Category: The History of Pranks

Check out Anita LaBelle’s wonderful film review of the oral history film “Joey Skaggs: Stop BioPEEP” for New Jersey Stage. This film, which is about Joey Skaggs’ 1998 hoax Stop BioPEEP, is screening at the New Jersey Film Festival on September 20, 2024. Festival details are in the link.

Joey Skaggs: Stop BioPEEP is the tenth installment of the oral history series Joey Skaggs Satire and Art Activism, 1960s to the Present and Beyond, a film episodic that the New Jersey Film Festival has shown every episode of. Giuseppe Scaggoli, or as he is better known, Joey Skaggs has used artistic mediums and prank behavior to push pivotal societal issues into questioning. Through news clips, old prank footage, and modern interview excerpts conducted by Joey Skaggs and Judy Drosd, each episodic endeavor is thoroughly documented and hilariously explained. Skaggs’ work, though often gaining controversy at first, seems to always later reach critical acclaim due to retrospect and perhaps his own air of anthropological foresight. In this latest episode, Skaggs targets the still-topical issues of genetic mutation and government intervention, except this time, his audience goes global. Unfolding in 1998 when Joseph Howard (Joey Skaggs) plays the role of a corporate whistleblower, he foils BioPEEP’s 1997 corporate project to genetically alter and addict humans to chosen products, thus creating “consumer junkies” and targeted “gene-ocide”. When the information is leaked to the press via Skaggs, protests against BioPEEP occur in both the U.S. and Australia. Even more unexpected, was the mass alarm that the whole affair caused in Slovenia. Whether international conspiracy or guerilla artwork, audiences will be shocked by the inner workings and affairs of the piece, including the reach one story can take, and the media’s lust to grab any sensational story rather than the hard-hitting truth.

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