THE YES MEN
Friday, June 15
The Plaza
What do an inflatable gold penis, a chemical spill in India and vote buying have in common? They’ve all been used in high-profile hoaxes by The Yes Men, a pair of activist pranksters taking aim at the rich and powerful. The two are coming to Calgary this week to share some of their skills, tell a few stories and screen video clips of their most recent stunts.
The Yes Men got started playing pranks by accident because they couldn’t make it to protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle eight years ago. Instead, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno decided to create a parody of the WTO website. To their surprise, a trade conference in Austria mistook their parody for the real WTO site and invited them to speak.
Bichlbaum and Bonanno accepted the invitation and, impersonating WTO representatives, gave a speech calling for the elimination of the Spanish siesta in the name of better business hours and encouraging countries to adopt a system of selling votes to the highest bidder. Surprisingly, no one in the audience was outraged. "It’s disconcerting, the fact that they don’t find it reprehensible," says Bichlbaum.
From there, he and Bonanno orchestrated a series of similar hoaxes, partially chronicled in their self-titled 2004 movie. In one prank, they again impersonated WTO officials and, in a speech to a Finnish business conference, unveiled a gold spandex leisure suit for CEOs. Its key feature: an enormous, inflatable phallus with a TV screen at the end to allow CEOs to monitor their sweatshop labourers and electrically shock underperforming workers. Again, no one seemed to understand that it was a joke. In hoax after hoax, they found the same reaction, their horrendous ideas met by polite silence from business audiences. "It seems outrageous to you and me, but it doesn’t depart from the reality of what they’re doing, except in tiny details," he says. "There’s always one or two people in the audience who get it, but they never break our characters."
Pulling off a hoax isn’t always easy and can involve months of preparation, says Bichlbaum. The speech in Finland, for instance, required weeks of planning and some expertise in textiles to create the spandex suit. Ironically, however, Bichlbaum’s biggest hoax simply fell into his lap.
In 2004, The Yes Men created a parody website for Dow Chemical, the parent of Union Carbide, the company responsible for a chemical spill in Bhopal, India, that killed 20,000 people. On the disaster’s 20th anniversary, the BBC contacted The Yes Men and interviewed Bichlbaum, believing him to be a spokesperson for Dow. Live on global television, he announced that Dow would accept responsibility for the disaster, pay to clean up the site and offer billions of dollars in compensation to the surviving victims. Dow exposed the hoax two hours later, but the prank generated a wave of media attention related to Dow’s lack of action on the Bhopal spill, he says.
While he and Bonanno try to work with other activists, hoaxing has become Bichlbaum’s main form of protest over the past few years. "It’s not necessarily the most valuable form of activism, but it’s what we’re good at," he says. "We enjoy it. The question for us has always been how to get the message across."
Last year, The Yes Men pulled off what Bichlbaum describes as their funniest stunt. At a conference on hurricane damage in Florida, he unveiled three Halliburton-made man-sized balls that could protect business managers from the effects of climate change, including flooding and disease.
Bichlbaum is encouraged to see that others have taken to using Yes Men techniques, and he hopes their workshop in Calgary will have a similar effect. With any luck, everyone will get the joke.
The Yes Men will hold a workshop and film screening on June 15 at 7 p.m. at the Plaza Theatre. |
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