Improv Everywhere will be profiled on the radio program This American Life this weekend. Click the link below for more about the show and to find your local station. The episode will be archived on their site in Real Audio format next week.
This American Life (Real Media)
I think the nontargeted improvs are brilliant. The GOP ep made me uncomfortable, but it sounds like it worked out okay. The Ted/Chris one really made me uncomfortable and slightly voyeuristic if that’s possible on the radio (but of course I listened until the end);contacting him the following year feels like harassment especially when it’s pretty clear that he still seems disturbed by the incident.
when you take advantage of someone and cause them humiliation, as you did with the Ghosts of Pasha gag, or the Ted Birthday trick, it’s inexcusable and morally irresponsible.
In the beginning of This American Life, it was clearly stated that you guys don’t like to call what you do “pranks” because that implies that there are victims, and that’s not what you guys do…
Well, I think today’s show exemplified two instances where Improv Everywhere DID create victims. I read the Ghost of Pasha’s “response” to finding out that they had been “punk’d” (further proving that they see themselves as victims). It was really interesting to read those knowing their true feelings about what had happened, and having the insight that their response was strategic, not so genuinly “oh, it’s ok, let’s forget about it,” as they made it seem.
I think in both that case and the case of Ted, you guys need to remove the ‘Mission Accomplished’ from the end of the page… otherwise, what this group stands for is pretty disappointing.
Years ago when TV was in its infancy, there was a program called “Candid Camera” which played pranks on folks and filmed the prank and the reactions. At least at the end of the prank they had the decency to tell the “victim” who they were. Most of the victims then got a big laugh out of the prank. Therein lies the difference between Candid Camera and Improv Everywhere. What IE did to Chris and the band was cruel mostly because you didn’t let them in on your immature joke, and instead laughed AT them rather than drawing them in and letting them laugh WITH you. Sure, they found out later, but not until the harm was done. I for one do not find your pranks to be entertaining.
Just heard you on TAL – love your idea, but why not “interview” some folks after the gig? Why not let them in on the joke? Let them enjoy the idea of it all, and most of all – face up to it if they DON’T like what you did. Just because your heart is in the right place doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for everyone. If they loved it share in the joy. If they hated it share in the misery, that’s the human condition. Most people will probably “get it” and roll with the punches. Lastly, it’s cool to see you making a difference in the world, what you’re really doing is “human art,” along the lines of Chrsito’s “The Gates.” Good job, it’s really wonderful.
I have to agree with the folks who are drawing a distinction between the subway and Starbucks missions and the “Ted”/Ghosts of Pasha missions. The former are everything your group purportedly stands for: turning mundane moments into unexpected magic. The others? Yup, I’d use the word “prank.”
The key is that the subway/Starbucks pieces can be observed and no one is forced to become involved unless they want to. The latter missions depend on marks that you choose but they are not choosing to get involved themselves — you’re making that choice for them. On a human level, that’s extremely rude. On another level, it may eventually get you sued, arrested, or create other unintended and unwanted consequences.
I hope you folks can recognize this distinction because the stuff you guys do that doesn’t depend on a mark is brilliant.
Hi, heard your feature on This Amer. Life. It was great, love stuff like this. I’m a multi-instrumentalist full time musician and I do some experimental music that’s pretty off the wall. Can anyone be an agent? OK i just read the FAQ page, I get it. I would love to participate someday if time and circumstance allow. And here’s an idea–I’ve always wanted to have someone put me on a leash and walk into stores on all fours like a dog. I think that would make people go hhmmm. Please put me on the mailing list
chrislide@juno.com
I’m good at coming up with stuff like this so since you’re open to suggestions maybe I’ll send some more day.
Keep doin it, Chris.
Wow, reading the other comments was almost too much!! I enjoy TAL on a regular basis and since my local NPR affiliate (KRCC in Colorado) replays the show, I can “make” my teenaged boys listen on Sunday afternoons… mostly, it is not forced, and often, it is the best discussion of the week. Yes, I feel for the guys in the band, but as a former bar employee, I’d think a contrived but sincere (look who they compared the band to – The Cure!) bunch of drunken loser fans is as good as any other bunch!!
The idea behind your group is brilliant, Mobius in particular. Playing with peoples’ ontological certanity in our so called “real world” takes theater and contemporary art outside of the stuffy institutions and plants our postmodern anxieties right in front of our faces. I am left with concerns about singling one person out instead of directing your projects towards a group (Mobius v Ted). There’s an ethical line you seem to be walking, and I can see how you might inadvertently cross it. All in all, I think your group is contributing greatly to the tradition of contemporary performance art. Bravo!
I posted earlier, but I think in addition to the point I made earlier, I think it’s important to recognize this-
I think the principle behind Improv Everywhere is absolutely wonderful. After reading about all the various missions, I really think you guys came up with some really really wonderful stuff! And these two pranks (Pasha and Ted) were obviously not ill intentioned- I think it’s good to hear from the ‘victims’ in this case, and maybe refocus to the principles with which the group started with…
I’d like to hear from your group (especially Todd), and your reaction and maybe what you learned from the This American Life experience…
My college roommates and I used to engage in what we called “The War on Straight People” and engaged in behavior somewhat like yours, but certainly not to the extent you have.
I hope we were never cruel to anyone as you were to GOP & Ted. Create comedy and food for thought, not victims and pain. You’re no different than Dubya if you’re so sure what you’re doing is right that you never see things from others’ point of view and consider ALL the ramifications (or, even worse, simply choose to ignore them).
The TAL show was cool. What it doesn’t really show, though, is the sweet nature of what you do – the birthday party, making a band’s gig wonderful.
I’ve been a fan of yours since the Chekov mission, and just listened the TAL show this evening. I thought it was insightful, but perhaps a little misleading if you didn’t know the history of the group. In retrospect, it seems clear that missions like “Ted” and to some extent Pasha were bad ones to try. But I don’t think that was necessarily obvious what would happen, nor did you guys go about them with anything but good intent. And every other mission I can remember did involve bigger audiences and presumably avoided those problems. Improv Everywhere does some amazingly creative stuff, the downside of which is that the results can be unpredictable. The key thing is to learn from your mistakes and keep going.
Here’s to many successful missions to come!
I was listening to TAL while driving this morning and had to pull over. I laughed so hard that I couldn’t see through my tears. I think what you do is great. Rarely have I been so motivated by a program to post a comment. I hope you are undaunted by your critics. GOP had the Best Gig Ever and I am sure Chris will look fondly upon his birthday party. Granted there are people out there with baggage. However, we all can’t stop speaking because we might say something that reminds someone of their troubled past. We know that people get killed in car accidents, but that doesn’t mean we all stop driving. I am a fan – of Improv Everywhere and Ghosts of Posha!
I heard the TAL episode and I think it’s great what Improv Everywhere is doing. I’m a people watcher wherever I go and I get a kick out of jokes/events like what you’re trying to accomplish. I think that your philosophy of giving people moments for which they’ll remember is wonderful when applied to a group or general public.
For instance, the boat tours in the fountain, the synchronized swimming competition, and the Moebius Strip all are performances which encourage the public to view and participate. I think that’s great!
However, I must agree with some of the dissenters of your work. To perform pranks, and essentially they ARE pranks, on ordinary people like the Ted bit and the GOP groupies is cruel. The fact that you specifically target an individual (Ted) or a small group (GOP) and work a calculated plan around them is pretty selfish in purpose. There is no audience per se, just victims. GOP may disagree as their e-mails indicated.
The difference here is that when you do a public performance, people have the CHOICE of whether they want to watch, participate, or ignore. To target somebody is borderline harassment. And in the case of Ted, it is full-fledged harrassment.
According to your own accounts of what happened, When he tried walking away from it all two ‘agents’ chased after him, trying to convince him to come back and participate. And a year later, people are STILL trying to put the joke on him.
I realize that a major portion of these improv events is designed to amuse yourselves. But I think you ought to stick to public theater and outgrow your attempts to target specific people for your work. Good job though on everything else, I especially love the subway series bits. That’s classic public theater.
absolutely brilliant!
I was delivering pizzas, listening to the story play out on the radio here in North Dakota. I didn’t want to get out of the car!
I have posted the links on my blog and on our local music scene website. Great story, keep em coming, shit, make a movie about it.
thanks,
mork
“Moralists have no place in art…”
Check out the movie “The Shape of Things” for a variation on the theme of manipulation-as-art. My friends and I saw the movie right before listening to the TAL piece, and we were stunned at the canny similarity in concepts.
Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to provide us feedback in the wake of our This American Life profile. We appreciate hearing all of it, both good and bad.
I was thrilled to be interviewed by TAL. Jorge Just and everyone else at the show were fabulous to me, and I think they did an amazing job with the story. The original story was to be 41 minutes long. 10 minutes were cut at the last minute to make room for the other stories. In those missing minutes, TAL covered the Megastore and Will You Marry Me? missions. Perhaps had they not been cut, their inclusion would have given the listener a better idea of Improv Everywhere’s body of work.
The first I heard of the negative reactions experienced by the guitarist of Ghosts of Pasha and “Ted” was on TAL this weekend. This fact is not made clear on the program. TAL interviewed me in December of 2004. They interviewed both GOP and “Ted” in March of 2005. The reactions of both parties were never passed on to me; I found out on TAL at the same time as everyone else in the world. When the program cuts back to me for my thoughts on both missions after providing the other side of the story, they are using my December interview.
Another thing that I want to make clear—when TAL talks about the mockery that took place on GOP’s message board during the first few days after the show, those posts were not made by me or any other Improv Everywhere Agent. If you take the time to read the Best Gig Ever mission on this site, you’ll see that our comments about the band were entirely enthusiastic and supportive. The absolute last thing we wanted to do with the Best Gig Ever was to humiliate, mock, or embarrass. That evening, for us, was about giving a band an awesome experience. Take a moment and listen to the NPR Weekend America interview with GOP lead singer Milo Finch to hear his own account of our enthusiasm (the interview is on our “press” page).
The TAL piece also led some listeners to believe that during “Ted’s Birthday” IE Agents were somehow preventing Chris (aka “Ted”) from leaving the bar. This could not be further from the truth. If you read the report on this site, you’ll notice that about 10 minutes into the mission, I was certain Chris was about to leave and was preparing to organize the group to find a new “Ted”. A few agents offered Chris free drinks and games of pool, and he decided to play along. Chris claims this was “his only option” during his interview, but he could have left at anytime. We in no way prevented him from leaving the bar.
It is also important to understand that Chris was not alone at the bar that night. The TAL piece briefly mentions this fact, but many listeners seemed to have missed it. Chris’s friend Harry was with him the entire evening. By the end of the night, Chris and Harry were both playing along and enjoying themselves. They went to great trouble to try to talk one female agent into going home with them. They enjoyed as much free alcohol as they desired and took home $250 in Best Buy and Barnes and Noble gift cards. Chris and Harry left the bar that night with smiles on their faces and gave us no reason to believe it had been anything but a positive experience.
A year later, I thought it would be fun to throw Chris another birthday party. In fact, if he said yes, we would have thrown him a birthday party every September 19 for the rest of his life. He could have had one night every year where complete strangers pay his bar tab and give him hundreds of dollars in gift cards.
Chris played most of his pool that night with Agent Good, who asked for his phone number at the end of the night. Chris gave him the number freely. A year later, Agent Good gave Chris a call and mentioned that we were considering throwing him another birthday party and would it be ok if someone from the group gave him a call to set it up. Chris said that would be fine. The next day I called him and left him a voicemail explaining that we would like to throw him another party and that we wanted to know what kind of gift cards he would like this year. I didn’t hear back from him. As I explain on TAL, I found out from a friend of a friend that he didn’t want me to contact him anymore. I of course honored this request and that was the end of that. I have never heard from Chris. To my knowledge he didn’t even know this website existed before TAL contacted him.
Obviously, I was not happy to hear that both Chris from GOP and Chris from Ted’s Birthday had negative reactions to our encounters. Improv Everywhere never seeks to humiliate or embarrass, and I feel awful that in the case of these two guys we didn’t accomplish that mission. I’m happy to hear that Chris from GOP ultimately considers the incident as a “gift”, and I hope that GOP continues to soar. I also wish Chris from Ted’s Birthday nothing but the best of luck at NYU and beyond.
For those of you who are visiting this site for the first time, I encourage to check out our missions page. Over the past four years, we’ve performed over 40 undercover missions. Best Gig Ever and Ted’s Birthday are the only ones in the bunch that involved singling individuals out. For that reason, they are perhaps the most interesting and it’s not surprising TAL chose to focus on them.
Thanks for reading this, and thanks for visiting our site.
Agent Todd
4/11/05
i love, love what you guys do. i try hard not to, but i can’t help myself. great job, TAL.
caught you on TAF on the last leg of a weekend road trip. Reminds me of the clutural jams that we use to do in college. Do you think you have outed yourself since the story?