Andrew Doyle, the comedian behind the popular Titania McGrath Twitter parody account, has revealed that he trolled UK newspaper The Independent and got it to publish an article that he says shouldn’t have been taken seriously and was “clearly a hoax.”
The article (archive link) was published in February 2019 under the name Liam Evans and with the headline: “As a new comedian working the circuit, I’m appalled at disgusting ‘jokes’ creeping back into the industry.” The article called for hate crime laws to apply to all comedians and said that “crying ‘free speech’ isn’t good enough.”
At the time, many readers were suspicious of the article and pointed to it being fabricated or satire. Some even guessed that it had been written by Titania McGrath or Godfrey Elwick – another popular parody of social justice warrior culture.
Even The Independent appears to have had doubts about whether Evans was a real comedian after the article was published and changed the original headline to: “As a comedy aficionado, I’m appalled at disgusting ‘jokes’ creeping back into the industry.”
However, the outlet didn’t seem to gather the full scale of the hoax and left the rest of the article unchanged.
During a speech at the Speaking Truth to Social Justice conference, which was recently uploaded to his YouTube channel, Doyle discussed the article and went through the signs that show it’s “clearly a hoax.”
The first sign Doyle pointed to is the “flagrantly authoritarian” style of the article which cites several well-known comedians including Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais, and Fin Taylor, and says that their jokes “should be subject to investigation” and punishment under hate crime laws.
“No one should be taking this seriously,” said Doyle. “It’s flagrantly authoritarian. It’s clearly a hoax.”
Second, Doyle said: “A number of prominent comedians complained to The Independent asking why they were publishing such clearly fabricated stuff. And that is a good question.”
Third, Doyle questioned: “What has happened to our media? Why is a respected national newspaper publishing drivel from a writer that no one has ever heard of just because it’s pushing a woke agenda?”
Finally, Doyle pointed to a big clue that was hiding in plain sight. “I do not want to speculate as to the authorship of that article but I would point out one thing which I do find a little bit curious,” Doyle said. “If you take the fourth letter of every sentence in that article, it actually spells out the phrase ‘Titania McGrath wrote this you gullible hacks’.”
Doyle said the point of hoaxes like this is that:
“A major publication is happy to publish any old nonsense so long as it is sufficiently woke. The social justice ideology has infected our mainstream media and irreparably degraded its standards. That’s what these hoaxes reveal.”
Doyle also recently pointed to how the legacy media “fabricates outrage” by picking up tweets with very little engagement and then amplifying them to create “woke nonsense.”
Doyle isn’t the only public figure to recently call out the legacy media’s tactic. Earlier this month, YouTuber PewDiePie exposed how the media report on fake “hate symbols” and described how this is dangerous because it helps fringe extremists by giving them more attention.
