Moderator at Dell event in Denmark, on what men should say to women: "Shut up, Bitch!" (UPDATED)

UPDATE: Dell has issued an apology.

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Christiane Vejlø writes about attending a Dell corporate event in Denmark which was hosted by Mads Christensen, a "lifestyle speaker" who sounds like Copenhagen's answer to Rush Limbaugh: a troll known for doing routines about how women don't belong in the workplace (and worse).

From Vejlø's account of the evening:

“The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy” he says.

“What are you actually doing here?” he adds to the few women who are actually present in the room.

Dell’s moderator continues talking about his two Rolex watches and he then presents the next speaker from Intel. After the break Mads Christensen shares with us his whole “show” about the bitchy women who want to steal the power in politics, boards and the home.

“Science” he calls it and mentions that all the great inventions come from men. “We can thank women for the rolling pin,” he adds.

And then the moderator of the day finishes of by asking all (men) in the room to promise him that they will go home and say, “shut up bitch!”.

Here's his website. I do understand that some argue that schtick is self-parody in the vein of Stephen Colbert, but hey, this guy is no Stephen Colbert. And showcasing that sort of comedy material at a corporate event is a strange choice for Dell to make—unless they're in the business of alienating customers.

Dell has since apologized:

Dell apology regarding insensitive comments about women from Mads Christensen made at a recent @Dell event: del.ly/6018rX94

— Dell(@Dell) May 14, 2012

A related analysis is here.

(thanks, Nadya Lev and Mike Monteiro; photo via elektronista.dk)

• [invictus]

  If ever there has been a need…
  “Christ, what an asshole!”

• [invictus]

  If ever there has been a need…
  “Christ, what an asshole!”

  • [Nathan Hornby]

    I see your ‘Christ, what an asshole!’ and raise you one ‘Jesus, what a prick!’.

  • [Nathan Hornby]

    I see your ‘Christ, what an asshole!’ and raise you one ‘Jesus, what a prick!’.

    • [Chris]

      Holy ghost, what a douche.

      • [Nathan Hornby]

        Oh, that’s a gooden’.

      • [OtherMichael]

        Yes, because we all know that invoking feminine hygiene products is inherently emasculating and insulting.

        “Hey, you, you misogynist over there — you’re a douche, you cunt!”

        Yep. That’ll learn ‘em.

        • [blueelm]

          No one said cunt, and douches are bad for women so it kind of a good insult for misogynists. 

        • [Chris]

          What blueelm said. Also - http://clarityandchaos.tumblr.com/post/22588240330/why-douchebag-is-an-awesome-insult

        • [Brainspore]

          @blueelm:disqus : I hadn’t thought about it that way, but you’re right: a “douche” is something that an informed, intelligent, self-respecting woman would never invite into her vagina.

        • [Adventures and Japes]

          HE COULD MEAN AN ANAL DOUCHE and they are unisex.

        • [OtherMichael]

          I’m afraid you completely missed the point when I used “cunt” in the non-standard meaning of “somebody who loves bunnies and coding in Python.”

          I bet you feel like a dick, now, don’t you?!!!

          And by “dick” I mean my hammer.

      • [TheMudshark]

         Mother Mary and Joseph, what a dickhead.

• [invictus]

  If ever there has been a need…
  “Christ, what an asshole!”

• [Guest]

  Something tells me Dell did, in fact, get trolled big time. There is no way they would have let him speak if they knew what he was going to say.

• [Guest]

  Something tells me Dell did, in fact, get trolled big time. There is no way they would have let him speak if they knew what he was going to say.

  • [Adventures and Japes]

    The THREE things he is famous for are 
    1) “The victims of the Breivik Massacre should have fought back”
    2) “Some black people look like monkeys”
    and 
    3) Women are the worst and women’s rights have gone too far

    So, what do you think?

    • [Guest]

      I think someone heard he was famous in Denmark and didn’t think to Google what for.

• [Guest]

  The Danish CEO said to Mads:  “To stay within code of conduct I don’t want to comment on what you just said.”

• [Jay]

  As if the text wasn’t enough to convince me this guy was an asshole, look at his head shot. Look at it! 

  • [irny]

    I thought exactly the same. Plus, if he really is that colour he should definitely seek medical help.

  • [Navin_Johnson]

     It’s like Joe Piscopo, meets Rush Limbaugh, meets that “Free Money!!!” question mark suit guy….

  • [Adventures and Japes]

    We’re very lucky he’s not wearing fake facial hair. Here in Denmark, that denotes “comedy”.

  • [Andrew Singleton]

    It’s a bad sign when the stock photo that was done by professionals makes the guy look like a douchebag.

  • [chaopoiesis]

    The forward head tilt with compensatory upward eye gaze is a fairly well-established semiotic archetype. As far as I can tell, Kubrick introduced it in Clockwork Orange for the character Alex. Not that this particular gentleman knows the origin, but at least he (or his handler) knows the effect. Doubt Rush knows either…

• [chgoliz]

  Is there any chance this is an elaborate Poe?

  • [Adventures and Japes]

    If only. I live here and no, it’s wall to wall “IT WAS JUST A JOKE, only bitches don’t laugh at jokes.”

    • [wysinwyg]

       Yup, Danish Tucker Max all right.

• [Nathan Hornby]

  @CoyoteDen

  What kind of code of conduct do they have in Denmark whereby the correct response to highly inappropriate abuse of your staff results in turning a blind eye?

  • [Guest]

    The kind where you can’t punch someone in the face on stage. Be the better man and all that. I mean, what is he going to do, fire the guy? He’s not an employee.

    • [Nathan Hornby]

      Make it clear that you find the material offensive and apologise profusely to everyone in the audience. And ask him kindly to leave the stage.

      However it seems the whole thing might have been heaped in irony… There doesn’t seem to be a conclusion yet if we’re supposed to be outraged or not.

      • [Antinous / Moderator]

        However it seems the whole thing might have been heaped in irony…

        Ultimately irrelevant.  If you want to buy a ticket to see Andrew Dice Clay or go to a foreskin restoration seminar or watch somebody get a Hot Karl on stage, that’s your business.  Being essentially forced to sit through it because you’re at a work-related event is just fucked up.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    What kind of code of conduct do they have in Denmark whereby the correct response to highly inappropriate abuse of your staff results in turning a blind eye?

    Corporate Standard?  http://boingboing.net/2012/05/07/att-must-pay-muslim-woman-5m.html

• [magicdragonfly]

  You might finish that quote: “But you did a good job”. Or in other words, “I can’t publicly agree with what you said, but yes, you’re speaking for me, too.”

  Here’s the quote in it’s entirety, with the lead-in for context…

  “I do get to talk to Dell’s danish CEO Nicolai Moresco who of course tells me that Dell is very happy about all the female employees and that they even have a lot of initiatives and networks.  He eventually says he can follow my perspective, but he explains that he was only chosen to entertain and warm up the crowd and he thinks that he succeeded doing that. “To stay within code of conduct I don’t want to comment on what you just said. But you did a good job” was he finishing line to the moderator of the day.”

  • [m1kesa1m0ns]

    only warm the part of the crowd with a certain number of chromosomes, obviously. I think the others probably felt a distinctly cold chill.

    what a disaster.

    • [ocker3]

      Which would you be referring to? If I saw anyone pulling this kind of stunt, comedian or not at an event, I’d walk out. I’ve seen far too much woman-hating in tech (from other men And women) to ever stand for it, even as a joke. We Need more women in tech (I’m a guy) to advance the field and help continue innovation. A recent study showed that having women in a problem-solving team effectively raised the IQ of the team to an extent that adding high-IQ men just didn’t do, and the danger of group-think is much higher in a more homogenous team.

• [Chris]

  Maybe Dell thought this was okay, because they can’t be misogynist – they offer pink laptops!

• [Alf Rehn]

  You might want to note that this is clearly a professional troll, i.e. a speaker that plays the role of an arrogant prick (he calls himself “blærerøv” on his webpage, which basically means “arrogant prick”) and says things such as “a beer only tastes good when opened with a Rolex”. He’s a role, a made-up character that basically is an ironical version of how Danes see American motivational speakers… (Whether he’s good or not at it, I do not know, just stating it as someone who lives in Denmark, a society which takes gender equality very seriously.)

  • [ChicagoD]

    I had a feeling that cultural context was important here. The words themselves are terrible, but if everyone in the room understood that he was playing a Don Rickles type character it might be a little more understandable. It’s hard to imagine an American CEO choosing this sort of speaker, but Denmark is very different from the U.S.

    • [Alf Rehn]

      My Danish wife points out that the word “blærerøv” means “braggard”, and that no Dane (“not even a stupid one”) would use that to refer to themselves, unless engaging in parody, irony or satire.

      • [Bob N Johnson]

         Is this the word that translated to bladder ass? lol

    • [J. Brad Hicks]

      That is important context that’s missing from the article.

      But that they’d risk this misunderstanding makes me think that Dell Europe hasn’t been following the knock-down screaming match that’s been going on for about a year over outright misogyny in tech startups.

      Now, to put the best possible light on it, it’s entirely possible that they are extremely aware of it, on the side of the women who’ve been bullied (and in some cases, successfully bullied all the way out of the industry), and putting this guy on stage to play his extremely unattractive character was their way of showing how being that kind of entitled misogynist prick looks to other people, their way of saying, “Don’t be this guy. Not even a little.”

      But doing so without actually telling the punchline of the joke, in an international audience who may not be able to spot the “tells” that this is a joke, a parody of “brogrammers” not an endorsement of them? Risky, at best.

      Not least of which because the last defense of the horrible sexist entitled prick is, “Oh, honey, I was just joking. You women need to learn to have a sense of humor about these kinds of things.”

      • [Bob N Johnson]

         This is exactly the point, clumsily made when viewed from an uninformed distance, but exactly what they were going for when they asked him to appear.

        Again, and this is only an assumption, but my guess is there were probably some very uncomfortable men in the audience, at least those with a conscience.

      • [blueelm]

        I… uh… know some one who worked in the IT department of a certain company while being of a certain gender, and this is just not their culture at all to be discriminatory in that way… or I am absolutely shocked in a way I could not describe. Well all I can say is that in their HQ I can not see this being acceptable even as a joke, but I can see how perhaps it would be considered safe enough for a joke of the trolling/Borat sort in another country. I’m not so much defending the decision to make this spectacle of a joke without considering that the rest of the world might notice (not to mention the rest of the company) but rather I am saying, though, that I can vouch that the company itself is not at all like this within it’s own IT department so there is no way that this is anything but an attempt at humor, wrong or right. Or maybe this is something the Danish company needs to explain better to other people because it is so easily misunderstood.

        • [Bob N Johnson]

          Then, this may further explain their willingness to book this performer. They are confident enough in the progressive culture of their own company to poke the rest of the industry in the eye with a blunt object.

    • [Adventures and Japes]

      No, you were right first time. People were laughing because “haha women and rolling pins”, no extra cultural layers.

  • [Adventures and Japes]

    Meh. If it was a Borat/Ali G/The Dictator style character the JOKE would be that the Danes who laughed were awful. It wasn’t. 
    I live in Denmark and as a woman, I can tell you that it’s only lip service which is paid to gender equality.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    You might want to note that this is clearly a professional troll

    That’s different than being a professional comedian. Stephen Colbert is a professional comedian who plays a trollish character. Glenn Beck is a professional troll who plays a trollish character. There’s a difference. A big, motherfucking difference.

  • [ocker3]

     Method and intent vary and matter, as Maggie pointed out below. Just because someone’s a comedian doesn’t mean we should just laugh at their jokes without asking whether the jokes are good ones.

• [Steve Brown]

  If you view his website translated to English in Chrome, it says: “Get your inner ego boosted when Mads Christensen aka bladder ass shows you that Jantelov actually set by the team sometime in the last millennium!”

  Couldn’t have said it better myself. 

• [SedanChair]

  Guys like this are why the word “insufferable” exists

• [Alf Rehn]

  An addendum, so as to be precise: Mads Christensen is not a comedian, but might best be understood as a form of performance art (think Joaquin Phoenix during his bearded rapper period). He has suggested that the kids who died in the Utøya massacre “should have just defended themselves” and generally spews extreme drivel of both misogynist and racist nature whenever given the chance, whilst showing pictures of his Porsche and wearing the trademark smiley-face tie you can see above. I doubt you’d find many who’d take him seriously. Still, very odd choice as moderator – but to me the hatred should be directed towards Dell for picking him, not him for doing his (very, very tired) shtick.

  • [Nathan Hornby]

    Sounds decidedly not-entertaining; but admittedly this does put a very different spin on the whole thing.

    I figured when he was referred to as a troll that it was partially self-knowing; like those people that know they’re offensive, but also mean what they say.

  • [Navin_Johnson]

     Danish Dennis Miller?

    • [wysinwyg]

       At this point, I’m guessing more like a Danish Tucker Max.

• [Derek Vandivere]

  Just sent to [e-mail]:
  @dell:disqus 
  Hello,
  I’ve been a Dell customer for both personal and professional computing for quite a few years, and I’ve not had too many complaints. However, I just read this on Boing Boing:
  http://boingboing.net/2012/05/14/moderator-at-dell-event-in-den.html
  which details a fairly horrendously sexist comedian hired in Denmark for an event. I’ve got an 8 year old daughter, and unless I hear something pretty quick from Dell, out of respect for my daughter I won’t be buying any more of your equipment.

  Regards,
  Derek Vandivere

  Chances of a reply? Slim.

  • [Lisa Sommer]

    Nice reply. I feel inspired.

• [Derek Vandivere]

  @Alf – by the way, there’s a fine line between pretending to be an asshole and actually being an asshole (not you, I mean – him).

  • [Alf Rehn]

    Absolutely, and I find this kind of shtick sad more than anything else. He might very well be an asshole – it is unlikely that you can be very good at playing that role unless you’re a bit of a prick.

  • [Peter Binderup]

    Derek – Danish humor is quite often misunderstood outside of Denmark. As alf stated earlier Denmark is one of the most open and liberal places in the world (liberal in the true meaning of the word – not the Foxnews kind of way). Danish humor is often very dark and is heavily based on irony. So for us it’s funny to see someone go totally against the norm that today is so politically correct.

    That said perhaps he wasn’t the right “comedian” to hold the event where there could be quite a few internationals in the crowd.

    • [Adventures and Japes]

      Ahh come ON. Danish humour shouldn’t be used as an excuse to bully. 

      • [ChicagoD]

        Can the Danes please reach  consensus and let us know? I don’t know whether to be outraged or mildly puzzled.

        • [Adventures and Japes]

          Mildly outraged is a nice compromise.

      • [Peter Binderup]

        Come on the nickname he uses himself is Braggart or Show-off – that should tell most people that he’s putting on an act. 

        I’m from Denmark and to me it’s very clear that he is putting up an act. Like when he says that beer tastes better when opened with a Rolex Watch.

        He was interviewed the day after the event and stated that it is an act and he making fun of stereotypes in IT (http://www.comon.dk/art/216015/kvinder-skal-holde-kaeft-boern-skal-have-vaaben-og-vi-skal-knalde-bevidstloese-kaellinger ) by acting more or less like a simple caveman.

        • [Djeep]

          Being Danish then, I assume Mads Christensen comes under the umbrella of ‘Danish values’.

    • [Antinous / Moderator]

      Denmark is one of the most open and liberal places in the world

      Wasn’t Denmark the first country to threaten to put up border controls in violation of the Schengen Agreement? That would put a new spin on the word ‘liberal’ and a really new spin on the word ‘open’.

      • [Peter Binderup]

        True. The former government had to rely on supporting votes by a far right wing party. That party lives and breathes for keeping “Danish values”.

         To be honest I think that the Liberal party (a center-right party in Denmark) and the Conservatives knew that it would not stand in EU and let them have that idea for their votes – then worry about actual EU law later.

        The current government have to rely on far left votes (and deal with votes the same way) – so it more or less balances out over time…

    • [laser]

       Well, I’m a Dane and I misunderstand Danish humour all the time. Apparently Christiane Vejlø didn’t get the joke either.

• [Bob N Johnson]

  “Get your inner ego boosted when Mads Christensen aka bladder ass shows you that Jantelov actually set by the team sometime in the last millennium!”

  The use of the word -Jantelov- is very important to understanding this guy’s performances. The Jante Laws are the ways in which small minded people in small towns feel towards outsiders. In this case it is probably used to describe how the corporate leadership views the common employee.

  He is making a point that corporations are mired in the past. Until someone interviews the Danish women in the audience, my opinion is they knew what they were getting into and agree the industry needs to take a very serious look at how to attract more women to IT and electrical engineering.

  I think in the context of their culture, he is making a very pointed stab at the misogyny inherent in the IT industry.  

  The following are the 10 Jantelov (Jante laws):

  1. Don’t think that you are special.
  2. Don’t think that you are of the same standing as us.
  3. Don’t think that you are smarter than us.
  4. Don’t fancy yourself as being better than us.
  5. Don’t think that you know more than us.
  6. Don’t think that you are more important than us.
  7. Don’t think that you are good at anything.
  8. Don’t laugh at us.
  9. Don’t think that anyone cares about you.
  10. Don’t think that you can teach us anything.

  • [Nathan Hornby]

    So he’s not just being ironic, but also making a fairly important point?

    I feel a little bad for calling the guy a prick now.  Pick your battles Nathan, pick your battles.

    • [Adventures and Japes]

      No! You were right first time. He just hates women.

      • [Sandra Snan]

        Regardless, there’s probably a part of his audience that do. Sarah Silverman once spoke of the “mouth-full-of-blood” laughs—where she’s playing a racist character and some subset in the audience are racists and enjoy the racist jokes in a way that’s not what she intended.

        If (not saying I know how this guy meant it one way or the other, even as someone who knows Danish) he is sincerely satirizing the many males in attendance rather than cheering them on, there’s still likely to be some subset of them who dig on the misogyny.

        I’m not much for irony and sarcasm. “OK, so you’re not saying what you are saying. But what DO you think?”

  • [blueelm]

    Really interesting take on it. I would like to hear from Danish women about this myself to try to “get it” better.

    • [Adventures and Japes]

      I live in Denmark and I am a woman. He wasn’t making a clever ironic point about how women should be in tech; he was saying that women’s rights have gone too far and we’re all bitches who should shut up and bake something because men have lost their role even though it’s a god given right of theirs to invent and innovate! 

      • [Ipo]

         Who forces you to live in Denmark, a country you dislike so much? 

        • [Antinous / Moderator]

          Isn’t that like saying that if you don’t like the US, why don’t you just move to Russia?

        • [Ipo]

           Antinous, 
          Yes, it is. 
          It is like asking a Russian that lives in the US and really hates it there, what keeps him. 

          It’s like asking someone visiting bOINGbOING who complains about the flavor of the ice cream why he isn’t reading or writing some other blog instead. 

        • [Antinous / Moderator]

          Because changing citizenship and clicking a link are EXACTLY ALIKE.

        • [Ipo]

          You made that up, Antinous.  
          A Russian has not changed citizenship because he lives somewhere else. 
          Neither has Adventures and Japes. 

          Wondering what strange horse Adventures had in this race, I read some of her tweets and clicked through to her blog, which seems largely be about how much   living in Denmark sucks. 
          She refers to herself as an expat, (a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country and culture other than that of the person’s upbringing) and has been there for less than 5 years. 

          My question to her was phrased poorly in its similarity to a rhetorical device, but remains: 
          Why do you choose to be in an environment you despise when you could live in your superior native lands? 
          It wasn’t: Shut up or get out! 

          It’s like me asking somebody that is a guest in your house why, when he says he doesn’t like your lifestyle, your cooking, gardening, humor and interior design, he is a guest in your house. 

          And no, this too is not EXACTLY ALIKE, but generally similar.

• [Joseph Francis]

  You got the link to Nadya’s twitter profile wrong.

• [Chris]

  Incredibly, Dell still hasn’t made any kind of apology for this, a month later.  The closest we have is “We can tell you that the moderator’s attempted humor does not reflect Dell’s values, or its strong record on and commitment to diversity and equal opportunity”, which doesn’t actually say that it was a mistake to hire a moderator that was certainly going to say very sexist things (yes, even if it was “just a joke”) or that they won’t be doing so again.

  Quote above is from http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-57431869-256/why-we-need-to-keep-talking-about-women-in-tech/ 

  • [blueelm]

    It wouldn’t be very smart to say something like that I don’t think. While some people would be thinking “oh they’re nice” others would be thinking “HA! Lawsuit time!”

    • [Chris]

      You’d be wrong: they’ve now issued an apology that says both of the things I criticized them for not saying.  Thanks to everyone involved in escalating this, including boingboing.

      • [blueelm]

        Brave. I’m kind of impressed.

  • [Adventures and Japes]

    What happens in Denmark stays in Denmark.

• [SFDex]

  I suspect that a reason folks here have responded so strongly to the comments of Mr. Christensen is that he seems — parody or not — to be very in line with a number of commentators and presenters in American right-wing media. Few people here react so strongly to Stephen Colbert because we get the joke.

  Without context I also find the comments repugnant. With context I still find them repugnant, but at least I can give some lattitude to the choice of Mr. Christensen as a host.

  • [Navin_Johnson]

    Indeed, there a number of comics who are actual dicks that couch their assholery in it being part of the act or whatever.  There’s a fine line between actual funny satire/parody, and there actually being some real bigotry going on.  I’ll reserve judgement as I have zero insight into what the comedy mindset is in Denmark…

    • [Bob N Johnson]

       Andrew Dice Clay always comes to mind, perhaps unfairly, but he always seemed a bit too real off stage.

    • [StrangeLand]

      After living here for ten years, I can tell you that he fits into the comedy mindset here – it’s juvenile, crude, racist and sexist.

      • [Bob N Johnson]

         After ten years of living in the U.S.? I kid, I kid. This guy would fit in here as well.

      • [Bob N Johnson]

         After ten years of living in the U.S.? I kid, I kid. This guy would fit in here as well.

      • [Bob N Johnson]

         After ten years of living in the U.S.? I kid, I kid. This guy would fit in here as well.

  • [Adventures and Japes]

    It’s NOT a coincidence. He is exactly the same sort of person. He is not a Danish Colbert-a-like, he’s a Limbaugh. He made a comedy routine about how the victims of a massacre “should have fought back” and that “some black people look like monkeys”. He’s not good people.

    • [Ipo]

      You repeat yourself. 

      Is he like a comedian or is he like Limbaugh, with his comedy routine? 
      Is Limbaugh a comedian? 

      What is your stake in this?

      • [Adventures and Japes]

        He’s what Limbaugh would be like if he tried to throw in some jokes, if you had to pin me down on that point.

        • [ocker3]

          That’s a useful distinction

          Although I wonder if Limbaugh sometimes thinks he Is making jokes?

• [Red Pill Junkie]

  Andy Kaufman would be amused that someone took this guy seriously.

  http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj74/cartman83_photo/Andy.jpg

  • [Navin_Johnson]

     Can’t see Tony Clifton doing corporate events…

• [Daemonworks]

  Given their notoriously poor quality, they probably are in the business of alienating customers.

• [Josh Burker]

  I kid you not:  my in-laws showed up this past weekend with a copy of that book. It is every bit as horrible as the image above suggests.

  • [Brian Cain]

    The book (just like the moderator at the Dell event) is satire.  The author was a cartoonist for the New Yorker. 

    The irony in here is so thick I can cut it with a butter knife.

    • [Josh Burker]

      Except it was a book from an elementary school library, written in 1970 (not 1960). I work with elementary students:  trust me, they don’t get satire.

• [Petzl]

  He has the unmitigated gall to post this on his website:

  Var der nogen, der sagde provokerende? Ja, provokationen er ikke svær at få øje på, når Mads Christensen giver den som unik entertainer med lækkert hår og stilsikre anekdoter.

  ikke svær at få øje på, indeed!

  • [ChicagoD]

    That bastard.

  • [Adventures and Japes]

    “Did someone say “provocative”? Yes, provocation is not hard to spot when Mads Christensen gives it as a unique entertainer with lovely hair and stylish surefire anecdotes.”

    • [Ipo]

       You don’t speak Danish. 
      That is a google translation and “stilsikre” doesn’t translate to stylish. 

      • [Adventures and Japes]

        Hvorfor siger du det? Ok, altså “stilsikre” kan oversættes til “sure-fire” hvis det du kan bedre lide. 

  • [Ipo]

    Really not hard to spot at all. 

    Anyone being upset about Mads Christensen’s extreme caricature of a slimy male chauvinist pig isn’t getting it, or trying hard not to. 

    He is not Stephen Colbert. 
    Colbert is from Charleston, South Carolina, the most polite/best mannered City in America. 
    Colbert does university commencement addresses. 
    If one didn’t know or “get” Colbert’s shtick, that would seem outrageous. 

    Christensen is from Denmark, a refreshingly not “politically correct” and good natured rude place. 
    Danish humor is known to be extreme and vulgar. 
    Christensen is quite blatantly way over the top.  On purpose. 

    While fucking Dell obviously screwed up having him, whining about a guy satyrically playing a “Rush Limbough”, to make fun of the people you hate, is dumb. 
    How about saving the outrage for the enemies? 

    Adventures and Mockeries is trolling.

    • [Antinous / Moderator]

      Anyone being upset about Mads Christensen’s extreme caricature of a slimy male chauvinist pig isn’t getting it, or trying hard not to.

      Or maybe you’re just completely clueless about other human beings. Maybe your experiences have stripped you of the ability to appreciate that what you find funny is offensive to people who aren’t you. Maybe you’ve never had anything bad enough happen in your life to force you to look outside your own head.

      • [Ipo]

        Maybe. 
        But I wasn’t claiming to be an inoffensive person or particularly empathetic nor to find Christensen’s act funny. 
        Not in this thread for sure. 
        I said nothing about myself. 

        I would claim that experience makes one gain ability not lose it. 
        Also, that condemning an ethnic group, you don’t understand, for its culture, isn’t totally a sign of looking outside your own head. 

        Mads Christensen’s spiel is purposely offensive. 
        Be offended if it offends you. 

        It is still a caricature of people you very much dislike, by somebody normally catering to a culture you can’t relate to.  
        And at least in his mind he is on your side.  
        Do you really not get that?   

        Or maybe I’m just a small–minded misogynist. 
        But I know that at least in my mind I’m on y’alls side.

    • [Origami_Isopod]

      I so love it when teh menz mansplain to me what I “should” find offensive…

• [x jeremy jarratt]

  Clearly his Rolexes have both stopped at 1512, CE. Because that is more likely than anyone made out of common atoms achieving such an improbably astronomical douche factor.

• [Carsten Agger]

  To those who defend Mr. Christensen on the grounds that he’s satirical and this is Danish contextual antisexist humor: That’s such bullshit.

  Christiane Vejlø is a Dane, and I think she’s familiar with Danish cultural issues. AND Danish humor is also known to have a strong nastiness, some kind of yokel bullying.

  Like Adventures and Japes said, this guy is NOT like a Steven Colbert, he’s the asshole bigot who ends up with “I was joking, right? Bitches/n****s/[insert slur here] just can’t take a joke”. There are FAR too many of them in Denmark, and Dell should by now have issued an apology so huge it can be spotted from the moon. They didn’t, and that tells loads.

  • [ChicagoD]

    Wait, the only people actually defending him are Danes, I think. The rest of us are trying to figure out what the wily Danes are talking about. And worried that you’re going to show up on the Kentish coast in boats and invade again (UK readers only).

    • [Carsten Agger]

      Yes, I was kind of addressing those Danes and warning people against believing their arguments :-)

      • [Peter Binderup]

        Carsten I want to be perfectly clear – I don’t share the view he portraits (satire or not), or find him funny. 
        But his story (the interview in Comon.dk a Computerworld/IDG owned tech news site) has been left out completely.

        Was it poor judgement by Dell Denmark to hire him? Yes. Can his “show” be seen as a sexist rant? Yes. Is Dell right to give an apology? Yes.

        This is not the first time Danish humor has been misunderstood, and chances are slim that it will be the last. Remember that humor can be bad and good – I find this to be bad humor, but humor none the less.

        So I’m not defending him or his humor/satire, I’m just making a point that the story has been very single sided – and that he is taking a lot of heat eventhough he almost a month ago gave his side of the story.

        • [Adventures and Japes]

          I’ve translated it now, so his side is given
          http://adventuresandjapes.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/news-translation-mads-christensen-interview/

• [Capital_7]

  I had a Dell a few years ago.  They refused to offer the on site repair for the machine after the first visit, the machine was a lemon, and it was down more often than it was usable.  At no point did Dell offer a solution.  When it died, I swore I’d never deal with them again, and in the intervening seven years I never have.

  That they thought that this asshole would be a good fit for a corporate event is another good reason to stay away from Dell.  One of many.

• [Randy Russell]

  This is another one of those “good ol’ boy” type of rants where they’re going to try to say that it’s all a joke and women just don’t have a sense of humor. Of course, that’s crap. This dude deserves to starve in the gutter and might if men didn’t keep hiring him to spout this bullshit.

• [Guest]

  This is the same comedic culture that brings us: Dolph the Fascist Hippo

• [JenniferS]

  Where’s the ACCOUNTABILITY here? Standing up and saying you’re sorry it happened doesn’t mean that you’ve held anyone accountable. If you don’t hold someone accountable, this will just happen again.

• [Snarf]

  He is a notorious idiot and his sole reason for existing seems to be to fill out lifestyle magazine for insecure  men with ridiculous ”advice” on how to be a “real man”. He is a joke, and not a funny one. oh yeah, I am a dane and I am definitely not defending this fool.

  • [Ipo]

     Immersed and absorbed in Danish culture. 
    That’s you.  You feel Danish. 

    • [Snarf]

      I can’t help it. I AM danish.

      • [Ipo]

        I don’t know about you, but I am of an ethnicity other than that of the country I reside in and am citizen of. 

        Your fruit-eating music videos suggested to me that you and I were similar in that respect.

        • [Snarf]

          Nope I am born and raised here in denmark. I might contain genes from other parts of the world and I might feel more like an earthling than a unit from a country, but I cannot escape the fact that I am danish. 

• [Snarf]

  And “Janteloven” is simply the danish version of “The Hitler card”.

• [LionelatDell]

  Thanks for updating the story, @Xeni.

• [Andrea Dickson]

  This is causing cognotice dissonance for me. I thought I was supposed to want to live in Denmark because of the way women are treated?

  • [Adventures and Japes]

    Right!? *cries*

• [OtherMichael]

  I almost have mixed feelings about this.

  Yes, it’s possible this was meant in an obscurely-impenetrable-to-outsiders humorous manner, but it seems unlikely to this outsider.

  And given the context of the tech industry and concerns, too risky* for a professional company.

  For a theater*, maybe; company, no.

  * and that’s only if we take the “this was mean as a satire and the meaning is OPPOSITE the words” as a given.

• [starfish and coffee]

  …..

• [David Weintraub]

  Mads Christensen is no Stephen Colbert. When Stephen Colbert does his routine, he makes sure the joke falls squarely on Stephen Colbert. This guy is closer to Andrew “Dice” Clay. 

  Like Clay, Mads claims his act is only a joke and those who are insulted simply don’t get the joke. Yet, for some reason, Mads tends to draw those who seem more to cheer him on rather than laugh at the joke.

• [stephaniemunck]

  You can compare Mads Christensen to Stephen Colbert in the sense that their public personas are outrageous caricatures. However, Mads Christensen’s punchlines are rarely funny, going straight for shock value with no depth, and seem to be just mild exaggerations of his own personal views. He rarely adds anything new or interesting to the debate. This is the guy who found it necessary to grab headlines with really stupid, uninformed, and insensitive remarks about weak youths not fighting back, just days after the Utøya massacre. His apologies for that particular controversy were the real joke, if you ask me.

  But, believe it or not, Mads Christensen is not the issue here. To the best of my knowledge, the guy is a douche canoe. The world is full of them, in many shapes and forms, and mostly we get by just fine by ignoring them. The point is that a company like Dell could have chosen to not give him a platform, they could have chosen someone with a minimum of class, who might not alienate huge parts of the audience. Many companies in the tech industry are in a somewhat fragile state, fighting really hard to shed the brogrammer image and attract a diverse work force, and this might be a bad time to bring in the comedy equivalent of a bull in a china shop.

  Disclaimer: I am a woman, from Denmark, working in the tech industry. I think Louis CK is funny – some people would take that as proof that I do have a sense of humour.

• [LindaM]

  I sent this story link to Dell and asked for a comment as well as a reason as to why I should ever order from them again. Their reply: “If you wish to place an order, please contact our sales department.”

• [Luna]

  My response to this:

  “Dear Dell:

  I make purchasing decisions for a certain amount of kit in our department, and was recently given a budget of £45,000 for a refresh of our backup infrastructure.

  I will ensure that we go with HP.”

• [melissawm]

  I think it’s really funny that Adventures and Japes tried saying that the guy is a prick from the beginning and some people (like Ipo) just didn’t believe it, even though Adventure and Japes is a dane, even though she lives there, and knows the situation, and speaks danish etc etc

  But the second a MAN comes in telling exactly the same thing, people are suddenly convinced. 

  That’s the example of a sexist person… 

  • [Ipo]

    Adventure and Japes is not a Dane, but a foreigner who lives there. 
    I am, but have never lived there. 

    It’s not so much that I don’t believe the guy is a prick, but that I recognize satire and caricature as such. 
    I know next to nothing about the speaker-guy, but I know he plays a prick on stage. 

    Now if I was a typical example of a sexist person, that would be really cool, because it would mean that equality of the sexes was very much desired by them too. 

• [Adventures and Japes]

  What do I seem angry about?

• [Adventures and Japes]

  The original link in the above post is an eyewitness account by a woman in the audience.
  There’s not much in the way of English language in the Danish media, just big immigration stories really. As for “reputable”, I’m really not sure I could even provide the goods in the language of Danish.

  I think your take on Jante is wrong, by the way. But that’s okay, we can’t agree on everything.

• [Nick Mailer]

  You realise that in Swift’s time, people said the equivalent of “You didn’t just compare this dude to Juvenal did you?”