In an age of Yes Men, flash mobs, birthers, and fake pundits, is the prank dead?

What’s a good prank worth? How about $2 billion? That’s how much Dow Chemical’s stock value dipped in just 23 minutes on the morning of December 3, 2004, after its spokesman went on the BBC to announce that the company would make amends for the 1984 Bhopal toxic-gas disaster “simply because it’s the right thing to do.” (Dow had acquired Union Carbide, the original owner of the Bhopal chemical plant, in 1999.) Within the hour, the flack was exposed as one of the Yes Men, a duo that’s spent the past decade perfecting the art of anti-corporate trickery. The feat cemented their reputation as the world’s preeminent political pranksters (a reputation they recently reaffirmed by pranking the US Chamber of Commerce). It also proved that a punch line can occasionally pack a real punch.

The Bhopal stunt kicks off the pair’s new film, The Yes Men Fix the World, the follow-up to their self-titled 2004 movie. But don’t let the puffed-up title fool you into thinking that the Yes Men believe their hijinks are actually making the world a better place. A better title would have been The Prank Is Dead.

The exploits documented in both films follow the same basic script: First, the Yes Men create false identities and silly names; then they infiltrate conference halls and banquet rooms where they unveil Swiftian PowerPoint presentations and ludicrous inventions meant to expose the foibles of free-market capitalism. Posing as McDonald’s reps, they’ve suggested making fast food from human excrement. They’ve passed out samples of ExxonMobil’s new, corpse-based renewable fuel. While posing as WTO spokesman Hank Hardy Unruh at a textile conference, Yes Man No. 1 Andy Bichlbaum tore off his business attire to reveal the “Management Leisure Suit,” a skintight gold bodysuit with an inflatable three-foot phallus. Their victims are usually too dumbfounded or clueless to object. (The Chamber of Commerce being a notable exception: After the Yes Men held a press conference this October where they announced that the business lobby was making a dramatic about-face on its climate change policy, the Chamber discarded savvy PR strategy and sued the Yes Men for trademark infringement, unfair competition, and false advertising.)

While the first Yes Men movie was animated by an impish exuberance—Can you believe we keep getting away with this?—the latest is pervaded by a sense of self-loathing. After unveiling the Halliburton SurvivaBall—a “gated community for one” that turns the wearer into a giant beige gumball—to a roomful of insurance managers, Yes Man No. 2 Mike Bonanno laments, “Instead of freaking out, they just took our business cards. Our effort had been a failure. And come to think of it, all of our efforts had been failures…Maybe making fun of stupid ideas was a stupid idea.” After playing the fool for so long, the Yes Men have come to suspect that they’ve become fools themselves.

Actually, they’ve become entertainers. In the five years since The Yes Men came out, pranks have morphed from an outlet for political and artistic outsiders into another form of popular amusement, from Borat and Brüno to Punk’d and Pranked. Beyond the realm of celebrity spoofs, big budgets, and seamless editing, the Internet has further democratized the practical joke, at least in its most sophomoric form: YouTube hosts more than 500,000 prank videos ranging from crank calls and friends humiliating drunken friends to the ongoing “prank war” between the CollegeHumor.com guys. For more inspired fare, you can easily lose an hour engrossed in the antics of Improv Everywhere, a New York-based group that orchestrates elaborate flash-mob “missions,” including pants-free commutes and “freezes” in which hundreds of people stop dead in their tracks in a public place for a few minutes. Joining the fun is as easy as Rickrolling your closest friends.

“Everyone’s become a prankster,” says Joey Skaggs, a veteran hoaxster who’s spent more than four decades coming up with clever ways to con gullible journalists, including—it must be said—us. In 2000, Mother Jones published an item about a proposed cemetery-cum-amusement park that turned out to be a Skaggs spoof. Skaggs, who tracks the field on artoftheprank.com, says he doesn’t mind the competition, but complains that quantity hasn’t been matched by quality. Pranks have “become so ubiquitous that it’s become harder for what’s really meaningful to stand out,” he says. “The bar has been lowered.”

In Skaggs’ view, any prank worth paying attention to is inherently subversive. Yet most of whom the Wall Street Journal has dubbed “the new pranksters” have little agenda beyond yucks—and bucks. Charlie Todd, the 30-year-old creator of Improv Everywhere, is adamant that the sole purpose of his happenings is “spreading chaos and joy.” The emperor has no clothes, so why not let him ride the subway, too? The hipster impresario recently started offering himself to advertisers as a prankster for hire. In June 2008, Todd staged one of his signature freezes as part of a viral marketing campaign for Taco Bell’s Frutista Freeze, and he’s since signed a sponsorship deal with Yahoo.

Attention, rather than intention, also drives the new crop of political pranksters. Take Martin Eisenstadt, a pseudonymous pundit who set up a phony conservative think tank and made the rounds during the 2008 election cycle. Posing as a McCain aide, he took in a Mother Jones reporter who briefly bought his claim that the candidate supported building a casino in Baghdad. But his biggest coup was pretending to be the source of Fox News’ postelection report that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country, not a continent. This false claim inadvertently allowed Palin to denounce the original story as a hoax, even as the reporter stood by it. Eisenstadt is, of course, concluding his 15 minutes of fame with a new book, I Am Martin Eisenstadt.

One reason that Yes Men wannabes like Eisenstadt seem so lame is that they’re competing with the likes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and The Onion. Satirists shouldn’t be confused with pranksters, but the most trusted names in fake news (and their many imitators) have further mainstreamed the prankish aesthetic. But in doing so, they’ve lost the element of surprise, an essential ingredient of any effective prank. Even if you view the rise of this parallel media universe as a slo-mo prank of sorts, now everyone’s in on the joke. The audience tunes in to get their media-weary worldview humorously confirmed, and even politicians who were once conned by Ali G now line up to appear on The Daily Show.

And political pranks are no longer solely the domain of snarky liberals. Barack Obama’s victory has spawned an army of conservative No Men spewing accusations about birth certificates and death panels, inquiring about the executive foreskin, and making the inflammatory assertion that the president is just another guy with a weird name pulling off a clever feat of impersonation. Though it isn’t intended to be funny, this campaign of “saturation bullshitting” (as one of Kevin Drum’s readers put it perfectly) comes straight from the playbook used by Skaggs and the Yes Men. The haters have once again shown that the greatest hoax is how nonsense can be peddled with a straight face—and how the media are willing to spread the lies far and wide within hours, yet take weeks to debunk them.

Faced with this political theater of the absurd and prank overload, what’s an honest prankster to do? Reached at his office at Parsons school of design, where he holds the title of assistant professor in subversion (no joke), Andy Bichlbaum says he’s not throwing in the gold jumpsuit quite yet, just reevaluating the limitations of the prank. Sure, the Bhopal gag scored a PR hit, but it was a mere blip in Dow’s overall performance, and the company still refuses to take responsibility. “Okay, we got 600 articles in the US press to be written about the situation in Bhopal,” Bichlbaum says. “But how do you make things change systematically?” He and Bonanno have come to see that some issues—like climate change—are too big and complex for a couple of scruffy guys in cheap suits to take on alone, but “it’s not like we’re going to stop doing what we’ve been doing. It’s what we’re good at; we’re not good at organizing millions of people.”

The Yes Men have realized what Abbie Hoffman, the godfather of the modern political put-on, figured out long ago: The best practical jokes are primarily triumphs of spectacle. Witness the legendary 1967 stunt in which he and a band of Yippies rained dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. A few traders scrambled for the cash—but Hoffman saw that the real impact was psychic: “In the minds of millions of teenagers the stock market had just crashed.” And if his political pranks simply amused people, so be it. “You don’t turn up your noses at entertainment because entertainment is way up there on the hierarchy of needs.”

We need pranks—weighty and lightweight—now more than ever. In Capitalism: A Love Story, populist prankster Michael Moore wanders Wall Street with empty sacks to retrieve federal bailout money. It’s a biting, timely reversal of Hoffman’s stock exchange gag, but unlikely to leave audiences demanding “pitchforks and torches,” as Moore has suggested. Pranks can provide sudden jolts of awareness or catharsis, but we shouldn’t expect them to both mock and mend the world. Nor should we worry about being LOLed into complacency by mindless pranks. Good pranks aren’t dead, simply evolving. Just as Sacha Baron Cohen’s first three personas have gotten stale and the Yes Men are searching for a new gig, so will the current crop of predictable pranksters be pushed aside by a new batch of jokers who’ve concluded that it’s better to light a stink bomb than curse the darkness.

From Artdaily.org:

Washington, DC – This groundbreaking exhibition casts new light upon Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), one of the most influential artists of the recent past. This show demonstrates that Duchamp harnessed the power of portraiture and self-portraiture both to secure his reputation as an iconoclast and to establish himself as a major figure in the artworld. In the process, he played a key role in the reinvention of portraiture, exerting a transformative influence from the early 20th century to the present. The exhibition showcases approximately 100 never-before-assembled portraits and self-portraits of Duchamp ranging from 1912 to the present, including works by his contemporaries Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Francis Picabia and Florine Stettheimer as well as portraits by a more recent generation of artists, such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Sturtevant, Yasumasa Morimura, David Hammons, Beatrice Wood and Douglas Gordon. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published by MIT Press, featuring new research by leading scholars and a detailed chronology of Duchamp’s life. Co-curators for the exhibition are Anne Collins Goodyear, assistant curator of prints and drawings, and James W. McManus, professor of art history, California State University Chico.

Read more:

Exhibit studies artist who tweaked ‘Mona Lisa’, by Brett Zongker, AP

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Every religion, political ideology, philosophy, and scientific theory embodies a set of structured beliefs. These belief systems maintain a symbiotic liaison with the arts. Throughout history, communal beliefs have relied on music, theater, painting, and dance in order to propagate accepted doctrines, and the arts in turn have shaped the articles of faith.

The conference brings together artists and scholars in an unusual forum. The arts addressed deal primarily with media, the major art form that has only come to the fore in recent decades. The scholarship concerns antique matters, such as Sumerian music, early Egyptian medicine, and the omens, codes of law, and creation myths of Mesopotamia. The divergent perspectives of the participants augur well for innovative ideas emerging from this close encounter between scholarship, the arts, and the belief systems of early and modern times.

Participants: Mel Alexenberg / Netanel Anor / Michael Bielicky / Bazon Brock / Yiyi Chen / Michael Cohn / Brian Dillon / Dragan Espenschied / Dmitry Gutov / Jenia Gutova / Wayne Horowitz / Th. J. H. Krispijn / Bo Lawergren / Olia Lialina / Barbara London / Naomi May / Luke Murphy / Muzaffer Ozgules / Marcin Ramocki / Morty Schiff / Irene Sibbing / Joey Skaggs / Peter Weibel / Martin Williams / Jocelyn Wolff / Henry Zemel

Presented by Caeno.org/newagain

Having announced his death on two previous occasions, Bruce Conner actually did die on Monday at 74.

The false alarms were part of his continual toying with the nature of personal and artistic identity. Conner liked to have control – the neatness of his house attested to that – and the nearest he could come to controlling public information about himself was to inject it with ruses and contradictions.

The shaggy look of his early assemblages earned Conner a place in the Bay Area tendency briefly known as Funk art. But that shagginess is deceptive. The unflinching, albeit intuitive, control he brought to those works’ composition accounts for the inventive power that still burns through their period quality when encountered half a century later.

Long before the shaky ground of selfhood became a theme of postmodernism, Conner was working and playing with it. The work in his 2000 retrospective at the de Young Museum was so diverse that, as I wrote at the time, “it could almost be taken for the output of a movement rather than an individual.”

On the eve of that reputation-making show, Conner declared his intent to become again – as he had once been – an anonymous artist. “On the 12-step program of Artists Anonymous,” he said in conversation, “the first is never acknowledging any of your work, after never signing it. … Anyone who has a drawing of mine from before 1960 without a signature has an authentic work.”

Conner’s work is distinguished by a nearly unique combination of visual and emotional impact and artistic disguise.

Watch a piece by him such as the collage film “Take the 5:10 to Dreamland,” something of a landscape piece, and there is no way to decide how he felt about its eerie lyricism. Did he enjoy it? Did he regard it as an inevitable by-product of the materials in hand, or of our culturally conditioned reception? Composing the whole thing from found footage, he set the rationale of his decisions at an unbridgeable remove.

Conner chafed against people’s – including critics’ – habit of assuming a “one to one correspondence” between an artist’s thinking and his work. He preferred to “think of the artist on the model of a writer, a playwright or an actor, someone who works with narrative, irony and changing voices.”

I suspect that Conner still has not achieved the recognition he merits because of critics’ and the public’s inability to break with the model of authorship that he found so constraining. To admiring younger artists, his death represents a loss beyond recompense. “Life on Mars,” the current Carnegie International Exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, includes a dozen works by Conner.

(An exhibition of Conner’s photographs of the ’70s punk rock scene is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum through Aug. 3.)

Preparing to interview Conner in 2000, I was told by several people, including him, that his health dictated a brief conversation, necessarily in the morning.

But as our encounter progressed, he seemed to gain vigor, pouring forth one story and quotable remark after another, while I struggled to keep pace with transcription. After three hours, I left, drained physically and emotionally; he seemed fully alert and ready to meet the day.

I felt on that occasion that I had truly met the creative force behind his work. No wonder he could jump from filmmaking to collage to photography to conceptual art to translating his collages into tapestries, seemingly without resistance.

“When I’m asked a question, I tend to answer with a story,” Conner said to me, hence the title of his 2000 retrospective, “2000 B.C.: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II,” which also sounded, not incidentally, like the title of a Hollywood biopic.

The gravity of some of his work’s motifs – mushroom clouds, for example – and an aloof personal style may have kept many people from recognizing in Conner a great comic artist. “My entire history as an artist coincides with the history of the bomb,” he told me in 2000, “and it’s colored almost everything I’ve done. But I also don’t see why you can’t have a good time and be aware of your own mortality.”

Other Links of Interest:

Many, many thanks to all the supporters, contributors, readers, and friends who have made it such a great success!

images: party balloons, zombies

If you’re in San Francisco, don’t miss:

The First Annual Pranks Film Festival
April 1, 2, 3 at The Roxie Cinema
3117 16th Street by Valencia, San Francisco CA 94133
Tickets $10 per day for all shows.

The 1st Annual Pranks Film Festival is a three day celebration and tribute to the “Art of the Prank” and those pranksters that have courage enough to pull them off. [Editor's note: Footage of Joey Skaggs' exploits will be screened Thursday, April 3 at 5pm]

www.pranksfilmfestival.com

The First Annual Pranks Film Festival
April 1, 2, 3 at The Roxie Cinema
3117 16th Street by Valencia, San Francisco CA 94133
Tickets $10 per day for all shows.
www.pranksfilmfestival.com

The 1st Annual Pranks Film Festival is a three day celebration and tribute to the “Art of the Prank” and those pranksters that have courage enough to pull them off.

The Festival will screen films about the masters like Alan Abel, John Law, The Cacophany Society and the Billboard Liberation Front and short docs from the newest infiltrators and prankster, like the Yes Men, Harmon Leon and Joey Skaggs. This is a festival that is both humorous and political.

Check the schedule here. Benefit for RE/Search Publications and Todd Blair of SRL.

Editor’s note: Video about Joey Skaggs will be screened on April 3 at 5pm.

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG and Bani present:

The Influencers, a free three day event, Thursday, February 28 – March 1, 2008, at the Centre de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona (CCCB), dedicated to imaginative subversion of contemporary mediascape. Focusing on the first hand testimony of some of the protagonists of the international scene, the festival is a selection of the most subtle, elegant and visionary proposals of parallel narratives in the realm of media and global popular culture.

The Influencers explores controversial forms of art and communication guerrilla, presenting independent projects that play with global popular culture, infiltrate the mass media, and transform fashions, consumption and technological fetishism.

The key to The Influencers is found in its guests and stories: impostors, pseudo-totalitarian musicians, conceptual hackers, deviant geographers, anarchitects and actors from invisible theatre. In these three days they are going to present their work, show known and less known material and speak with the public about challenges, goals and strategies.

See you all in Barcelona!

Tricksters and Pranks with R.U. Sirius – February 11 – March 23, 2008

Pranks and Pranksters, Tricksters & Tricks — the brilliant ones open up a space in the world for magic(k), ambiguity, and novelty. They encourage us to Question Authority and better still, they cause us to Question Reality.

In this course, we will discuss the history of pranks and pranksterism in the contemporary world. We will examine mythical and world historic tricksters like Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Crowley, Puck, Heyoka, Papa Legba, Lucifer, and more. And we’ll explore and discuss the role pranksters and tricksters play in cultures. I will also discuss some of my own pranks and tricks and legendary pranksters Mark Hosler of Negativland and Joey Skaggs will be dropping in on the course to answer questions.

Finally, we will plan pranks, make pranks, and maybe even leave the course with a dedicated prankster cabal. No fooling.

For more information visit the Maybe Logic Institute. If that link doesn’t work, go here.

Related links:

The exhibition highlights the history of the avant-garde through some of its most pivotal figures and a wide array of mediums including film, film stills, installation, Fluxus objects and documents, sculpture, video, and poetry, which cooperatively stimulated new ways of thinking about art, culture, and society. Furthermore, the exhibition represents a celebratory homecoming for two of Lithuania’s most prolific artists: pioneering avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas and George Maciunas, the impresario and “Chairman” of the 1960’s international art movement Fluxus.

Kazys Binkis, the Futurist poet and writer whose literary activity awakened Lithuania to avant-garde philosophy and aesthetics holds an honorary place in the program. His books, poems, and manuscripts are a testament to his enigmatic persona and contribution to the progression of Lithuanian art and culture.

Jonas Mekas “The Godfather of American Avant-Garde Cinema” continues his groundbreaking work through new installations in which the still and moving image conjoin in a spectacular multimedia presentation. His Collection of 40 Short Films, recently on view at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York is shown on monitors and wall projections together with 40 film stills extracted from this riveting series.

The installations demonstrate Mekas’ formal innovations as well as his importance as a documentarian. Among the colorful and well known personalities who appear in his films are: John Lennon, Salvador Dali, George Maciunas, Richard Serra, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, and Allen Ginsberg, reminding us that Mekas’ films represent some of the best historical footage of the avant-garde in existence from the 1960’s to the present. Also featured will be Zefiro Torna: Scenes From the Life of George Maciunas (1992), Mekas’ cinematic homage to his longtime friend and collaborator. Complementing the film are 40 film stills that Mekas crafted specially for the exhibition.

Essential works have been selected from the Center’s recently acquired Fluxus collection. Maciunas’ readymade sign No Smoking (1963/1973), his collaborative work with George Brecht realized through Iced Dice (1964), and Yoko Ono’s Do It Yourself (1966) demonstrate the movement’s emphasis on humor and desire to construct art from everyday objects and actions. The 80 Wooster Street documents reveal the nuts and bolts behind Maciunas’ vision to convert the industrial buildings of New York’s downtown SoHo neighborhood into the legendary Fluxhouse Artist Cooperatives, which earned him the title of “Father of SoHo.” Also on view will be Nam June Paik’s conceptual video installation Real Plant/Live Plant (1978) and video sculpture TV Rodin (1975). Larry Miller’s Some Fluxus (1991) showcases key Fluxus performances incorporating segments from Maciunas’ final interview in which Maciunas explains his lifelong fascination with charts, systemization, and humor. Shigeko Kubota’s Fluxus SoHo Tour (1994) offers another intimate look at Maciunas as he and Fluxus members travel the streets of SoHo speaking in their native languages. While the international Fluxus movement as a whole is the subject of Lars Movin’s The Misfits: 30 Years of Fluxus (1993), Maciunas’ comprehensive production Fluxfilm Anthology (1962-70) encapsulates the group’s critical yet playful engagement with film tradition.

Jonas Mekas specifically curates a roster of films by visionaries of avant-garde cinema. So honored are Luis Buñuel’s revolutionary surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1929) written in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp’s characteristically Dada film Anemic Cinema (1926), Hans Richter’s Dada masterpiece Rhythmus 21 (1921), Fernand Léger’s pioneering cinematic testament Ballet Mécanique (1924), and Peter Kubelka’s experimental, abstract film Arnulf Rainer (1960).

“Jonas Mekas was born and raised in Lithuania. As a renowned poet in his native country, he pushed the boundaries of language to its most creative edges. After he was forced to leave Lithuania during World War II, Jonas found a new home in New York and continued paving new avant-garde frontiers. This time, he chose the universal language of cinema as his area of communication. Jonas’ return to Lithuania is not only a home-coming, but a continuation of new realities”, stated Artūras Zuokas, the Chairman of the Board of the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center.

This landmark exhibition culminates in the historic moment when Lithuania assumes the esteemed position of European Capital of Culture in 2009. Such international recognition attests to the fact that a vibrant new period in Lithuanian culture has already emerged.

The exhibition will be accompanied with a full-page color catalogue with essays by R. Bruce Elder, P. Adams Sitney, Amy Taubin, Mari Dumett, Julia Robinson, Carolina Carrasco, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, and Hollis Melton.

Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center, Ms. Maya Stendhal, and Mr. Harry Stendhal – exhibition curators Ms. Mari Dumett – Co-curator Fluxus Documents.

From artdaily.org

Alfred Jarry (September 8, 1873 – November 1, 1907) was a French writer born in Laval, Mayenne, France, not far from the border of Brittany; he was of Breton descent on his mother’s side.

Best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), which is often cited as a forerunner to the theatre of the absurd, Jarry wrote in a variety of genres and styles. He wrote plays, novels, poetry, essays and speculative journalism. His texts present some pioneering work in the field of absurdist literature. Sometimes grotesque or misunderstood (i.e. the opening line in his play Ubu Roi, “Merdre!”, has been translated into English as “Shittr!”, “Shikt!”, and “Pschitt!”), he invented a science called ‘pataphysics.

Biography and works

A precociously brilliant student, Jarry enthralled his classmates with a gift for pranks and troublemaking.

At the lycée in Rennes when he was 15, he led of a group of boys who devoted much time and energy to poking fun at their well-meaning, obese and incompetent physics teacher, a man named Hébert. Jarry and classmate Charles Morin wrote a play they called Les Polonais and performed it with marionettes in the home of one of their friends. The main character, Père Heb, was a blunderer with a huge belly; three teeth (one of stone, one of iron, and one of wood); a single, retractable ear; and a misshapen body. In Jarry’s later work Ubu Roi, Père Heb would develop into Ubu, one of the most monstrous and astonishing characters in French literature.

Read more about Alfred Jarry at Wikipedia…

‘Pataphysics, a term coined by the French writer Alfred Jarry, is a philosophy dedicated to studying what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics. It is a parody of the theory and methods of modern science and is often expressed in nonsensical language. A practitioner of ‘pataphysics is a ‘pataphysician or a ‘pataphysicist.

The term first appeared in print in Alfred Jarry’s play text “Guignol” in the 28 April 1893 issue of L’Écho de Paris littéraire illustré. Jarry later defined it as “the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments” (Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, II, viii). Raymond Queneau has described ‘pataphysics as resting “on the truth of contradictions and exceptions.”

Jarry mandated the inclusion of the apostrophe in the orthography “to avoid a simple pun,” the pun possibly being patte � physique (leg of physics), as interpreted by Jarry scholars Keith Beaumont and Roger Shattuck, or possibly pas ta physique (not your physics), or maybe “Pâte � physique” (physics dough).

Read more about ‘Pataphysics at Wikipedia…

This article was published in Extra! by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) in the 1999 March/April issue. Although I’ve produced many new works since then, the basic premises described below still resonate for me. This should provide a pretty good summary of the intent of my work and why I do it. I hope it also sets a positive and creative tone for this Blog. -JS

We’re living in a time when it seems everything we see on the news is a bad joke: President Clinton and impeachment, Y2K and the end of the world, Viagra raising the dead, cloning your dead pet dog.

So how can a conscientious media prankster make a mark? When reality gets this strange, pranks are needed more than ever to jolt us into reexamining our values.

With the Internet’s immediacy, its availability to anyone wishing to plant an idea, service or product for the world to consume, there’s more opportunity than ever for both pranks and scams. Anyone can send an e-mail, create a rumor on Usenet, make a website and look official with very little effort or cost.

To me the prank is fine art. I use the immediacy of the news media as my medium. The gullibility of the media and the vulnerability of the public help me to communicate my ideas to a large audience. When I perpetrate a hoax I get media attention. I use that attention to express thoughts on issues I feel are important.

When I package a satire into a funny, sexually suggestive, controversial or highly technical wrapping, the media tend to fall for it hook, line and sinker. That’s because I’m basically giving them what they want. A provocative story with great visuals that’s outrageous yet plausible: A cathouse for dogs where you can get your dog sexually gratified for $50; a portable confessional booth offering religion on the move for people on the go; an auction for celebrity sperm.

Why are my pranks–or any pranks, really–successful? I believe we are all predisposed to be conned. As children, we are conned into behaving. Then we are conned into believing. The Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the bogeyman occupy a great amount of our consciousness. Then there is religious training, lessons of morality that require great leaps of faith.

The bottom line is, we’re taught to suspend critical thinking and analysis and to believe what we’re told. So we grow up conning ourselves as we look for answers to unanswerable questions and miracle cures for all of our ills. And, with the help of a less-than-responsible press whose corporate bottom line frequently overrides sound journalistic judgment, we believe just about anything we see in the news.

Pranks vs. scams

For the most part, the kind of pranks that are being perpetrated via the mainstream news media and on the Internet are as shallow and vapid as the reality that surrounds us, or are outright scams for money. Take “ourfirsttime.com,” for example, a site mounted in July 1998 to promote two teenagers who were planning to lose their virginity with each other live online. It could have been a brilliant hoax–a great satire about our excessive fascination with the prurient and with voyeurism.

But it was a totally transparent scam for money. There were never any virgins who were going to consummate their relationship on line. There was just a plan to collect $5 per visit from hundreds of thousands of curious net surfers for weeks leading up to the great day. In other words, it wasn’t a prank at all. Yes, it was a media manipulation. But its purpose was to rip off the vulnerable public it could have so beautifully satirized.

The media love this type of scam because they can righteously put it down, meanwhile sideswiping serious media activists, satirists and culture jammers who get lumped in with the scammers and con artists. The mainstream media do not want to differentiate between the two. They prefer to put down any attack on their credibility. Typically, they trivialize or ignore the intent of the media activist because acknowledging that they have been irresponsible or shallow undermines their credibility.

A good prank, however, attempts to shed light on an issue and to create social change. It is the manipulation of ideas and emotions in order to shift focus onto otherwise hidden agendas or social injustices. Using elements of truth, irony, humor and satire, a good prank is meant to target closed-mindedness, prejudice, hatred and unquestioning thinking. It deconstructs the status quo. It attacks the misuse of power by media, government, business and religion. A good prank is a smoke and mirror illusion that can change people’s perceptions and make them realize that most of their reality is–smoke and mirrors.

I get e-mail every single day from wannabe pranksters, narcissists and revenge seekers. Electronic graffiti artists. They reach out to me as if I was the “Dear Abby” of pranks. They solicit my counsel on how to avenge a boss, humiliate a big brother or embarrass an irritating friend.

Sometimes I write back politely explaining that this is not the nature of my work. I’m not into meaningless stupid vicious vindictive acts of rage against people or institutions. Nor am I interested in delusional people who confuse their lack of conscience with some tweaked concept of anarchy, pulling off the equivalent of the burning-bag-of-poop-at-the-door trick on the Internet (i.e., the plethora of computer viruses). I challenge hoaxers to do something more meaningful, something that will rock the status quo.

Pranks have always been culturally important to society. And as our reality becomes more and more bizarre and seemingly less meaningful it’s more important than ever that effective pranks be perpetrated. So here’s to bigger and better pranks that attempt to affect positive change. We have to be able to look at ourselves and laugh.

Joey Skaggs’ hoaxes have been misreported as fact by such news outlets as the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Wall Street Journal, AP, UPI, Reuters, Scripps Howard, Knight Ridder, U.S. News and World Report, Ms., New York, People, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC. Skaggs is also a media consultant, college instructor, international lecturer on culture-jamming and media activism, and a fine arts painter and sculptor. He is, of course, working on another hoax.

Sidebar: They Fell for Them All

* Hippie Bus Tour to Queens (1968)

To satirize the busloads of tourists who came to the East Village to gawk at the hippies, Joey Skaggs rented a Greyhound sight-seeing bus and took sixty bearded, beaded, camera-toting hippies on a tour of suburban Queens. He called it his “Cultural Exchange Tour.”

* Cathouse for Dogs (1976)

A bordello for canines, a place to get your dog sexually gratified without the threat of pregnancy, staged for the media by supposed promoter Joey Skaggs, set off the media’s mojo.

* Celebrity Sperm Bank Auction (1976)

Giuseppe Scaggoli (a.k.a. Joey Skaggs) created the Celebrity Sperm Bank. Unfortunately, the night before the first auction of celebrity sperm, the sperm was mysteriously stolen. So the auction was replaced by a press conference, and the Celebrity Sperm Bank was widely reported as a thriving new and controversial business by numerous print, television and radio media.

* Metamorphosis – Cockroach Vitamin Pill (1981)

“Roaches have been around for 350 million years,” said entomologist Dr. Josef Gregor (a.k.a. Joey Skaggs). “They’ll survive a nuclear holocaust. We have much to learn from them.” Gregor, leader of a group called Metamorphosis, had bred a super strain of cockroaches, extracted their hormones, and made a cockroach vitamin pill which he said cured arthritis, acne, anemia and menstrual cramps–as well as making one invulnerable to high doses of nuclear radiation.

* WALK RIGHT! (1984)

“The Guardian Angels have the subways, we want the streets.” So said Joseph Virgil Skaggs (a.k.a. Joey Skaggs), street vigilante, who, with his gang of black-clad commandos wearing WALK RIGHT! sweatshirts, patrolled the streets to get signatures on a petition to institute 66 rules of street etiquette. In a case of life imitating art, many of Guardian Angels’ founder Curtis Sliwa’s tales of heroism turned out to be made up.

* The Fat Squad (1986)

“You can hire us but you cannot fire us. Our commandos take no bribes.” That was the motto of Joe Bones (a.k.a. Joey Skaggs), ex-U.S. Marine drill sergeant, and founder of the Fat Squad, an organization created to rub out fat. Clients signed a contract to allow Bones’ calorie cops to physically restrain them–whether on a date, at the job or at night in the bedroom–from breaking their diets.

* Portofess (1992)

A life-size confession booth on wheels, pedaled up 8th Avenue in New York to the 1992 Democratic convention, caused a media sensation. Skaggs was unrepentant.

* SEXONIX (1993)

In 1993, Joseph Skaggs, Ph.D. (a.k.a. Joey Skaggs), artificial intelligence computer scientist specializing in the field of virtual reality, reported he had perfected the world’s first sexual virtual reality apparatus. However, his plans to demonstrate it at an invention and gift show in Toronto were waylaid when the equipment was confiscated at the Canadian border by puritanical customs agents. But Dr. Skaggs was not deterred. As he said to the media, “Machinery may be put under lock and key, but the people’s dreams may not.” Skaggs took the ruse to cyberspace where the rest of the story played out.

* The Solomon Project (1996)

Do you believe that the judicial system is a joke? That there is no such thing as “equal justice for all”? That the courts are biased and racist? Dr. Joseph Bonuso (a.k.a. Joey Skaggs) created a solution. Working with over 150 scientists, judges and attorneys for over seven years, Dr. Bonuso and his team created the Solomon Project, a series of supercomputers which could render civil and criminal decisions with great speed, low cost and no prejudice, guaranteeing equal justice for all.

© 1999 Joey Skaggs