Air sex

[Gob]

Remi Gaillard is a French prankster and comedian. He’s enormously popular in Europe thanks to a series of YouTube clips of him doing things to unsuspecting members of the public and then posting them to YouTube.

Most of the time these are pretty benign, like dressing up as Mario and driving a Go Kart around Paris, which is actually pretty funny.

But he’s got a new schtick and it’s taking the world by… what’s the less impressive equivalent of storm? Scattered showers? Drizzle? Light to moderate wind on the southern coasts and ranges? Something like that.

That schtick is this: pretending to have sex with unsuspecting women.

He calls it “air sex”: he goes up to women in public places, positions himself relative to the camera so it looks like he’s penetrating a woman while she reads a book in a park or ties her shoelace in the street, until they realise what’s going on and get outraged, at which point he scampers off grinning at his own hilarity.

The joke is that they don’t realise for a while – they just keep on doing what they’re doing while Remi pantomimes pounding away.

It’s seemingly struck a chord with the planet: the video went up on March 28 and by 2 April had already passed four million views. Needless to say, outrage was not long in coming. The video was swiftly picked up by feminist blogs and websites and Gaillard was the recipient of much criticism on Twitter from all over the world.

Naturally, being a male comedian accused of perpetrating rape culture, he immediately apologised for his insensitivity, addressed the criticisms thoughtfully and entered into an enlightening dialogue about the damaging effects of sexism on socie…

Nah, just joking. He said his critics were humourless scolds and that those who were supporting his right to pretend to screw strangers were “voting en masse… for freedom of expression”. Freedom! Oh, Remi, you’re like the Rosa Parks of pretending to rape people.

[Sue U]

I have to say that while the sex video is pretty dopey, some of his other stuff is truly inspired anarchy. I particularly liked "Bomb," also his various animal costumes (the bat and the butterfly especially made me laugh).

[rubato]

Having watched a number of his videos now; he is a lot of fun but nearly all of his humor is based on fucking with people in one way or another, often by direct assault, so this is not that different in that dimension. It IS offensive but a lot of what he does is offensive. I think this only slips over the line because of the background reality; in real life women are frequently the victims of sexual assault and making it a joke is inappropriate by itself and USING members of the public as tools of this joke makes it worse. His frequent attacks on the police demonstrate the French idea of "L'audace!".

Anarchy is a good word for it; it has the same feel as a lot of the Marx Brothers movies.


yrs,
rubato

[TPFKA@W]

Bet he will whine when he gets his face beaten to a pulp over one of his stunts.

[Lord Jim]

This is the first I've seen of this guy's stuff, so maybe he's done something else that's funny...

But this is schtick that I might have found funny in High School for about the first two minutes, and after that it would have been boring...

[rubato]

Bet he will whine when he gets his face beaten to a pulp over one of his stunts.

He does get physically attacked by his victims and even arrested on several occasions. It does not appear to inhibit him from doing it again.

He IS exploiting people in the same way that "Candid Camera" did. I wonder if he gets releases from them?


Sue U is right. A lot of his other postings are funnier.

yrs,
rubato