Boya Dee and the Rise of the 'Tragedy Jesters'

Boya Dee, the latest in a line of "Tragedy Jesters" who are helping to define present-day news

Human beings realised a long time ago that their fragile hearts were probably not up to dealing with the reality of death, disaster and hate crime. That’s why we invented comedy and social satire. From WWII to the War on Terror, we've created clowns like Charlie Chaplin, Captain Mainwaring and innumerable Trey Parker and Matt Stone characters to make light of the darkest moments in human history.

But new media – the revolution that enabled news outlets to supplement their coverage with onlookers’ Instagram posts – is making comedians of anyone with a smartphone and some steez. We no longer have to invent characters to ease the murkier parts of our collective experience, because we’ve got the real thing at the scene and ready to serve the same purpose via videolink or Twitter. These comprise an unwitting new breed of Tragedy Jester, from Antoine Dodson to Charles Reynolds – or in the case of last Wednesday’s horrific incident in Woolwich, Boya Dee, the one-time Channel U also-ran, turned citizen journalist extraordinaire. By the end of Wednesday, the rapper had experienced the same dizzy ascent to fame as that guy who made gun fingers at David Cameron and that Swansea Ballboy who Eden Hazard kicked, having pulled in a neat 20,000 Twitter followers. This was all thanks to the energy and dexterity with which he live-tweeted from the scene of one of the most shocking incidents in recent British history. For anyone not au fait with contemporary street slang and too lazy to check Urban Dictionary, the Daily Mail provided a handy guide to bring Boya’s thoroughly current brand of reportage to the masses. Within hours, millions of Chris Moyles apologists were guffawing condescendingly at Boya's honest, man-on-the-street school of journalism and asking each other what "boydem" means.

It's not just the fact that Boya was the first to tweet live from the scene that earned him his place in the pantheon of Tragedy Jesters. It was also an overabundance of exclamation marks, repeated characters ("whyyyyyyyyyyy") and F-bombs. Something which the British public – reared on a style of news reporting that involved two old men sat in chairs talking calmly about money in utterly arcane jargon – totally lost their shit over. Give us a guy who had the (pretty understandable) reaction of swearing at the sight of someone being beheaded, and we get all excitable.

Then there was the hype, the level of sensation that Boya Dee was free to use. It’s an honesty that even the tabloids will avoid and one that we, the British public, can’t help but be drawn to. Not because we’re bloodthirsty, but because we don’t like to be patronised and are tired of every news story being put through the same straitjacket of vernacular correctness. Whether it’s right or not, we appreciate the candour of an account that refers to the perpetrators as “bredas” as opposed to suspects. Truth be told, many of us prefer to hear that the culprits were taken out "like robocop" and had their fingers blown off by a backfiring pistol, rather than the standard, uninformative “two men are being treated at a London hospital”.

The other causes for Boya’s overnight fame were the realness hunters. The dads playing Brick Squad mixtapes from the soundsystems of their VW Passats. People like Australian radio presenter Mark Colvin, who was quick to celebrate the fact that Boya had described what he'd seen in Caribbean patois, despite the fact that Boya is apparently Nigerian.

But like other unwitting Tragedy Jesters of the social media era, Boya Dee didn’t intentionally trivialise crime; it’s just that his preternatural lack of self-awareness still seemed to offer some light relief to swathes of people during last week’s horror. As proven by the fact that he turned down an offer of £75,000 for his story, Boya also didn’t seem to embrace becoming an overnight internet sensation (although this statement has since mysteriously disappeared from his Twitter feed). Probably because he knew that it would end all chance he had of forging a credible music career. This behaviour is in constrast to fellow Tragedy Jester and baggage collector John Smeaton, who famously kicked a failed terrorist attacker in the balls while he was on fire outside Glasgow International Airport in 2007 and later promised to fuck up any extremists should they step foot on Glaswegian turf. For Boya, something equivalent to the promise of a lifetime’s supply of free beer – as was promised to Smeaton by the people of Glasgow – didn’t quite swing it.

Which shows more savvy that another recent Tragedy Jester, Charles Ramsey. He embraced fame after his account of how BBQ and salsa enthusiast Ariel Castro kept three women prisoners in his home went viral. For weeks after, Ramsey was being invited to make guest appearances on news channels internationally – until they found out that he’d been arrested on domestic abuse charges ten years earlier, and Ramsey was quickly bundled up and sent packing back to the land of obscurity.

Or Antoine Dodson, whose autotuned best seller saw him living the life of a minor celebrity before being arrested twice in 2011 for marijuana possession and violation of noise ordinance. He swiftly announced that he had denounced homosexuality and wanted to settle down and start a family.

Who knows what will become of Boya Dee. Hopefully since writing his op-ed for the Guardian and becoming a voice for relationship issues and football, his journalistic career will soar. But one thing’s certain: the cult of the Tragedy Jester is on the rise. If a nuclear bomb went off tomorrow, the internet would probably seek solace in the guy who tweeted pictures of himself escorting a family of scared ducks from the blast radius, BBC News 24 circulating a segment on this miraculous tale of redemption in between footage of so much scorched earth and razed suburb. But it's easy to be cynical. It’s essentially pretty great that news has opened up in this way, to allow first-hand witnesses to tell their stories, immediately and on a world stage. It makes news more dynamic and human. Although I guess, what with us being human, that there will always be an element of this that is people pointing, clicking and laughing at the silly man in the hat with the accent.

Follow Nathalie on Twitter: @NROlah

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