Ronson’s quirky persona, isn’t working so well thirty years on (let’s just call it lack of character development).
Jon Ronson has taken his latest book on tour, which I endeavoured to review*, given he included a chapter on Graham Linehan for his constant badgering of Ronson on the issue of transgenderism. Like most people, Linehan thought the stories of heterosexual men, who are married with children, reaching the age of 50 to suddenly demand their families refer to them as female would be perfect Ronson fodder but we now know it’s never gonna happen.
*I also reviewed his previous show – Pyschopath Night.
No, Ronson really is quite a strange little fellow. His central character for the show (and of the book) is Chris, a sex trafficker, who lures vulnerable young women, mostly drug addicts, to his fake Castle. It says a lot about Ronson that he chose to make a feature of this particular scenario and milks it for as many weak jokes as he can get out of it, employing his quirky/naive looking-sideways-thing, which just doesn’t work so well thirty years on (let’s just call it lack of character development).
There was a big clanger too, when he mentioned with faux sadness that work dries up for twenty-somethings in the porn industry, ruminating on ‘the fallow years between teenager and milf.’ If he was aiming for irony, he missed it, sounding only slightly authoritative instead.
There’s also rumination on the case of a single dad (Ronson’s emphasis), trying to feed his family by learning how to be a YouTube content creator, who ultimately used his two very young daughters as content, getting them to pretend to be ‘bad babies’ and spit food in each other’s faces. The videos spawned a thousand copy cats (you can just imagine of what).
As we all know, Ronson relishes retelling these odd predatory little tales but the only thing you really come away thinking is: Why make that into light entertainment? But much more likely is: Ha-ha-ha.
https://twitter.com/SuzzanBlac/status/1137718569427447809?s=20
Ronson did a quick tidy up at the end, informing us that the reason why Chris in the Castle never got properly investigated by federal agencies was because Trump had diverted attention to ICE. Which left me scratching my head. Had Ronson, at any point when he saw the obvious wrongdoing whilst visiting Chris at the Castle, bothered contacting law enforcement himself? Maybe he did and that bit is in the book?
Hilariously, in the closing moment of his talk (tickets to which were solidly in the £40-60 mark), he told us he sees his role as trying to stop people from going to a place like Chris’s Castle. This is Jon Ronson, the man who only ever chats humorously about porn.
His mystery guest for the evening was compatriot into the world of the weird – Louis Theroux. A man who failed to spot Jimmy Savile. Big meta moment for these two utter fakes.
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