A “national call to creative resistance.” Join the effort to end fascism. Register your events on October 2nd, 3rd, & 4th.
Attempting to Humor the Humorless
There’s a long history of clowning for social justice. We need more of it. Thank you Felipe.
Send in the clowns: the new guard of activists combating the right, by Morgan Jerkins, The Guardian, September 16, 2026.
A growing cohort of performers ‘clown’ as a means to innovate traditional protest and create social change
On a humid morning on 15 July, Tillie the Clown, a Brooklyn-based drag performer whose real name is Taylor Horne, was waiting to be let inside a New York City council meeting. Horne had started getting into character at 5am, for a makeup and clown-costuming process that would take two hours. It would be another 10 hours before Horne was allowed to address the city council about the passing of Romanch’s Law, which would phase out and ultimately ban New York’s horse carriage industry.
From the Vault: Joey Skaggs’ Thanksgiving Dinner 1981
Thanksgiving Dinner 44 years ago.
Joey Skaggs, with the help of friends, students from the School of Visual Arts, and Abyssinian Baptist Choir, created a stark portrayal of a Thanksgiving feast at the United Nations Plaza on Thanksgiving Day.
From the Vault: Joey Skaggs’ 1979 Wall Street Shoe Shine
Dime for a shine? Fuhgeddaboudit!
In 1979, Joey Skaggs, SVA students and friends, make a statement about runaway inflation by charging ten times more than normal for a luxury shoe shine on Wall Street for workers who easily made ten times more than the average person.
Check out the story behind the Wall Street Shoe Shine here.
Joey Skaggs interviewed by Mark Borkowski about creative dissent on BBC Radio 4
OUTRAGE INC, an audio documentary by Mark Borkowski, aired on BBC Radio 4, August 23, 2025:
“From Suffragette arsonists to soup on sunflowers – why the stunt still matters.
Legendary publicist Mark Borkowski takes a no-prisoners look at the history of the protest stunt – the noisy, theatrical interventions that have rattled the establishment for over a century.
With fascinating examples from the BBC archive and interviews with Led By Donkeys, The Centre for Political Beauty, Joey Skaggs, The Yes Men, veteran activist Jamie Kelsey Fry and Clare Farrell from XR.”
“We criminalise the political stunt at our peril. It is a crucial art form that is impossible to ignore”, Mark Borkowski, The Guardian, 20 Aug 2025.
Listen to the full documentary on BBC Radio 4 (only available in the UK). For others, the interview is above.