Slo-Mo Home Depot

[djm]

Hey Bert ... er ... Bonequint!


djm

[Cynth]

Maybe you would think the Anton Chekov mission was funnier. It is very different than the Home Depot one.

Hm, let's see what one of their "agents" had to say about it:

A young man summed up the day's experiment quite well. "They're always filming some bulls*it over here."

He said it was an accurate summary, not me...

It is clever. I'd like to see it. It'd probably be more fun to be fooled than to be in the know. (I'd have been 99% sure Chekov was dead, the other 1% thinking he was an Ensign in Starfleet).

But a big part of it still seems to me like empty "cleverness," and making fun of natural human responses. Sure, plenty people have only heard a bit about Chekov, and wouldn't know he wrote so long ago. So what? What's so funny about that? The smirking "I know something you don't" vibe that runs through these pranks niggles at me.

I know, what a wet blanket. I hope it brightens up your life and brings a smile to your face without those negative vibes I'm talking about.

When I was reading through the prank I thought about whether they were just making fun of people who didn't know the details of Anton Chekov's life. I wouldn't have thought that was funny. That would be mean, in my opinion.

When I read it I felt it was more about the fact that we often believe what we hear if it is told to us in a particular way. We fall for things. If people are in a line to get a book signed, we get in line too because it must be worthwhile. I saw it more as good-natured poking fun at this part of human nature. The comments of the agents don't seem to be mean-spirited. If I didn't fall for this trick I'm sure there are others I would fall for, so I don't think I was feeling superior when I was reading it. Okay, the guy that told Chekov not to write anything but his name because it would be worth more when he was dead? I do feel a bit superior to that guy .

I can see what you mean about the "I know something that you don't" thing---but to me they don't seem to be smirking. It's more like laughing in a warm way. In the Starbuck mission, the customers were gradually getting the joke and joining in. The agents were talking about the stresses of the mission, how too much coffee spilled, the hidden phone looked strange, etc. That's also part of it for me-----what it's like to be doing something so totally insane in the middle of total sanity? I guess that's what "making a scene" is. I've always had a bit of a horror of making a scene, of standing out, of having all eyes turned toward me. I don't know why. Anyway, that might also explain my fascination with this.

I don't think we all have to like the same things though. There are lots of things other people think are funny or interesting that I don't, so I really don't think you are a wet blanket . This just isn't your cup of tea.

[Flyingcursor]

The Starbucks mission is my favorite.

[Jerry Freeman]

Starbucks was great. I loved the Chekov stunt.

Best wishes,
Jerry

[Father Emmet]

This sort of thing was all the rage in Manhattan a few years ago. I forget what it is called though. Many people, mostly unknown to each other, converge on a given spot and perform an action simultaneously, coordinated via web/e-mail. There is a term for it.

Edited to add: Flash mob - that's the term.

[BoneQuint]

I don't think we all have to like the same things though. There are lots of things other people think are funny or interesting that I don't [...] This just isn't your cup of tea.

I agree. I do think making people think about their preconceptions, and having fun playing with "normalcy" is a good thing.

Here's one more interesting tidbit. One of the missions, "Best Gig Ever" I heard about on the radio about a year ago, on "This American Life" (a show I quite like). I recall distinctly some band members being fairly upset about the whole thing. But on the Improv Everywhere website in the "response" section, they quote emails from the band, and they say everything was good and wonderful and happy. I wonder if IE just likes to report the positive reactions, or maybe people who are "tricked" don't want to look like bad sports, so they swallow any annoyance they may feel, and play along?

I just found a web page on the "This American Life" story:

Improv Everywhere just wants to make the band happy – to give them the best day of their lives. But the band doesn't see it that way. Nor does another subject of one of Improv Everywhere's "missions."

So, you can listen and draw your own conclusions...

[Cynth]

I don't think we all have to like the same things though. There are lots of things other people think are funny or interesting that I don't [...] This just isn't your cup of tea.

I agree. I do think making people think about their preconceptions, and having fun playing with "normalcy" is a good thing.

Here's one more interesting tidbit. One of the missions, "Best Gig Ever" I heard about on the radio about a year ago, on "This American Life" (a show I quite like). I recall distinctly some band members being fairly upset about the whole thing. But on the Improv Everywhere website in the "response" section, they quote emails from the band, and they say everything was good and wonderful and happy. I wonder if IE just likes to report the positive reactions, or maybe people who are "tricked" don't want to look like bad sports, so they swallow any annoyance they may feel, and play along?

I just found a web page on the "This American Life" story:

Improv Everywhere just wants to make the band happy – to give them the best day of their lives. But the band doesn't see it that way. Nor does another subject of one of Improv Everywhere's "missions."

So, you can listen and draw your own conclusions...

I haven't had a chance to listen to the TAL program yet. I think I actually did hear part of it on the radio but it must have been interrupted because I can't remember it well. I did read the write up and reactions at the Improv Everywhere's website though.

Without hearing that program or even knowing how the band really felt, I would still say that setting people up the way they did that band does not seem like the sort of thing thoughtful people would do. I think doing something like that has the potential to be hurtful, even if it has no intention to be hurtful, and that's plenty of reason right there not to do it. I also don't think the whole point was to give the band the best day in their lives. The point was to see how the band dealt with the strange situation---it seems like that was the focus of the agents' remarks, for example. I can certainly imagine the members of the band telling the agents that it was no big deal so that they didn't look like crybabies, which would only make matters worse.

The birthday party mission was also strange and I would not do that to someone. It doesn't seem as bad an idea as the band idea, because you would expect that most people would somehow be able to deal with a prank like that, would be confident enough in their own selves to withstand a lot of people insisting they were someone else. I would really be afraid, though, that a person might be chosen who would have some problems and that the problems could be made worse or something by a trick like that. I honestly wonder how I would react. It seems like it would be so obvious that a joke was going on, but it would also be inconceivable that that many people would get together to play a joke like that.

The Home Depot mission and the Starbuck's missions seemed as though no one could be hurt. If someone became frightened by the events, it seems like there would be other on-lookers there that they could turn to for reassurance that they were not going crazy or something. The Chekov stunt could possibly hurt people, but I think so few people really know who he is or when he lived that no one would feel they were particularly dopey if they fell for it. I don't know, maybe that was a little mean.

I hope to listen to the program this week. I really like TAL but I usually am not around the radio when it's on and I can't seem to get myself to sit in front of the computer and listen to something.

[Wanderer]

I listened to the TAL story, which was a theme along the lines of "deception leads to evil" (paraphrased). It doesn't focus on the Improv Everywhere crew or the band Ghosts of Pasha, but rather uses them in a series of stories designed to highlight the harms of deception. The Ghosts of Pasha story is one small bit in the "2nd act" of the TAL story.

The TAL guy interviews the GoP guitarist who had the biggest beef. His issue was basically (paraphrsed): "I was made fun of my whole life, and so this just felt like that all over again. We were punked. I took up guitar so I could be cool, and here people were still making fun of me." which to me seems more of a personal issue than anything else.

The band got some fame..they were written up in Spin, Rolling Stone, etc. With that kind of fame, especially on the internet, you also get a certain percentage of crap...people writing you to tell you how lame you are, etc. It seems likely that due to the Improv Everywhere prank that they probably got an additional share of that, but you know, at some point, anyone with a web presence has to learn to stop caring what random people on the internet choose to say to you.

In the end of the story, the TAL crew gives a small bit of space to the fact that the GoP/IE thing helped the guitarist get over his personal problem with feelings of inadequacy...the message there is lost is the overbearing push to say "deception hurts people, and these skits are deceptive, and so they are hurting people."

When you do improv skits for the public like the IE crew does, you can't account for every personal issue people may have. Especially if your skits are bizarre and push people out of their comfort zones. I mean, seriously...take the Starbucks time-loop skit as an example. In that skit, the IE crew recreates a small slice of time over and over again for an hour. A guy has a fight with his girlfriend about smoking, a guy comes through with a boombox. Another guy seezes. Something like 12 times over the course of an hour.

What if in the time-loop skit, someone in the Starbucks had a similar fight with a loved one about quitting smoking...and that loved one went on to die of lung cancer? I'd bet that they'd take the re-arguing about it every few minutes pretty hard. Had something like that occurred, I think these TAL guys would have loved to have used it for their own story, playing up the pathos. But I don't think that'd make the Starbucks skit bad or evil.

Taking the analogy a step further, what if the person who had the big angst had a positive breakthrough because of it? You know, something like "After I broke down after seeing the Starbucks skit, I realized that you can't control other people and they make their own decisions, and I was finally able to leave that guilt behind." To give that wonderful breakthrough a barely-acknolwedged nod in a story that otherwise shoehorns the experience into a "deception hurts people" motif would be a bit disingenuous, I think. And while not as dramatic or angsty as a smoking death from lung cancer, I think this is pretty much the same kind of treatment the Ghosts of Pasha story got.

So, that's pretty much what I took away from the TAL story.

[emmline]

This sort of thing was all the rage in Manhattan a few years ago. I forget what it is called though. Many people, mostly unknown to each other, converge on a given spot and perform an action simultaneously, coordinated via web/e-mail. There is a term for it.

Edited to add: Flash mob - that's the term.

I remember two such schemes in my elementary school days. One merely involved dropping pencils at a given time.
The other was better. I was in 6th grade in 1973--the height of the misbegotten "open space" experiment. Imagine 100 eleven year olds in one big room the size of 4 classrooms. We sat at randomly distributed tables, rather than desks, in colorful plastic chairs with a triangle shaped cut-out in the back. Somehow, the message was conveyed--by note or whisper--to every kid in that "quad" that we'd fall over backward in our chairs (carpeted floor) at exactly 2. It worked. The look on the teachers' faces was priceless.

[Innocent Bystander]

"Gee, I'm really upset by that post, Wanderer! How can you write in that terrible way?"

...No I'm not. But I'm trying to make a point. Every breath you take denies breath to something else. Every time you stand in the sunshine you may be blocking the light to something that needs it. There is a point at which you have to say "That is beyond the limit of things I'm prepared to accept responsibility for."

I enjoyed the Slo-Mo Shopping experience and haven't had time to look at the rest yet. I'm tempted to look into joining the similar UK group.

Whatever you do is liable to upset someone. You might as well do things you like doing. Is this a deformation of reality? Reality is already pretty deformed, as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, give it another squeeze, there!

Nice link, Slude, Dude!

[BoneQuint]

I listened to the TAL story, which was a theme along the lines of "deception leads to evil" (paraphrased). It doesn't focus on the Improv Everywhere crew or the band Ghosts of Pasha, but rather uses them in a series of stories designed to highlight the harms of deception.

Hm, we took very different things from the show. It seemed to me they were being careful not to make judgements like "evil" or "harmful." They talked about deception leading to "things it was never meant to lead to," and the Improv Everywhere "mission" being "more emotional than they planned" for the bystanders. The whole first story was more about how weird the situation was, and how the person who was lied to went along with the lie, and seemed to even believe it himself...or not? The point didn't seem to be anything about the lying being bad at all, but just how convoluted the whole thing got. The girl was laughing about the whole thing. Improv Everywhere's "No Pants" stunt and the "Mobius" stunt (the time loop at Starbucks) was described without any negative results presented at all.

Anyway, maybe the folks they talked to about the "Ghosts of Pasha" and "Ted's Birthday" "missions" should just buck up and get over it...but I don't think what I'm mainly interested in is people being bothered. It's the disconnect between the professed intention of Improv Everywhere and what's actually happening. In other words, I'm not so worried about the innocent bystanders who are being fooled, but I really feel the Improv Everywhere folks are fooling themselves. They seem quite defensive, and even self-deluded. It seems to me they're doing these things more because they're clever and fun for themselves, than because they want to make people happy. And part of the "fun" for themselves (and it's quite obvious by reading their reports or hearing when the leader of the group laughs when describing the Mobius mission), is noticing when innocent bystanders are being fooled or are confused. And people don't like being tricked, especially when the trickster is laughing at them, and posting video of them on the internet. Improv Everywhere seems to totally deny any possibility this -- the leader even says he doesn't call what they do "pranks" because a prank implies a victim, and their missions have no victims, they just spread happiness. Well! I'm not so sure of that.

[brianormond]

-The Best Buy stunt is reminiscent of "The Thomas Crown Affair" scene of bowler-hatted folks creating a diversion.
Its a favorite "B" movie.