TED has posted a talk I did at TEDxBloomington this spring to their front page today. If you’re interested in booking me to speak at your school or event, check out this page.
80 people enter a Manhattan Best Buy wearing blue polo shirts and khaki pants. Chaos ensues.
This 2006 mission is the first in a series of remastered videos we are producing from our archives to commemorate our 10th anniversary. We are going through our original tapes and updating old classics with higher quality video and audio, as well as adding additional never-before-seen footage. Due to file size restrictions in the early days of YouTube, many of these videos have only been seen in extremely low 240p quality. The remastered Best Buy video adds some interactions with employees that we didn’t even realize we had on tape! The original, lengthy Best Buy mission report is still online for your reading pleasure.
Look for more remastered videos in the future including some that have never been posted to YouTube, and stay tuned for a brand new mission coming out in just a few weeks.
Last weekend I married my longtime girlfriend and fellow Improv Everywhere member, Cody Lindquist. Our wedding ceremony featured a surprise stunt where we were interrupted by a professional wrestler. Besides the bride and groom, only the officiant and groomsmen were in on the prank. Watch the video above first, and then check out the behind-the-scenes photos and report below.
For the Second Annual Black Tie Beach, hundreds of participants spent a day at Rockaway Beach in black tie attire. We covered a half mile-long stretch with a diverse group of people of all ages laying out, playing games, and swimming in the ocean in formal wear. Agents were instructed to find cheap tuxedos and ball gowns at thrift stores for the occasion. The event also happened on the same day in five other cities around the world, including Sydney, Australia and Malmö, Sweden. Watch the video first, and then read the check out the photos and report below.
For our latest mission we constructed a custom wooden lectern with a megaphone holster and an attached sign that read, “Say Something Nice.” The lectern was placed in public spaces around New York and then left alone. We wanted to see what would happen if New Yorkers were given the opportunity to amplify their voices to “say something nice.”
Say Something Nice was produced by Improv Everywhere as part of the Guggenheim Museum exhibition stillspotting nyc. This is our second collaboration in the series, the first being The Mute Button.
Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our report below.
Improv Everywhere is a New York City-based prank collective that causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Created in August of 2001 by Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere has executed over 100 missions involving tens of thousands of undercover agents.
