A man with a silly name who makes pointless videos about computer games has been in trouble for making offensive jokes. That’s the level of understanding of most people over the age of 30 of the PewDiePie story that broke today. But there is more to the story than that.
if you haven’t seen one of the 30,000 tweets about it, the story is that Felix Kjellberg, a Swedish gamer who lives in the UK and is known as PewDiePie has been making jokes on his YouTube stream. The jokes are about the things that you can get people to do for you in the gig economy. PewDiePie paid an actor to dress as Jesus and say ‘Hitler did absolutely nothing wrong’, and paid two men in India to hold up a sign which read ‘Death to all Jews.’
The thought of millions and millions of young people laughing their heads off at any joke where the punchline is ‘Death to the Jews’ makes me feel distinctly queasy. That this kind of content is broadcast to fifty million people (most of them teenagers) with no editorial checks, is concerning. And I know that any moves to regulate YouTubers would be decried as censorship.
But don’t worry, says the joshing gamester, it’s not meant to be actual antisemitism. The point was to illustrate the crazy nature of the world today.
No one paid much attention to these jokes for quite a while - that’s because the mainstream media, while realising the huge influence that YouTubers have, don’t really monitor their output, believing it to be mostly drivel about make up (if female) or computer games (if male). But then the Wall Street Journal picked up the story and contacted Disney which has been in partnership with PewDiePie since 2014. The partnership is no more. Quite a blow, you think?
Actually, no. A few years ago the business world woke up to the earning power of YouTubers. Cue a flood of commercial opportunities to exploit their popularity. Books (PewDiePie’s This Book Loves You was reviewed thus in the Guardian: 'PewDiePie's jokes, such as they are, are not funny; his wisdom, such as it is, comes in just three flavours: trite, condescending, and trite and condescending), premium video content (ScarePewDiePie was ‘boring’ according to Variety) and crowded events where fans queue up to meet their heroes.
The result? Teenagers started to complain that YouTube stars were losing their authenticity, losing their edge and selling out. The platform on which PewDiePie’s estimated $124 million fortune was built seemed in danger. But he's been fighting back in the most effective way possible. As a recent commentator on one of his posts put it: "The media makes people hate Pewds with all their clickbaits, and when a lot of people hate Pewds, they know him and come watch his videos to actually see the horrors. They find out the media is not telling the truth. They sub [subscribe to] him...."
Today there are plenty of tweets congratulating him on showing up Disney as hypocrites (because, after all, wasn’t Walt an antisemite himself?) and assuring him that of course he’s not a hater, this sort of humour is what stand ups do, it’s the mainstream media, the establishment, getting it wrong. The joker gets his edge back. And the Jews? No one really cares.
