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Not Just Fooling Around
If you hear about a good prank, you tell everybody. If you pull off a great prank yourself, you tell everybody about it for the rest of your LIFE. The introduction to Pranks 2! from Re/Search Publications has this to say about pranks:
What are pranks? For us, pranks are any humorous deeds, propaganda, sound bites, visualbites, performances and creative projects which pierce the veil of illusion and tell "the truth." Pranks unseriously challenge accepted reality and rigid behavioral codes and speech. Pranks deftly undermine phoniness and hypocrisy.
Pranks lampoon sanctimoniousness, self-glorification, self mythologizing and self-aggrandizement. Pranks force the laziest muscle in the body, the imagination,to be exercised, stretched, and thus transcend its former self.The imagination is what creates the future; that which will be.
Kembrew McLeod will always be the king of all pranksters in my mind. We went to college together, although we barely knew one another. During his tenure at JMU (our alma mater), he pulled off some legendary, mind-blowing pranks -- in a pre-internet era, he was a prankster media king.
Among other genius maneuvers, Kembrew managed to conduct a mass wedding on campus, marrying hundreds of students to bananas, as well as conduct an INTENSE campaign to change the school's mascot to a three-eyed pig with antlers. This campaign attracted the attention of ABC and CNN ... all without the help of the blogosphere.
Perfect pranks like Kembrew's can't happen without the blogosphere anymore. They shouldn't. Because in this day and age, if something hilarious and unsettling doesn't make it the dim glow of the digital limelight, it's because it didn't happen. Blogs, text messages, and social media can be used to organize and coordinate pranks -- and in this day and age, they almost have to be. Pranks are usually pulled by the young and crafty with very little access to money -- and web communication is the way to go.
Blogs are the only way going these days to document a great prank -- like this one from Improv Everywhere. Improv Everywhere got 225 people to shop at a Manhattan Home Depot in extreme slow-motion. They stopped short of actually harassing customers or ausing a scene, and managed to make some pretty interesting statements about mass consumer behavior.
And, in the case of the recent impostor HUD spokesman prank, pulled by the Yes Men, the blogosphere and online media disseminated news and chatter around the prank like nobody's business. To the uninitiated, a man pretending to be a spokesman for HUD spoke Monday at a conference on public housing after Hurricane Katrina. Immediately following Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco, the impostor spokesman stated
"We were wrong to prevent people from returning home at this critical time, especially when the new master plan was going to keep them out for good," Jackson said. "Today, it is my great pleasure to announce to you that HUD is reversing our policy. From now on, and beginning at all Orleans parish housing communities, our policy will no longer be to destroy much-needed housing, but to do all in our power to make it work."
The statement was not true. Now people at large (online and off) are debating whether or not HUD is doing the right thing, and what the real priorities are in the post-Katrina recovery process. Sometimes (not always) when people start talking, their brains start working.
Not bad for a bunch of pranksters. Check out the online discussions for yourselves.
What are some of the better pranks you've pulled? Do you think any of these were good? How do youfeel about the HUD impostor?
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9/22/06 6:26 AM