Pranksters:
Making Mischief in the Modern World
Kembrew
McLeod
2014
New
York University Press
New
York, London
By
BRAD WEISMANN
Nobody
likes a smartass.
Pranks
are often thought of as a low form of humor, ranged down there with puns and practical
jokes. However, Kembrew McLeod’s comprehensive and thought-provoking history of
pranking ranks it much more highly. Pranking runs through modern history like a
fault line of sardonic disorder, and McLeod demonstrates admirably the great,
society-changing effects some of it has caused, as well as the damage and
destruction that other examples have wrought.
McLeod’s
wide net takes in all activities designed to make fools of society at large. He
marks his start at the point where broader, faster forms of communication –
pamphlets, almanacs, and proto-newspapers – lent themselves to the pointed
attack, the spoof, and the literary hotfoot. The gamut begins with Jonathan
Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” and wends its way to today through a variety of forms
and frames, motivated by everything from sheer criminal intent to the most
idealistic attempts to remake society.
A
short list of topics and characters covered should in itself propel the curious
into its satisfying pages: Benjamin Franklin, P.T. Barnum, the anti-Spiritualism
movement, yellow journalism, the Merry Pranksters and the Chicago 8, “Paul is
dead”, Andy Kaufman, and today’s hackers and groups like Anonymous. All relate
to the intent of invoking a cathartic rethinking of a culture’s shared
assumptions, waking it from its addled distractions.
While
it seems that the primary motivation of a prankster is to crack a joke, McLeod
makes it very clear that, by and large, society rarely gets it (and if it does, it tries to tear the perpetrator to shreds). Indeed, many of
the fonts of crazy conspiracy theories – documents pretending to pertain to the
Rosicrucians, Illuminati, Freemasons, the “Inner Circle” – were written as humor,
satire, parody, all unfortunately taken at face value and run with by those that are inclined
to paranoia. Even more disturbing are his accounts of the
life-and-career-ruining “rumor panics,” such as the
satanic-messages-in-rock-songs and the repressed-memory-child-abuse cases of
more recent decades. In McLeod’s universe, the human mind doesn’t need much
tinder to spark an outbreak of fear, hate, and ugly behavior.
McLeod
is the perfect person to tackle the topic, as he himself has participated and/or
perpetrated some mind games of his own. Most notably, he made Michelle Bachmann
feel uncomfortable in the guise of a gay robot – which makes him A-Number-One
in my book. He is able to expertly dissect not only the mechanics and thrust of
the pranks, but analyze the repercussions and the effectiveness of the actions
as well, providing a micro- as well as macro-focus.
It’s
an examination, not a celebration. The moral ambiguities of pranking are in
full view here. Still, there’s a sense here that the author sees pranking at
its best as a creative kind of non-violent civil disobedience, justified in the
face of a domineering state that brainwashes its inhabitants with propaganda of
the kind pioneered by Edward Bernays, which can be construed as a kind of
pranking itself. McLeod quotes media critic Stuart Ewen, who “characterizes
Bernays’s ideal model of communication as merely a hallucination of democracy: ‘A
highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians is continuously at work,
analyzing the social terrain and adjusting the mental scenery from which the
public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions.’”