub, being lads...but just because there’s a group of feminists out there who don’t like the way some lads behave, there are also masses of groups of women who love naughty, cheeky lads – who love attention from men. Again, I think it’s a class thing. The majority of the girls that I grew up with were worse than the lads. They talk about worse things than lads. And they’re probably naughtier than lads. Just because feminists don’t enjoy it doesn’t mean other women don’t."