in the middle of things.

You can tell that I haven’t posted anything to the site in over six weeks by way of the truly unimaginative title of this post. With that behind me, I can turn to more interesting issues and topics. Of late, I’ve been focusing most of my attention on a paper I’m writing with Megan Boler (UoT) on the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. We attended the rally back in October and interviewed over thirty participants. We’re in the final stages of writing this article, so it seems likely that some version of the paper will appear in the not-so-distant future. The working title is “Satire and Social Change: The Rally To Restore Sanity and the Future of Politics.” If you’re curious to learn more about our work, Dr. Boler provided a really great encapsulation of the rally’s significance in this interview with the CBC’s Mark Kelley. If you’d rather keep things light and fluffy, I suggest at the very least you visit HuffPo’s homage to the best/funniest signs from the rally.

I’m also in the process of writing a book chapter on fake news/informed comedy for the 2nd edition of Communication in Question: Competing Perspectives on Controversial Issues in Communication Studies. The book itself is a great introductory text, largely comprised of competing arguments from leading Canadian scholars on issues of relevance to communication/media studies. The general idea is to demonstrate to students that there are at least two approaches to any given topic or debate, and to encourage them to develop their own perspective(s). In class, I always seem to mention that if students should ever encounter someone that argues that the world is made up of “two kinds of people,” they should drop everything and run full-stop in the other direction. “And run as fast as you can…” In retrospect, perhaps the best advice I could give is for them to wait for the person to explain themselves, absorb their (binary) worldview, and offer an alternative perspective. Admittedly, this would require a lot of patience and a great deal of restraint, so this may not always be the most feasible course of action.

All digressions aside, the fake news chapter will argue for a more inclusive view that gives comedians and satirists a degree of merit, credibility, and legitimacy for the work that they do. Having studied this phenomenon for over five years, I’ve witnessed an interesting progression in the ways in which fake news operates — from independent/DIY undertaking to corporately-controlled media branding exercise to politically progressive activist work — making it a fascinating point of departure for thinking about contemporary journalism. One aspect of fake news that continues to inspire me is the notion that readers of news parody/satire have to have a baseline of information and cultural capital to be in on the joke. Without that information, readers are essentially left on the sidelines without any promise of re-entering the frame. A good analogy here is the notion of being coerced by the laugh track in today’s sitcom — and mindlessly laughing without understanding why one is laughing (Chuck Klosterman deconstructs this practice here). This kind of laughter is superficial and hollow, and doesn’t necessarily encourage one to continue watching or reading. Moving beyond this kind of hollow laughter into the realm of informed or knowing laughter is what makes the experience of reading/watching news satire so engaging.

One my hunches is that The Onion incites its readers to consume news from a whole range of sources. This relationship was crystallized for me through a number of informal interviews I’ve conducted over the years, but it truly materialized as a powerful idea through Pippa Norris’ excellent book, The Virtuous Circle (2000). A discussion of her work merits multiple blog posts, so in the interests of brevity, I’ll say that one of the most illuminating findings from her research is that consumers of news will seek out other news sources, creating a robust and engaged newsreader. If this is true of readers of traditional news, it follows that the same can be said of readers of (news) satire.

To make the relationship between traditional and satirical news more explicit, The Onion website even started running the day’s headlines from Slate, The Washington Post, and others. Of course, news organizations and media companies have long relied on advertising dollars for the bulk of their operational costs — and The Onion‘s integration of advertising content from so-called legitimate news organizations might be seen, at first glance, to amount to little more than business as usual. But the section’s unassuming title – From our Partners – is suggestive in two striking ways: first, satirical news (however ironically) situates itself as part of a larger continuum of traditional news; and second, the site offers a clearly defined jumping off point for readers to investigate other news sites. What we learn is that the boundaries between real and fake, serious and sarcastic, stern and playful — not to mention, political and entertaining — are becoming increasingly fluid. As far as The Onion is concerned, these distinctions matter little. Its YouTube channel conveys this quite nicely, making two other channel recommendations for The New York Times and Funny or Die.

The next step, of course, is to discuss the currency of both traditional and satirical forms of journalism, highlighting the strengths of each. It’s my contention that fake news is instrumental in serving as a critical check not only on power (governments, corporations, shoddy figures in the public eye), but on the news media that is meant to be serving the public interest. In a future post, I’ll unpack this a little further, as it seems I’m already drafting the beginnings of this essay.

More to come.

[In a completely unrelated note, if you haven't seen this Beirut concert footage already, you probably should. Beirut plays the Phoenix tonight.]

The Yes Men are arguably the most important media activist group to have emerged in the past decade – anywhere. I say arguably because many will disagree with this claim, but the point I wish to make here from the outset is that The Yes Men’s diverse body of work merits the kind of attention that is ill-afforded activists and marginalized voices today. Whereas I would not wish The Yes Men become mere fodder for celebrity gossip and 24/7 soundbite culture, my intention for writing this book is to provide another opportunity for their work to be discovered, discussed, and debated. In the best case scenario, I imagine that when The Yes Men come up in random conversations over coffee, cocktails, or take-away, people will no longer look at me with a searching glance, as though the lines on my forehead might produce a satisfactory anecdote. This would certainly trump the head-scratching, belaboured “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of them before”-type responses I frequently get.

For too long, The Yes Men’s work has been relegated to virtual obscurity within the warm embrace of artists, academics, and would-be filmmakers – all longtime champions of “identity correction” and corporate hijacking. Indeed, much has been written on The Yes Men in these camps, but very little substantive discussion has emerged in book-lenth form. To date, the only book-length work devoted to The Yes Men was written by, well, The Yes Men. A brilliant, clever, funny, and self-reflexive account of their first actions as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the book provides a wonderful glimpse into Mike and Andy’s motivations for entering the realm of media hoaxing and explains their persistence in carrying out this controversial work.

I should add that my purpose here isn’t to discredit the important research and scholarship of artists and scholars, nor is it to one-up the people I’m writing about; rather, my hope is to build on this research in the interests of writing an accessible and up-to-date account of their work that will appeal to a broad, yet general, readership. That The Yes Men remain the key figures in the dissemination of their own work reveals an disheartening lack in the popular literature devoted to media hoaxing more generally, and suggests that an easily excitable academic should tackle an in-depth exploration of media hoaxing on their behalf.

My first encounter with The Yes Men came in November 2005 (relatively late in the scheme of things), when the University of Guelph’s Docurama series screened their first documentary. Following the screening, I was baffled by how a group of (seemingly) ordinary men could orchestrate, perform, and ultimately pull off such amazing feats in the presence of some of the world’s foremost thinkers and experts. The fact that they used humour as the primary vehicle for communicating their ideas made their work even more poignant. Here was a group of pranksters using some of best comedic material I’d ever seen — in the express interests of highlighting social injustices and corporate corruption. They demonstrated with relative poise just how easy it was to marry parody/irony/humour with social justice and political issues. All this to say I was not only inspired by their sophisticated work, I was moved by the possibilities their work uncovered.

“What if other groups followed suit?”, I wondered. In 2005, the likelihood that anyone would follow in their footsteps seemed unlikely. Aside from what I deemed the serious technical barriers to participating in these kinds of actions (creating websites, multimedia content, online organizing), I felt that the work required too much money, effort, expertise, and courage to attract a whole subset of imitators. Not to mention a comic precision that only some of the best comedians and satirists can fully realize. Finally, creating a bridge between comedy and activism seemed a difficult undertaking, a divide that continues to this day. In drawing these connections, I felt even more grateful to have encountered The Yes Men’s WTO identity corrections because I was unsure of just how many more actions of this kind would materialize. (As this book makes clear, there would be many other noteworthy pranks to follow.)

Over the next few years I made a concerted effort to introduce my students to The Yes Men, if only to expose them to the realm of media activism, but perhaps more so to gauge their responses to these elaborate pranks. Undergraduate students were unsurprisingly enthusiastic, perhaps due in part to youth culture’s longstanding penchant for rebellion, its questioning of authority, and its playful use of the (symbolic) middle finger. After all, The Yes Men (first and foremost) want to make you laugh. They’re akin to the comedian that is primarily in the business of making you laugh – whether they’re using situational/topical humour, blonde jokes, or off-colour remarks, their primary goal is to make you laugh. If the subject matter is political in tone or in nature, so be it, but if the material isn’t funny, they will not use it. It goes against their comic instincts.

But the comedian has always drawn from the well of political wrongdoing (today’s corporate malfeasance) to make his/her audience laugh. No matter the political stripe of the actors involved, ignorance, hubris, immorality, human folly, and stupidity will always serve as key ingredients in good comedy or satire. The Yes Men understand this as well as Aristophanes did. If satire and humour serve as correctives to reprehensible behaviour, The Yes Men’s identity correction projects fill this role admirably, which explains why so many undergraduate students find their work appealing. Indeed, one of the strongest motivations for students to support Yes Men pranks lies in the moral and ethical dimensions of their performances. As one student put it, because they’re trying to expose wrongdoings while proposing solutions to existing problems, we need more of these pranks to continue the conversation.

That’s not to say that all students have totally embraced the virtues of these pranks. Irony, sarcasm, and parody seem to be most responsible for muddying their reception of this controversial work. If a group is using irony or sarcasm to backhandedly criticize a target, this logic assumes, they are not to be taken seriously. Where sincerity is concerned, their pranks are seen as largely devoid of any meaningful message because to resort to hiding behind golden phalluses instead of embodying straightforward modes of critique. What The Yes Men do, some students have noted, is on par with a comedian insulting his audience for not getting the joke; or worse, using pageantry to obscure any real message from being heard (how a comic might use the word fuck to be funny). And these objections are warranted because indirect forms of communication are often misunderstood (i.e., you must have some interpretative and/or literacy skills to decipher the intended message) and this ultimately leads us to question which strategies are best when we communicate critique to a larger uninitiated audience. More to the point, answers to these questions become even more difficult to assess when we extend the discussion to issues of hoaxing and pranking, already problematic forms of expression in the public sphere.

What I hope to make clear in the pages that follow is that The Yes Men’s body of work offers an important window through which to examine the precarious practice of contemporary hoaxing, and it provides a useful point of departure for thinking about the uses and consequences of using humour and satire to critique the most powerful institutions of our time. In exploring the political, moral, and ethical dimensions of their work, I hope to shed light on why hoaxing and humour have emerged as defining practices of the early twenty-first century.