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His schtick is strange and inconsistent. Sometimes he's an arch-womaniser, the Warren Beatty of Clapham High Street. In others, he's more like Buster Keaton, a hapless mess who struggles to pull at all. Sometimes his penis is enormous, sometimes it's small and a source of embarrassment. Sometimes he tells men in the gym that he likes the look of their testicles, in others he puts on a camp lisp and makes fun of gay people.His laughs are as cheap as his production values; a few weeks ago he took the Science Museum's escalator into the earth's crust and Vined himself comparing it to the viewer's mother's vagina. One recurring motif includes shoving packets of Walker's into Gary Lineker's son's face. He pretends he's being chased by disabled people. He puts on quasi-racist minstrelsy rudeboy voices. He dabbles in crude slapstick. He approaches girls on the street and tells them that they're "proper moist". He makes fun of men for having long hair. He pretends to shit himself.He is, in the simplest terms, an absolute tosser. The kind of man whose annual holidays in Spain are enough to make the rest of the planet hate Britain. The kind of man who'd get his face stamped on if he lived anywhere other than Clapham. The kind of man who'd be shot by his own unit in Vietnam. A tosser. A total fucking tosser. A total, total bag of shit tossing itself off all over the internet.
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To scroll down his Vine page is to see shades of Benny Hill, Bernard Manning, Adam Sandler, Woody Allen and Andrew Dice Clay all in the same act. And, for me, it's the Dice-Man that his persona – and audience – has the most in common with.When Dice Clay first burst onto the US comedy scene he was a total anathema. Despite being criminally unfunny, his crude nursery rhymes and aggressive sexism struck something of a nerve with the young, white, blue-collar, heterosexual American male of the time. He became the first comedian ever to sell out Madison Square Garden, but most people would tell you that he wasn't even a comedian. Rather, a caricature – an amalgamation of the worst parts of American culture and our own hidden desires to be the worst we possibly can.Dapper – whose foray into live stand-up means he can now add the slightly-less-impressive feat of selling out two nights at the Scala to his résumé – is made of the same stuff. His comedy is aimed and marketed at a section of the population who probably find themselves alienated by the comedy cognoscenti, who, despite all their dumbing down and casual "isms", come from a resolutely liberal, Oxbridge background. There's a reluctance on TV these days to admit that not everyone wants to hear weak jokes about politicians all the time.Dapper Laughs manages to fill this gap because he understands his audience. He didn't play the Edinburgh festival, but he is compering the premiere for Noel Clarke's new football hooligan parody film. He's never been on a panel show, but he's done meet and greets at satellite town nightclubs. He doesn't know Stephen Fry, but he does know Kirk Norcross. He's never done anything for Comment Is Free, but he did tweet at Katy Perry to let her know that he desperately wanted to "ruin her".
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