Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World
Kembrew McLeod
Language: English
Pages: 364
ISBN: 081479629X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From Benjamin Franklin's newspaper hoax that faked the death of his rival to Abbie Hoffman’s attempt to levitate the Pentagon, pranksters, hoaxers, and con artists have caused confusion, disorder, and laughter in Western society for centuries. Profiling the most notorious mischief makers from the 1600s to the present day, Pranksters explores how “pranks” are part of a long tradition of speaking truth to power and social critique.
Invoking such historical and contemporary figures as P.T. Barnum, Jonathan Swift, WITCH, The Yes Men, and Stephen Colbert, Kembrew McLeod shows how staged spectacles that balance the serious and humorous can spark important public conversations. In some instances, tricksters have incited social change (and unfortunate prank blowback) by manipulating various forms of media, from newspapers to YouTube. For example, in the 1960s, self-proclaimed “professional hoaxer” Alan Abel lampooned America’s hypocritical sexual mores by using conservative rhetoric to fool the news media into covering a satirical organization that advocated clothing naked animals. In the 1990s, Sub Pop Records then-receptionist Megan Jasper satirized the commodification of alternative music culture by pranking the New York Times into reporting on her fake lexicon of “grunge speak.” Throughout this book, McLeod shows how pranks interrupt the daily flow of approved information and news, using humor to underscore larger, pointed truths.
Written in an accessible, story-driven style, Pranksters reveals how mischief makers have left their shocking, entertaining, and educational mark on modern political and social life.
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Decade’s social upheavals. A ragtag group named the Discordians stirred up even more trouble. They worshiped the goddess of chaos, made fun of organized religion, and satirized what historian Richard Hofstadter calls the “paranoid style in American politics.” Among other things, these Discordian prophets mailed comical letters on Bavarian Illuminati letterhead to evangelical churches and organizations such as the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.30 These sorts of impish acts triggered some.
Over by claiming that men were permitted to have multiple wives, so that “they may beget many Children every Year; of whom some of the Sons are Sacrific’d, but the Daughters are all preserv’d for Matrimony.”29 Psalmanazar’s book also offered a political history of Formosa, complete with conquests and daggered intrigue. It included a reproduction of a letter addressed to the Formosan king, written by the king of Japan (though no one asked how this wretched refugee acquired this rare document).
Money.” Successful humbugs lured folks in with weird, wacky, and tacky displays, and audiences made repeat visits to figure out how they had been fooled. Humbugs and confidence games remind us that “if there is a false belief among us, we need to become conscious of how belief is created,” Lewis Hyde writes in Trickster Makes This World. Even though conniving con artists and thought-provoking pranksters are driven by different impulses, their audiences can learn similar lessons from their.
Crystal” sunk Atlantis, which would soon rise again: “Expect it in ’68 and ’69,” he declared. “Not so far away!” Cayce likely absorbed the Atlantis myth from 91 Spirits in the Material World Madame Blavatsky, though he was also influenced by the popular culture of his youth (such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Lost Continent). Much like his Spiritualist predecessors, he was fascinated with electrified communication technologies. Like-minded people flocked to him, including Thomas Edison, Nikola.
Shots of the skinny, white twenty-something in a pimp costume, making it look like he dressed this way in ACORN’s offices. It was one of many manipulations in O’Keefe’s viral videos (which, to be fair, are not unlike some edits found in films by liberal documentarian Michael Moore).49 The incendiary footage prompted multiple criminal investigations, though no charges were ultimately filed. A report on ACORN activities 174 k cab wo l B k n a rP produced by the California attorney general.