Tag: prankster

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The Artiness of Naughtiness

Update, April 3, 2011: You can now listen to this 30:00 radio show here on Joey Skaggs’ website.

This radio show, produced by Rob Alexander, hosted by Toby Amies and featuring Joey Skaggs, among others, aired on BBC Radio Friday, April 1 at 11:30 a.m. UK time. You can listen to it on the BBC Radio site until April 7, 2011.

The Artiness of Naughtiness
Friday 1 April, 2011 at 11:30am on BBC Radio 4

Toby Amies discovers how tricksters have turned the poking of fun into an art form.

What have Jonathon Swift, Orson Welles, Marcel Duchamp, Yoko Ono, Malcolm Mclaren, Jeremy Beadle, and Sacha Baron Cohen got in common? Toby Amies discovers how tricksters and pranksters have turned the poking of fun into an art form.

Pranking is such a part of society, we’ve got a specially sanctioned day of misrule in the calendar. Mark Twain described the 1st of April as “the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year”. But for some people April Fool’s day is just not enough; generally opposed to the status quo, they are determined to alter our relationship with reality by forcing us to question its veracity.

There are pranksters who have been determined to show us our folly all year round and most have philosophical, political and artistic reason to do so.

Toby investigates this reasoning behind pranking – discovering why people will risk consequences as serious as prison to make a point or get a laugh. Sometime the motivation behind a prank is not always only a good laugh at someone else’s expense. It can be a very serious business.

Toby draws a wobbly line from the court jester to the hoaxes of Swift and Welles to Yves Klein to the playful Marxism[!] of Debord and the Situationsists, through to the commercial modern pranking industry and the work of Sacha Baron Cohen, Improv Everywhere, Jeremy Beadle and America’s king of the prank, Joey Skaggs.

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4

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Forgery for Love, Not Money

Elusive Forger, Giving but Never Stealing
By Randy Kennedy
The New York Times
January 11, 2011

His real name is Mark A. Landis, and he is a lifelong painter and former gallery owner. But when he paid a visit to the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, La., last September, he seemed more like a character sprung from a Southern Gothic novel.

He arrived in a big red Cadillac and introduced himself as Father Arthur Scott. Mark Tullos Jr., the museum”s director, remembers that he was dressed “in black slacks, a black jacket, a black shirt with the clerical collar and he was wearing a Jesuit pin on his lapel.” Partly because he was a man of the cloth and partly because he was bearing a generous gift “” a small painting by the American Impressionist Charles Courtney Curran, which he said he wanted to donate in memory of his mother, a Lafayette native “” it was difficult not to take him at his word, Mr. Tullos said.

The painting, unframed and wrapped in cellophane, looked like the real thing, with a faded label on the verso from a long-defunct gallery in Manhattan. Father Scott offered to pay for a good frame and hinted that more paintings and perhaps some money might come the museum”s way from his family. But when the Hilliard”s director of development chatted with Father Scott about the church and his acquaintances in deeply Roman Catholic southern Louisiana, the man grew nervous. “He said, “˜Well, I travel a lot,” ” Mr. Tullos recalled. ” “˜I go and solve problems for the church.” ”

Mr. Landis “” often under his own name, though more recently as Father Scott or as a collector named Steven Gardiner “” has indeed done a lot of traveling over the past two decades, but not for the church. He has been one of the most prolific forgers American museums have encountered in years, writing, calling and presenting himself at their doors, where he tells well-concocted stories about his family”s collection and donates small, expertly faked works, sometimes in honor of nonexistent relatives. Continue reading “Forgery for Love, Not Money”

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A Cockroach Cure? Again?

Submitted by Dave Camp, saying “Prescient again”? Dave is referring to a hoax Joey Skaggs did in 1981 called “Metamorphosis“. Skaggs said he was an entomologist who had discovered cures for all of mankind’s common ailments such as colds, flus, acne, anemia and menstrual cramps, by extracting and eating cockroach hormones. Is history repeating itself? Or, was Skaggs really onto something?

Here’s the article:

Cockroach Brains May Be a Source of Antibiotics, Research Says
by Simeon Bennett
Bloomberg
September 6, 2010

Cockroach brains may be a source of new antibiotics capable of killing deadly drug-resistant bacteria, according to research that suggests the germ-spreading pests may be good for something after all.

Insects such as cockroaches have a defense mechanism against bacteria, a “logical” development from living in unhygienic conditions, research from the U.K.”s University of Nottingham showed. Tissues from the brains and nervous systems of cockroaches and locusts killed more than 90 percent of MRSA and E. coli without damaging human cells, scientists said. Continue reading “A Cockroach Cure? Again?”

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Costco Prank

Internet prankster takes on Costco
By QMI Agency
Toronto Sun
April 28, 2010

If you’re shopping at Costco and you come across a price tag for “Goat Balls,” “Human infant skull replicas,” or “The Gift of the Magi,” your eyes aren’t deceiving you.

They’re the handiwork of Rob Cockerham, a tech support worker in Sacramento, Calif., who has a website and a propensity for pranking.

“I am a Costco member, specializing in purchases of bananas and milk. On a recent visit in search of a quality, yet low-priced tequila, I realized that their on-shelf price tags are rather generic,” wrote Cockerham on his website, Cockeyed.com.

“They are printed without decoration, black on white paper measuring four by seven inches, with a straightforward layout using common fonts. And if I can make it, I can prank it.” So he made a list of all the products he thinks Costco should have, such as a “Vinyl dungeon restraint system,” “Canine/feline pacemaker kits,” and “Bottled vodka in water bottles.” He then set about making and printing the fake price tags, laminating them, and affixing them with magnetic strips. Continue reading “Costco Prank”

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