A comedian has pulled out of a gig after learning she would be sharing a stage with Dapper Laughs creator Daniel O’Reilly.

Kate Barron had been booked to appear at Comedy Unleashed’s Hate N Live tomorrow night, promoted by the comedy club that prides itself on its ‘free speech’ ethos, and providing a home for comics ‘cancelled’ elsewhere.

But on learning about the notoriety of O’Reilly’s now-abandoned alter-ego, Canadian stand-up Barron decided she couldn’t share the stage  of East London’s Backyard Comedy Club with him.

Barron wrote on Twitter: ‘Having only moved here 4 years ago and not began my comedy in the UK or grown up here I'm unaware of many comedians and their histories until I meet them / get put on a lineup with them.

‘I'd never heard of Dapper Laughs before and as great as it is that he can now see women as real people because he has daughters of his own, it's still a no from me due to his previous "stand up".

‘I'm all for freedom of speech and people evolving but I have a personal line that I won't cross so I have cancelled tomorrow nights Hate 'N' Live gig at @unleashed comedy as I don't feel comfortable being on this bill.’

Regarding tomorrow night’s cancellation of @UnleashedComedy pic.twitter.com/ZnOWCPIzZt

— Kate Barron (@Kate_Barron) April 25, 2023

However, gig organiser Leo Kearse said it was ironic that Barron ‘pulled out of a show called Hate N Live because a comedian on the bill did some material she thought was hateful’.

He said: ‘Daniel O'Reilly's supposedly "offensive" jokes were a decade ago - plenty of comedians have done worse – Stewart Lee, Frankie Boyle, Alfie Brown, but they're middle class so are given the benefit of the doubt.

‘This isn't about principle, it's about appeasing comedy's self appointed milk monitors who put pressure on her to pull out.

‘I'm pretty sure Kate's rock hard principles would crumble if Frankie Boyle offered her a spot on his TV show. Except he can't, because it's been cancelled. Because nobody wants to watch comedians going for claps instead of laughs.

‘There's no fun in the orthodoxy being enforced. At Hate N Live we mock everything, especially society's sacred cows.

‘Also who doesn't know that you can get out of anything at the last minute by pretending you've got Covid?’

O’Reilly – now a regular commentator on GB News – last month announced his tour Out Of Character, which made no mention of the  Dapper Laughs persona. He has today announced extra dates for that tour.

Suggesting this notorious alter-ego -  which was at the centre of a misogyny row a decade ago – was not true to his own personality, the blurb for the show says: ‘He has had many characters, but for this live show he's going Out Of Character to stand up as he brings the laughs and looks back on the mischief, the mistakes and the madness of his career so far. From losing it all, battling addiction and becoming a father he’s been on some rollercoaster.’

O’Reilly, now 38, still uses the Dapper Laughs handle on Twitter, where he has 383,000 followers, and Instagram, where he has almost 800,000

He has latterly embraced mental health podcasting with a show called Menace II Sobriety, having battled drug and alcohol addiction and being diagnosed with ADHD. He also runs a Facebook group called Men And Their Emotions (MATE)

It’s a far cry from 2014 when he his ITV2 dating show, On The Pull, was heavily criticised for being degrading to women. After footage emerged of him telling a woman at one of his live shows that she was ‘gagging for a rape’, the show was cancelled and tour dates pulled. At the time, O’Reilly said he was merely repeating back what the audience member had shouted at him.

He gave a contrite interview to Newsnight – famously wearing a black turtleneck to show how serious he was being –  saying ‘Dapper Laughs is gone’. But just weeks later he was back making videos for social media with the same alter-ego.

O’Reilly - now the father of two daughters aged six and four – also appeared on Celebrity Brother in 2018. Last month he told the Daily Star that becoming a father to two girls ‘opened my eyes to how dangerous some of my content could have been’.

He said he had now ‘learned a lot about… sexual harassment, sexual violence and and what women have to put up with, and now I'm terrified.’

Claiming that Dapper Laughs was a ‘satire’ of lad culture, he added: ‘Sometimes that image was taken too far and it could very much have influenced people in the wrong way. But I was a different person and I didn't have children. I was a right knobhead back then. When I look back, I can see why people that were older than me, that had daughters and women found it offensive.’

After she pulled out, Barron was replaced on tomorrow's bill by Tania Edwards.

Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan recently chose Comedy Unleashed to make his stand-up debut, having been ostracised by most of the comedy world for his views on transgenderism.