Authors: John Beckman
A look back over the past half century shows a groundswell of ethnic- and identity-based groups whose long-standing parties, conventions, and
parades broke the levees in the eighties and nineties. For more than a century “
Mardi Gras Indians”—New Orleans neighborhoods and gangs paying tribute to Native Americans who sheltered blacks during slavery—have staged once-violent, now intensely playful showdowns of masquerade and mimicry. For generations a New Year’s Day
Mummers’ Parade has strutted and blared its outlandish mummery through the center of Philadelphia.
Gay Pride parades, originating in the 1969
Stonewall riots, have grown the world over into weeklong hootenannies. Plus: Chicanos’
Cinco de Mayo, black Texans’
Juneteenth, Trekkie conventions, Civil War reenactments, underground-comics fairs,
Coney Island’s
Mermaid Parade, San Francisco’s Folsom Street leather fair, Deadhead tribes, sock-burning sailors, grrrl-powered roller derby leagues, and the
riotous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally whose participant population every year since 2000 has eclipsed that of South Dakota, in whose Badlands the party goes down. While the nation’s teenagers blow major bucks on the official holidays of Homecoming and Prom, they still fight for their rights to unchaperoned dances, heedless house parties, and, most fun of all (sorry, administrators), Senior Skip Day and Senior Prank.
And in the long tradition of revolutionary-era broadsides, Washoe newspapers, sixties
undergrounds, and punk-rock zines, a DIY bonanza in fun information dominates the Internet. On blogs,
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Urban Dictionary, people get the joke. These technologies and more—many of them “free,” if not always in the
Diggers’ purest sense—have excellent potential for creative fun: they foster public debate and media parody; they get people producing their own films and music and forming networks without corporate sponsorship; they allow strangers to throw spontaneous parties on sidewalks and department-store floors—the site, indeed, of the first millennial
flash mob, when some one hundred citizens answered the call to pile onto a rug at the flagship
Macy’s. Whether triggering nonpartisan pillow fights in
Union Square, or politicized ones at the NYSE, the swarming trends in the millennium’s first decade seemed to marry the nineteenth-century
mass hoax with the twenty-first-century mass prank.
The American ringleader of this global circus, a not-for-profit P. T. Barnum of hands-on high jinks, is the neo–
Merry Prankster
Charlie Todd. Influenced by such twentieth-century troublemakers as situationist Guy Debord, comedian
Andy Kaufman, his mentors in the
Upright Citizens Brigade, and, naturally,
Abbie Hoffman, Todd founded an organization called
Improv Everywhere—a Web-based collective, based in New York City, devoted to “causing scenes”—or what they called “missions” performed by “agents.” Starting small in 2001 with spoof celebrity sightings and bemusing performances in downtown
Starbucks, they stepped up their game in 2006 by swarming a Best Buy with employee look-alikes. Their instructions, which forbade agents to bring cameras (and being spectators), made this caveat: “only show up if you are wearing the proper dress and are ready to participate and have fun.” Eighty agents turned out in khakis and royal-blue polos; otherwise they
made for a “
really diverse group of agents,” which as Todd recalls “added to the fun.” Harmless chaos ensued. It tickled agents and customers and “lower-level employees” alike. But as Todd had discovered with other retail pranks, “the managers and security freak[ed] out.” (The cops, when called, were superfluous: as usual, their prank was perfectly legal.) In 2007, in Grand Central Terminal, 207 agents froze in place for five minutes, and Improv Everywhere’s name went viral: agents repeated the prank worldwide, morning talk shows wanted replays (Improv Everywhere pranked them for the favor), and commercial interests staged copycat ads—passing the joke on to unwitting consumers.
But Improv Everywhere—and its many affiliates in the
Urban Prankster global network—keep switching the rules. Best known for its annual
No Pants! Subway Ride, which boasted four thousand participants in 2012, and also for its free downloadable MP3 missions, which gather thousands of strangers in New York’s parks for conga lines and squirt-gun fights, Improv Everywhere holds tight to its cheeky motto of “caus[ing] scenes of chaos and joy in public places.” In the oldest American tradition, it exploits general gullibility and the desire to play along. Their book signing in
Union Square by long-dead playwright Anton Chekhov played beautifully to all different members of the crowd: the “
clueless” were amazed, the “misinformed” were baffled, and clued-in citizens got the full joke. No wonder Improv Everywhere’s bumptious high jinks have been embraced by the “
Fun Generation,” as
Anand Giridharadas pointedly calls them. Their way of “doing, doing, doing” is fiercely witty and radically inclusive. “
The golden rule of pranks,” for Charlie Todd, is that “any prank should be as much fun for the person getting pranked.” Which is to say, with an excellent prank, all of society gets activated, and only the killjoys miss the joke.
Improv Everywhere is radically civil, not overtly political, and it acts on the distinctly millennial impulse to seize on any chance for fun. Indeed, even the terrorist attacks of 9/11 raised the stakes for collective fun, which historically has comforted Americans
in crisis.
The Onion,
with its schticky midwestern irreverence, lived up to its slogan as “America’s Finest News Source,” when, having taken a respectful break during the week after the attacks, it rose above the sanctimony, jingoism,
and fear-mongering that dominated the “serious” twenty-four-hour news cycle and galvanized, broadened, and soothed their readership with a flash of
real
patriotic fun. They put crosshairs on a map of the United States and gave it an all-American headline: “Holy Fucking Shit—Attack on America.” Who, after all, didn’t get
this
joke?
Post-9/11 fun also rose from the streets. Antiwar activists staged festive protests, while smaller tribes of merry pranksters—
Green Dragons,
Billionaires for Bush—gloried in the myopia, irony, and hypocrisy generated by Bush doctrine politics. Antic
activism in the face of tragedy came, for many, to define this century’s first decade. Down in New Orleans, five months after
Hurricane Katrina, twenty-seven krewes honored
Congo Square’s spirit by holding defiant
Mardi Gras
parades, many of them mock-celebrating the sorest spots of the catastrophe—the flood damage, the looters, FEMA, the “Sewerdome,” all of the natural and social disasters that tried to drag the city down. By making their agenda delightful and comic, or by following
Saul Alinsky’s “rules for radicals,” these aggrieved citizens and political activists invited even their opponents to participate and laugh—if not necessarily to get the whole joke. And for several weeks in the winter of 2011, thousands of Americans seized the
Wisconsin State Capitol—chanting and singing in exhilarating defiance of the governor’s assault on state workers’ unions. The
Occupy movement, formed in the rubble of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, spread this fight-the-power fun all across the globe.
OVER THE COURSE
of four centuries, as if in pursuit of Thomas Morton’s wild dream, Americans have rigged up delightful new ways of busting down barriers that keep them apart, on sandlots and street corners, at parks and on beaches, forever diving back into the skirmish with other fun-loving, party-throwing, pranks-pulling, footballing, jitterbugging, motorcycling, double-dutching, masquerading, spray-painting, scav-hunting, zombie-parading, “yarn bombing,” tough-mudding, melon-launching, banner-wielding, nation-building…
And over the course of four centuries, in the spirit of William Bradford,
some of the nation’s most authoritarian citizens have marveled at America’s lust for freedom. Sometimes they have tried to get involved, like slave masters joining the dance with their slaves, and sometimes they have matched the rebels’ wits, like Justice
Julius Hoffman crossing swords with
Abbie Hoffman during the Chicago conspiracy trials. But time and again, much to their dismay, authoritarians’ efforts to quell American liberty have only inspired wilder and wittier outbursts.
FOR THE PAST THREE DECADES
, out in
Mark Twain’s old Washoe Territory, in the week preceding Labor Day weekend, up to seventy thousand wild-minded citizens of the world have met in the
Black Rock Desert, where they’ve built a flammable Wild West town devoted to the thrills of radical civility. In agreement that activity is the lifeblood of community, trusting in each other’s basic decency, trusting in each other’s appetites for pleasure while shedding any semblance of law, the risky citizens of Black Rock City found their town on maximum fun: artists build makeshift theme-park rides, acrobats and fire-breathers roam the desert floor, composers and musicians stage avant-garde concerts, massive dance parties rumble round the clock, bicycles circulate, “mutant” cars parade, costumes sparkle, nudity abounds—as do comedy, drugs, good manners—and the ever-present torches and camp- and bonfires grow in significance as the last night approaches, and the crowds crowd together, and the towering wooden man that has loomed all week like a hollow frame of law and order is torched at sunset with weapons-grade fireworks. This great conflagration inspires the citizens to join in the hollering fire-making frenzy and, like Bradford’s “Maenads or mummers,” to burn their own art and clothes and garbage into the echoey, smoky black sky.
What began in 1986, on San Francisco’s
Baker Beach, with twenty partiers burning an eight-foot-tall driftwood anthropomorph, has exploded into a multimillion-dollar incendiary city, typically pushing radically civil fun beyond all recognizable limits. It has become an international destination, a mass-media darling,
an academic cottage industry. Who knows but that
Burning Man—as unlikely as Hollywood or Washington,
D.C.—may actually be here to stay? Who knows but that Americans may need it? Its critics are legion. Many call it silly, dangerous, perverse. Others call it self-parody, a commercial sellout, or say it has lost its authenticity. But the participants still dive in and have a ball. And every year there are more of them. In a related trend, this one truly commercial, the
rave craze of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when guerrilla youth gathered in derelict urban spaces for Ecstasy-flavored all-night dance parties, has unearthed yet another entertainment gold mine: at events like the
Electric Daisy Festival, where
three hundred thousand ravers crowd the Las Vegas Speedway to dance to the latest celebrity DJs, the rage for electronic dance music (EDM) eclipses even Woodstock-inspired music festivals. It’s all the latest in Barnumism, without a doubt. But is that all? Burning Man, EDM, and the viral pranks of the
Cacophony Society and
Improv Everywhere may signal another change in mainstream tastes. At a time when billions are staring at smartphones, glued to Facebook, shackled by ever more sophisticated shackles to their ever-larger
television screens, people may be growing weary of being
spectators. Maybe they’re intrigued by the chaos of the crowd. Maybe they see possibility down there. Who could blame them? Who could blame them for getting out into the air, like Plato’s hero who springs from the cave and lives a livelier life in the sun?
This spirit of renewal is as old as the land. It comes from the young, or the young at heart, and acting on it is wicked fun.
ON NOVEMBER
27, 1760, twenty-five-year-old
John Adams walked into a bar. He was paunchy, tetchy, a wallflower by temperament. But this fine young Puritan was a red-blooded American, and he had an afternoon to kill. So he kicked back with a pipe, and a good sense of humor, and he watched our nation’s great story get started.
This book was written over many years, with a lot of trial and error and the help of countless people. It would never have been possible without the initial guidance of Sandra M. Gilbert, my dear friend, mentor, and dissertation adviser at the University of California, Davis, who urged me—with her own bottomless appetite for fun—to explore the rigors of this unlikely subject. Also indispensable at this early stage were the close readings and expert advice of Linda Morris, Georges Van Den Abbeele, Clarence Major, Michael Hoffman, and Riché Richardson. Many thanks, as well, to Sarah Boushey, Erika Kreger, Eric Smith, Rod Romesburg, Andrew Gross, Lisa Harper, Jennifer Hoofard, Carl Eby, Joe Aimone, and many others among our grad-student cohort for their generous advice, criticism, and support. Among my terrifically fun friends and colleagues at the Université de Bordeaux III, Jessie Magee, Michelle Church, Alexander Earl, Zoe Bond, Paul Egan, Federico Frédéric Aranzueque-Arrieta, John Jordan, Pauline Delpeche, Michael Moses, and Yves-Charles Grandjeat made an especially strong impact on this work. For a California education, from the Washoe Territory to Lake Anza and beyond, I warmly thank, among so many others: Melissa Stein, Mitchell Rose, Lucy Rose, Grey Wedeking, Maryam Eskandari, Shoshana Berger, and all my rocking friends in the Ashby Avenue Groop.
All of my friends and colleagues in the U.S. Naval Academy English Department have given incredible support during the writing of this book. My friends (and chairs) Anne Marie Drew, Allyson Booth, Tim
O’Brien, and Mark McWilliams have served as tireless advocates for travel, research, and promotion, in addition to being invaluable readers. I am deeply indebted to Charlie Nolan, Eileen Johnston, Bill Bushnell, Michael Parker, Michelle Allen-Emerson, and Temple Cone: thank you for your camaraderie and brilliant input. Many thanks to Reza Malek-Madani, the Faculty Development Center, and the Naval Academy Research Council for their constant advocacy and interest. Thanks to Christopher Simmons and the ripping music-night scene. Thanks to Hoss Mitchell and all the Galway Bay bon vivants and to Skipper Mark Elert and the Wind River crew.
Big chunks of this book were written in a cabin on breathtaking Norton Island, Maine. My unending gratitude goes to Steve Dunn and the Eastern Frontier Educational Foundation for providing this extraordinary opportunity. Among the many residents there who have touched this book with their stories, ideas, conversation, and cavorting, Brian Bouldrey, Camille Dungy, and Lesley Doyle must be singled out as paragons of American fun. Special thanks to Ammi Keller and Angela Woodward for regional anecdotes.