Tis the season...for what, I'm not sure this year. But one thing we do know is that for the past 9 months some of our best companions have been podcasts. To bring Season 3 of Now & Next, the podcast I host, to a close, a double shot of episodes have just been dropped for your earbud fulfillment. In one we meet an indigenous actor, producer, and filmmaker who as a kid wondered why there was no one who looked like him in Home Alone. Today Jacob Pratt is based in LA, and his latest project is creating Indigenous themed content for Disney. The other episode picks up on this theme of home alone-ing and offers a preview of a forthcoming research report on how people in the game industry are adapting to working from home. Enjoy.
Now & Next Podcast S3 E8 – Isolation Nation: Insights into #WFH
Have you ever said to yourself ‘if only I could work from home whenever I wanted’? And then followed up with a list of all the ways in which it would be better than the daily grind of an uncomfortable commute, overpriced coffee, and hours spent pushing paper and clicking keys at your desk, interspersed with hours in meetings and boxes of muffins? Now, for better or worse, most of us know what that’s like. Spoiler alert: it’s not as great as we thought it would be.
On this episode of the Now & Next podcast we’re taking a closer look at an industry that was one of the first to go to full work from home mode: the game industry. In some ways it was a fairly straightforward transition, because the majority of developers, designers, producers, and testers were already working independently and on screens for much of the time. But has the transition really been that seamless?
The guests on this episode of the podcast are Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan and Jim Munroe. They’re long time game art industry professionals who have been tasked with finding out what the shift to working from home has actually been like for game industry personnel. They’re putting the finishing touches on a research report about the sector’s transition from studio-based work to home-based work called “Isolation Nation”. Marie and Jim provide us with a sneak peek into some of their interview-based findings so far, such as the challenges of people having to be their own boss at home, the tendency to work too much, as opposed to working too little, and mechanisms for keeping morale up when the opportunities for the usual team building events are limited due to the Covid-19 restrictions.
Marie describes the research project this way: “People are really isolated right now, and I say that’s more the case for people making games, especially small studios. And we think life is easier when people can solve problems together and share knowledge. So the goal of this project is to gather knowledge from people making games all over Canada, in small studios, in larger studios, or people working alone. And then gather that knowledge together into one resource so that people can share the things that they’re struggling with, and how they’re getting past them.”
On this episode, learn more about:
How did the gaming industry respond to Covid in terms of getting people set up to work from home? (02:37)
How team health is affected by working from home (09:00)
Ways studios are trying to build camaraderie and trust with people that joined during the pandemic (11:25)
Studios dealing with mental health challenges (15:00)
The most surprising discoveries Marie Claire and Jim made from doing this research (18:35)
Getting creative work done while being stuck at home during a pandemic (22:30)
Now & Next Podcast S3 E7 – Breaking On-Screen Stereotypes from the Inside Out
As a child growing up in southern Saskatchewan Jacob Pratt found himself watching TV – as most kids do – and wondering why he saw no one who looked like him. Jacob grew up on the George Gordon First Nation reserve, about 100 km north of Regina, and remembers that the only images he saw of people from his culture on TV and in movies were stereotypes like people dancing around drums or as members of a tribe from the 1800s riding into town on horseback. “Why is there no one that looks like me in Home Alone?”, he thought to himself.
It took several years for Jacob to process, and ultimately answer that question for himself. He built his career in the entertainment industry one step at a time, first as a dancer, then as an actor, and more recently as a producer and director. It was along this journey that Jacob realized that the stereotypical images of Indigenous people he had seen his whole life were not just created by the industry, but reinforced by it. “And then I started thinking to myself, well, how can we reverse or eliminate those stereotypes? And the first answer that came to me was: use the same medium that created and reinforced those stereotypes to reverse them.”
On this episode of the Now and Next, Jacob Pratt talks about his journey from a town of a few thousand people on the prairies to the heart of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, where he recently completed his Masters at USC, and launched his own company, Skoden Entertainment. Skoden is an Indigenous story-focused entertainment production company whose first client happens to be Disney. But this is not the story of an overnight success. Far from it. While still based in Canada, Jacob hosted, produced, and directed several shows on APTN. And it was while doing an internship at Disney, as part of his Masters program at USC, that he forged the relationships that would lead to his current work with the entertainment industry giant.
On this episode, learn more about:
How using the entertainment industry can be a great way to reverse stereotypes created and reinforced by the media (02:20)
The biggest challenges in bringing Indigenous stories created by Indigenous filmmakers to a wide audience (6:30)
The story of how of Jacob got the deal with Disney (09:00)
Skoden Entertainment’s plans to impact Indigenous communities more directly in the future (10:30)
Learn more about Use Your Voice, the project Jacob created for Disney Channel
Jacob is still very active in Canada where he currently has three shows on APTN: Wild Archaeology, Louis Says, and a self-produced show called Land Wandered
If we’re going to be spending so much time alone during Covid-19, we might as well do it together. And not on yet another Zoom meeting. Instead, how about taking the experience of watching a movie, add a group of like-minded individuals, and finish the evening off with some captivating conversation? And do it all at a safe distance online.
That is essentially what Hilary Henegar and Fiona Rayher, the entrepreneurs behind the startup Hoovie are doing. The two friends began organizing in-person events in Vancouver a few years ago that were essentially ‘pop up’ movies. They called them Hoovies, a blending together of the words ‘home’ and ‘movies’.
These events took place in living rooms, in backyards and in basements – anywhere where people could gather and share the experience of watching a documentary, art house movie or film festival award winner together. The evening was capped off with a post-film discussion, usually accompanied by some wine and cheese, and oftentimes the exchange of phone numbers. People were meeting new people and sharing new ideas at Hoovies. Then Covid-19 hit, and like many entrepreneurs, Hilary and Fiona had to adjust their model. “Since Covid, said Fiona, we’ve pivoted. We’ve really tried to bring the magic of what we used to do to the online world.”
On this episode of the Now & Next podcast, we’ll hear from the two BC-based entrepreneurs about what it’s been like shifting their model from people’s yards and homes to their laptops and tablets. As Hilary explains in the interview: “What we know is that there’s this longing people have to interact during the film. As one of our users has said, you can actually feel the audience in the room. And that’s been a real guiding light in how we build the technology.”
And there’s good news for producers too. On top of adding a new social dimension to the viewing experience, Hoovie also provides a new way for filmmakers to reach audiences. Some filmmakers are already finding new audiences in this way while others are using the platform as an additional window, both with a revenue stream attached.
In this episode, hear about:
Using cinema as a tool to build online communities (1:40)
How food remains an integral part of a movie watching experience, even online (7:00)
Why independent films are uniquely suited to a social cinema model (10:30)
The new distribution window for filmmakers offered by Hoovie (14:35)
The story behind how Bob Stein, the founder of the Criterion Collection, fell in love with the Hoovie model (21:53)
There is no doubt that all sectors of the entertainment industry have been severely affected by the pandemic, and the game industry is no exception, as it has historically relied on networking at large annual in-person events. When you can’t just pack your bags and head to some of the industry’s biggest events like GDC in San Francisco or E3 in Los Angeles, you miss out on the opportunity for those happy encounters that sometimes happen by the sandwich tray or the coffee machine.
And then there are the parties. All those parties. Where a good chunk of the fun seems to be talking your way in when you're not technically 'invited'.
But because large in-person events are not an option in the current landscape, a number of online events for the video game industry have been emerging, like MEGA MIGS, the virtual version of the gathering that usually takes place in Montreal. And created specifically for these locked down and working from home times, Canada Games Online recently came together as a collaboration between the provincial interactive media associations across the country.
These virtual industry gatherings bring game developers together with publishers, investors, and other collaborators. And as with most B2B events, the goal is to find new partners in order to reach new audiences and markets around the world.
On this episode of the Now & Next podcast, we check in with a handful of game development studios to find out how they’re adapting to changes in their day-to-day operations during Covid-19, including finding fresh ways to network and get their name and game out there to the world.
And I also talk to the head of one of Canada’s largest industry associations for game developers, La Guilde du jeu vidéo du Québec, and learn about the initiatives happening at the industry level to help keep things moving along amidst the business challenges brought on by the pandemic.
In this episode, you'll hear from/about:
Angela Mejia, the co-founder of Clever Plays Studio, on what the transition to working from home has been like for game developers (01:24);
Tony Walsh, founder and CEO of Phantom Compass, and Rob Segal, co-founders of Get Set Games, on the ease of attending virtual events (04:21);
How the new Canada Games Online event came to be (06:45);
The gaming industry is a true ecosystem, meaning that the health of one part affects the health of the whole (10:45);
Nadine Gelly, CEO of Quebec’s LaGuilde, on Canadian game companies particular advantages in the new landscape (12:25)
To get a sense of how the gaming industry events were impacted in 2020, have a look at the Video Game Convention Calendar
To find out more about Canada’s gaming ecosystem, read Essential Facts 2019, ESAC’s annual publication which provides economic, demographic and public opinion data about the Canadian video game industry;
Thanks to Vocal Fry Studios for this profile that tells the story of my pretty accidental return to the microphone for Now & Next, the podcast I host that is now into its third season.
You can read the piece here. In the meantime, below you'll find a related Exhibit A and Exhibit B.
Exhibit A: The 'couch studio' being used for the Covid-concurrent Season 3 of the podcast
Exhibit B: Cue the confetti...
We made it as high as #3 on the charts in the "TV & Film" category on Apple Podcasts!
At a time when fast food restaurants all over North America are serving veggie burgers and most retailers are charging extra for plastic bags, it seems reasonable to assume that the level of eco-consciousness is fairly high. And while that’s true to a large extent, there is still a long way to go. The film and TV industry is no exception, according to Clara George, my guest on this episode of the podcast.
Based in Vancouver, Clara is the VP of Studios & Sustainable Production Services at Sim International, a role she transitioned into after close to three decades working as a producer in film and TV. Clara has had a longstanding interest in environmental issues and has been active in a variety of sustainability initiatives over the years but it wasn’t until Covid-19 hit earlier this year that she made greening film and TV production her full time focus. While the Covid-19 restrictions might seem like a step back in terms of sustainability efforts, they’ve actually provided an opportunity for people to become more aware of unnecessary waste on set, and come up together with new solutions, as Clara explains in this episode.
Among the strides Clara George has made in sustainable production practices: shifting a number of BC-based productions to clean grid power, making a fleet of close to 100 hybrid vehicles available for short term rentals for productions shooting in Vancouver, and finding workaround solutions to the high emissions diesel generators that have been a staple on film and TV sets for several decades.
In this episode of the podcast Clara also shares some examples of how she’s been able to essentially ‘sneak’ more sustainable practices onto set, and explains that crew members and producers are learning to both think and behave differently when it comes to issues that have an environmental impact. And to top it all off , Clara says such initiatives either cost nothing to implement or, even better, end up saving the production money.
In this episode, learn more about:
What can be done during COVID-19 in terms of sustainable production (01:28)
What made Clara rethink her entire career during COVID-19 and how she is working to instigate change at the city of Vancouver level (03:50)
How a few people can make a difference in terms of sustainability and a trick from Clara to encourage some initiatives on set (11:20)
Making sustainability a common goal in front and behind the cameras (13:35)
Clara’s pet peeve on set regarding waste in production (17:48)
Special effects that create computer-generated characters and backgrounds are found everyday in the gaming world and they have been standard fare in higher end Hollywood productions for years. But now, using a combination of more affordable technologies and open source real time 3D game engines as a foundation, these techniques are starting to move closer to mainstream film and TV production. With networked laptops, game engines that can render high fidelity worlds, and a late model iPhone most everyone can experiment with these new technologies.
The guests on this episode of the Now & Next podcast are producer Andrew Scholotiuk and director Dylan Pearce. They have a sizable portfolio of feature films, TV shows, and games to their credit, along with a Lumiere Award for advancements and innovation in digital filmmaking.
According to Andrew, it’s not just the technologies involved in virtual production, but the completely new ways of approaching the work that are exciting. “It’s going to allow for new partnerships, new ways of working either within a region or to connect and produce and create without boundary. This isn’t just about transposing what we did in the past into this new technology, but what can we do with this new technology that we’ve never done before.”
And while there are always costs and learning curves associated with new technologies, Dylan points out there is an indie way to approach virtual production, using green screens, game engines, inexpensive tracker systems, and even iPhones to obtain superior quality content that used to only be feasible with big studio budgets.
In this episode, learn more about:
The role video game engines play in virtual production (01:15)
Andrew and Dylan’s current system for virtual production and how it works (03:24)
To what extent virtual production can help with rising costs under COVID-19 restrictions (09:25)
In the tradition of the rock radio double shot, Now & Next, the podcast I host, just dropped 2 episodes for the launch of Season 3. (By the way, if you haven't yet subscribed to the podcast, you can do that here.)
In Episode 1, Toronto-based serial entrepreneur Alex Kolodkin joins me to talk about how to make production as safe as possible while still in the midst of a pandemic.
After months of complete shutdown, film and TV production has now resumed in Canada’s major filming centres of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. Not surprisingly, there is a ‘new normal’ in place.
While there have always been health & safety consultants on set, Covid-19 safety requirements are a lot more specific and constraining. Hint: they are more than just a matter of frequent hand washing and mask wearing. For example, “sneeze etiquette” is now a thing.
On top of physical distancing among actors and crew members, new guidelines now apply to everything from bathrooms and food to the number of consecutive hours spent on set or location.
In BC the term ‘depopulating the set’ has been coined. It refers not just to limiting the number of people on set to the strict minimum, but also to new practices such as directors working remotely and following along on monitors as well as camera operators filming from cranes when possible.
Meanwhile in Quebec, there are new limitations on shootings involving close physical contact between actors, be it love scenes or fight scenes.
To help on-screen and off-screen talent adjust to such changes, Alex Kolodkin started the virtual company Safe Sets International. Since June 2020, they've been providing education and delivering certification for on set safety.
In this episode, you'll hear about:
What it’s been like for actors Andrew Bee and Ethan Berkeley-Garcia to go back to work (02:20)
The most high-risk situations and the new basic drill for people arriving on set (05:35)
The biggest resistance points to safety protocols on set (11:02)
What motivated Alex Kolodkin to create Safe Sets International (12:35)
The flip side of COVID-19 safety protocols when it comes to production sustainability (15:06)
In Episode 2, I'm joined by award-winning actor and founder of Reelworld Film Festival Tonya Williams to talk about ways to achieve meaningful and long-lasting racial representation in front of and behind the camera.
Canada is among the world’s most culturally and racially diverse countries. But what we see on the streets is rarely reflected on our screens. That’s why Tonya Williams, best known for her two-decade role as Dr. Olivia Barber on the long running-soap The Young & The Restless, has made it her mission to bring increased racial and ethnic diversity to Canadian TV and film productions.
Her first step toward this goal was founding the Reelworld Film Festival back in 2001. The initial objective of the festival was to showcase Black actors, writers, producers and directors in Canada. It has since expanded to include Indigenous, Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latinx talent.
The festival’s 20th anniversary is coming up this October 2020 (14th-19th) and will be taking place online. Its newest feature, launched this summer, is an online database called Access Reelworld. It helps match racially diverse on-screen talent with writers, producers, and directors. Williams believes that now is the perfect moment for this kind of industry tool. The technology needed to build such a database has recently become much more affordable plus inclusion and equitable representation are top of mind priorities for producers, writers, directors, and networks.
On this episode of Now & Next Tonya also discusses how she defines success for the various initiatives she is driving and what she sees as the important work that still needs to be done.
This post is a follow up to one from last month that examined the overlaps between content creation and curation as new digital technologies take the place of the first generation of social platforms.
Below, is Part 2, co-authored with Jad Esber, one of the co-founders of koodos, a VC backed startup that's building tools to fill the gaps between consuming, creating, annotating, and categorizing online content.
And now, the hopefully awaited sequel to last month's post...
The internet has enabled us to pursue our passion and turn that into a financial reward of some kind, and that can be anything from making a bit of money on the side to making a decent living; see much-hyped Passion Economy. But -- it’s still a game for the 1%.
People creating physical products and selling on Etsy and Shopify are prime examples of the commercial side of the passion economy. What could previously only be done at the level of a craft market can now be done on a global scale, and that's the case for the millions of people around the world selling their wares on those sites.
So when you look at creators using online tools to post creations to sell or monetize (whether, e.g. that's Etsy sellers or YouTubers or creators on Twitch etc.) the overall picture is another story of the top 1% of the 1%. A study done last year showed that there are about 17 million such creators in the US, with aggregate earnings of $7B, but fewer than 1% of those 17 million earn $10,000 or more per year.
Of the 30 million+ YouTube channels only about 20,000 or so have a million subscribers or more, which is where one needs to be to be 'in the game', so to speak, and in that 20,000 figure are the broadcasters and media organizations and recording artists who are already major brands, with infrastructure and marketing budgets, so that's now a really challenging place to make one's mark.
Above is an example of the distribution of views on YouTube for 2019, from Pex.com. I think people tend to think there are more YouTube stars or YouTube millionaires than there actually are, but the numbers show that close to 90% of videos posted get under 1000 views and not even 3% get between 10,000 and 100,000 views. And to get over a million views puts you in the 0.1%. I think people think there are a lot more PewDiePies out there than there actually are and these numbers back that up.
The bright side of these stats is that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone able to earn at least a nice 'side hustle' level of money, if not a living, doing things that were either not doable from a logistical point of view or not feasible in the sense that a broadcaster or publisher was probably never going to give them the go-ahead to do a show or write a column.
Is there any good news? Yes there is. The GDP of the creator economy is expanding.
More & more consumers becoming creators and curators (with greater incentives & easier to use tools)
Better methods to monetize creative output online
An increased willingness to pay online creators
In terms of how these dollars will be distributed, we will likely see a flattening of the head, with wealth being distributed more equally across creators. However, only slightly.
We’re seeing an obvious shift to a more creator-centric model. Patreon estimates that their creators will be earning at least $1 billion a year. A story about AWAL recently reported that somewhere between about 100 and 300 of the artists on AWAL earned over $100,000 last year and that AWAL's parent organization, Kobalt, believes there could be as many as 100,000 artists in this tier in the next five 5 years.
Markets naturally pick winners and talent is distributed by a very skewed power law. Most people only want to see content from the best creators. And we generally have similar assessments of what the best is. However, what constitutes content, talent, and even creation, has never been more voluminous or varied. And at the center of all of this is the question of taste.
For the first time, possibly ever, we're seeing all tastes represented, expressed, distributed, and consumed. Wattpad is a good example with its (very) long tail of sub-genres. Everything from Christian zombies and vegan vampires to angry mermaids, and more recently angry mer-men.
TikTok is another great example. They’ve helped to keep a huge range of distinct subcultures, with their different tastes, separated. And in the words of Eugene Wei: “one person’s cringe is another person’s pleasure, but figuring out which is which is no small feat”.
With platforms’ higher resolution of taste preference, creators have more opportunities and more choice between monetizing by earning a little off of each fan from mainstream content or earning a lot off of deeper connections with a smaller set of fans through niche content (see e.g. SignalFire’s recent report on the economy of creators).
In the end, it comes down to curation. Curation involves multiple vectors, and taste is the term for the component vectors of curator preference. As soon as taste enters the definition of talent, so does distribution and market segmentation. The idea that creation is for the 1% and the winner-takes-all dynamic relies on creators being judged simply by an excellence (or talent) standard. And curation only determines the size of the pot. But when creators are judged by a taste standard, curation and creation are intertwined. And we’re seeing more of that now than ever - and with that, we’ll see large welfare gains and more opportunities for people to make money creating and curating online.
On the menu of the various things I've been keeping myself busy with is serving as an advisor to a Boston-based startup calledkoodos.koodos is a venture-backed startup out of Harvard and MIT that’s building tools and incentives for people to curate on the internet. They’ve started with an experience that allows users to curate music and add commentary using emojis, and have reached thousands of users that actively do this every week.
In this week's edition of the koodos newsletter part 1 of a 2-part interview I did with co-founder Jad Esber on the current state of content curation and creation, and how the two are overlapping more than ever.
What does it mean to curate in 2020?
Things have changed dramatically since the top down, industrial strength days of content creation and content curation e.g. I worked in radio in the 1980s and 1990s (yes I'm that old but don't tell anyone, ok?). In those days — and I only think it's worth talking about the 'old days' to the extent that it informs what's going on currently — there was extremely limited access to the system, whether for artists, fans, or people who wanted to be in the industry. Only so many spots were available on charts, only so many jobs were available in the industry. A world of engineered scarcity you could say, but engineered that way because of the cost of taking something from inception to success took a lot of people, and a lot of connections, and cost a lot of money. In those high barrier to entry worlds, whether music, journalism, film, fashion, whatever, there were a relatively small number of what could be thought of as 'tastemakers' and generally broadcast media (whether radio or television or newspapers or magazines) were used to disseminate those tastes. Again, a lot of meetings, a lot of marketing, a lot of money.
In the past 10 years or so things have flipped. No to low barriers to entry. Is that good news or bad news? It's both, because it means nobody can say no to your idea but it also means hugely increased competition. We see things like 50,000 tracks a day, yes each day, being uploaded to Spotify, 4+ million creators on Roblox, over 7 million Twitch streamers, over 30 million YouTube channels. And then there's the world of TikTok, which is harder to categorize as what exactly is a TikTok video in relation to the categories we generally use to think about these things. At any rate, all this is the inverse of the world of a handpicked 10 or 20 bands getting signed every year or TV shows getting greenlit or games getting made.
So the new game is not about getting in the door, so to speak. The door is wide open. But damn that front hallway is packed. The new game is about doing something so new, so captivating, so must see/hear/do that hundreds then thousands and hopefully millions will come along with you. In theory it's a from the ground up system (and certainly was in the early days of online content creation) but in practice it's about building taste communities and fan communities but it's also about algorithms and discoverability and those things are complex and dynamic and therefore require strategies and know how and budgets in order to optimize them.
In terms of technology's role in all of this, it has given us algorithms, it has given us recommender systems, it has given us machine learning and AI, and we need all those things because as the numbers cited above indicate, everything is happening at previously unthinkable scale. But can the technology alone be the curator? Is there a role for human touch in there? We're at the point now, about 10 years into this tremendous flurry of creative activity, that we're only now starting to see the strengths and also the limitations of the coming together of technology and curation. There are all sorts of new categories and new use cases for slicing and dicing things for recommendation and curation, new ways of thinking about end users, and how they may have many different personas at different points in time and therefore there are many different use cases for content for each individual.
Is there a living to be made from curating online?
I think we're already seeing that in various places and ways. The playlist makers at Spotify are effectively curators. When there are 50,000 tracks uploaded daily and something like 50 million in total we need that layer of curation. This is what radio used to do, what music magazines used to do, what the front rack of the record store used to do (for those that remember record stores). Now, the playlist makers that are making a living are generally employees at Spotify, as opposed to independent music curators online, but we also see people like Anthony Fantano and his Needledrop channel on YouTube, which has over 2 million subscribers and about 640 million views and he's one guy sitting at home reviewing albums...he also does live events on Twitch (and used to do live events in person in pre Covid times). Here's a guy who created his own niche, on his own, and it was different enough from what either legacy media or other digital media outlets were doing that he now pretty much owns this space of album reviews. And the new crop of Substack writers is another example. Many are both creating and curating. Adding opinion and expertise to the world of over abundant content and adding enough value that people are willing to pay.
Patreon has been a great enabler of similar activities too. They've paid out over a billion dollars to creators ince their inception and half of that was in the last year or so. I'm also very impressed with what Cherie Hu has been able to build there, as a kind of curator of market intelligence, and generator of insights, about the new, technology-driven music industry. Another example of someone, working as just 1 person, who has been able to build what appears to be a nice cottage industry online, in a space where there was no shortage of 'noise' or conventional (whether legacy or digital) covering the sector but there was a shortage of smart commentary and insights, and people are willing to pay for this. And then in the broader sense there's influencer marketing, which is now a $10B industry, and it could be argued that many of the influencers are performing a curatorial function, of fashion or travel or sports or makeup or whatever their area of interest may be.
Oh, and if you're interested in more musings on digital communities and internet culture in 2020 there's more to dig into on the koodos newsletter, that can be found here.
And here we are at Chapter 5, aka the final part of the paper, with some concluding thoughts about what has been examined and explored in these preceding chapters:
In an era of widespread and arguably predictable iconoclasm, the media prankster’s concurrent habitation of the worlds of work and play locates him in an interesting paradox. His (Ed. Note: There were no female media pranksters known to the author at the time this paper was submitted, i.e. Fall 2000) popularity gives him sufficient power to impact significantly upon popular culture, while his reputation as a self-parodying clown makes him seem harmless to the status quo. In reality, however, what the prankster brings to media discourse is a new logic, a rationale of the reflexive and the ironic. If we conceptualise the conventional media model of decorum, curiousity, and logic as signifying the reasonable and the temperate, then the prankster-initiated model of unfettered inquisitiveness and dismissed boundaries should read as chaos and illogic. Increasingly this is not the case.
The proliferation of niche groups, or microcultures, with a deep understanding of alternate approaches to cultural production and reproduction, has greatly enhanced the intelligibility of the media prankster. In addition, the mocking of both media personality and media protocol by the indisputably popular media prankster weakens the sovereignty of the conventional media. What we are left to ponder, then, is what is more genuine: the openly derisive media model presented by the prankster, or the rigidly self-conscious version put forward by the majority of conventional media? Additionally, popular acceptance of the prankster’s techniques and sensibilities indicate a move away from the stigmatisation usually accorded to rule-breakers and mavericks, and a move toward mainstream permeation. For a style of discourse rooted in such avant-garde and openly dissenting traditions as Dada, Situationism, and punk, this represents a remarkable achievement.
It also bears reiterating that such cultural incorporation positions the media prankster as something apart from the binary opposite of conventional media professionalism and protocol. He must therefore be considered as a manifestation of a larger cultural moment and a point on the curve of highly vernacular, (and after Goffman) ‘backstage’ and ‘informal’ strands of broadcast talk. The prankster’s modus operandi thus conducive to the production of a media metadiscourse, a constantly evolving language of broadcasting that references broadcast culture and repositions media personality and audience in the process.
The media prankster, unlike previous figures of media authority and/or celebrity, is neither expert nor imagined companion to the viewer, but co-conspirator. By dislocating the power relations and boundaries of broadcast discourse, the entire media environment becomes destabilized. Information flow becomes a continuous loop rather than a one way transmission, notions of authenticity and authority are undermined, formulaic broadcast talk becomes a laughable, if not highly suspect, form of public discourse, and consequently the model for what constitutes broadcast talk, in both nature and actual utterance, expands.
As the hoax becomes a more commonplace activity in a culture that celebrates irreverence and heterodoxy, it also becomes a less deviant activity. The prankster figure is no longer relegated to the sidelines of society. By incorporating the prank into his grammar of broadcast discourse, he offers an antidote to soundbite culture and media-trained celebrities and spokespeople. Recent media developments such as the syndicated American radio program The Phil Hendrie Show, in which the host of the program cunningly plays the role of presenter, guest, and callers, suggest that the high moment of media prankstering is upon us.
Such an extension of the synthetic into all aspects of the media experience, combined with the proliferation and popularity of the media prank discussed in this dissertation, indicate a need for further research into audience readings of pranksters and synthetic narratives as everyday components of broadcast discourse.
**********
(Ed. Note: And to tie things up with a nice Mobius strip of a bow may I refer back to the original post in this series, and its reference to a more recent crop of media pranksters, in particular Stephen Colbert's 'Stephen Colbert' of The Colbert Report. Here we find the either/or of satire is a lesson, and parody is a game may be too crisp a distinction. Much food for thought.
And then there are the armies of YouTubers and Instagrammers and TikTokers and the like; gatekeeper-free environments that are open to anyone with a phone. Millions of daily uploads, billions of daily views, and, of course, a high rate of turnover in this world of influencers and microstars and 'ordinary celebrity'. (Turner, 2010)
This chapter will be devoted to an analysis of the work of the media pranksters. Methods will include textual analysis as well as a discussion of the way the media have reported upon the phenomenon. The analysis will also include the relationship of aspects of the media prankster phenomenon to existing academic theories which have not yet been touched upon in this essay. In attempting to understand this style of broadcast talk, the literature review section of this dissertation pointed to cultural theories of the liminal, the ludic, the spectacular/narcissistic, and the carnivalesque as relevant to the theoretical positioning of the media prankster. What became clear is that the mission of the media prankster is to test the boundaries of appropriateness, and create room in media discourse for a point of view that contravenes conventional notions of truth, integrity, and consistency. Goffman’s work on identity, interaction, and styles of talk proves to be of particular value in this analysis, as does Tolson’s work in the area of synthetic personalities and its larger implications for the public sphere of broadcasting.
While it is tempting to accept the idea of the inversion of values of the carnival world and transpose it wholesale to the world of the media prankster, additional considerations should be factored in to the equation. The media prankster defies neat categorisation as he does not simply negate or oppose the status quo. Instead, he continually surprises, craftily switching gears and keeping us guessing. He plays against expectations, but it is not always clear when he is being sincere, sarcastic, or sardonic. Often his methods yield more interesting, and arguably superior results to those of his ‘professional’ media colleagues.
To further complicate matters, the media prankster exists both inside and outside the world of the media. By incorporating certain aspects of media and interaction protocol and blatantly ignoring others, the media prankster draws attention to the artificiality and arbitrariness of not just the media encounter, but to notions of media personality, authority, and celebrity as well. Yet, however awkward or uncomfortable it may be to observe the resulting style of communication, it makes for indisputably compelling viewing. Barnes’ (1980) and Bakhtin’s (1968) respective theories of subversion through ‘grotesque parody’ and 'grotesque realism’ provide us with insight into the strategies of the media prankster. It is through the manipulation and satirical overstating of those elements of everyday media presentation that are predictable and unremarkable in themselves that the prankster creates spectacle from the ordinary.
Meet Prankster #1: Ali G
In many ways the Ali G character represents a media manifestation of Baudrillard’s simulacrum. Of the pranksters analyzed in this dissertation, Ali G is probably the most seamless, and therefore the most successful at hoodwinking officialdom and creating intelligent, entertaining satire. Ali G creator Sacha Baron-Cohen has created a comprehensive universe for his character, complete with its own distinctive look, language, taste, sensibilities, and values. The Ali G persona has become so entrenched in British popular culture in 2000 that if we see a 'yellow Fubu track suit, wraparound shades, chunky jewellery, and Hilfiger hat', we automatically conjure up images of the skilled. Ali G’s heart is with the ‘Berkshire massive’, a fictional association based out of a well-to-do suburban London neighbourhood. It is from the untenable point of view of a ghetto boy from Berkshire that the world of Ali G originates. With this alter ego established, Ali’s strategy is to feign ignorance and gain social immunity by virtue of exotic ethnic and subcultural affiliations. In this guise he asks the most fundamental questions of the most respected figures.
Ali G guilefully positions himself as the voice of youth, the host of a television program said to speak to the young people in the ghetto, hence his impressive track record in securing interviews with assorted spokespersons and officials, e.g.:
Ali G to High Court Judge Pickles:
“Is I allowed to kill a man who calls me Mum a slag?”
Ali G to noted scientist and Professor Heinz Wolff:
“What is the smallest thing in the universe? Is it smaller than a sand?”
Ali G to Major General Ken Perkins (Britain’s most highly decorated soldier):
“Ain’t the army just full of thick blokes? Would it help getting in the army if you’ve already killed someone?”
Ali G creates a protective wall around himself with intentionally bad grammar, naive questions, malapropisms, historical inaccuracies, and vernacular slang. Allegedly serious exchanges, such as the above noted and the following, between Ali G and Lindsey Owen, the Bishop of Horsham, are thus able to take place within the context of what appears to be a straightforward media interaction.
Ali G: What does God look like?
Bishop: He is sort of Jesus-shaped.
A: What has God ever done?
B: Well he made the world. He created.
A: (incredulously) He made the world?
B: Of course.
A: (sounding surprised) Did he?
B: I can only tell you what I believe.
A: So you’re saying God made the world. (pause) And since then he’s just chilled?
In the world of the media prankster the embarrassing questions are asked, the social codes that govern interactions are tossed aside, and the usual cues and norms are ignored; in other words, a significantly different set of rules than those that apply to the world of the media professional. What we have here, to use Goffman's terminology, is the prankster deftly playing with the guidelines of 'in frame' and 'out of frame' interaction, the latter representing a form of communication that would be scrupulously avoided by the average person for fear of embarrassment or social retribution. Yet, for a reason difficult to pinpoint, ‘out of frame’ communications do not hold this threat for the seemingly humiliation-immune media prankster. Goffman’s work in the area of ‘backstage language’, or the type of speech usually reserved for subordinate spaces or areas without surveillance, is also applicable to the world of the media prankster. Whereas clear distinctions once existed between the backstage world and the onstage world, the dividing line has become increasingly difficult to ascertain, particularly now, and particularly in media culture.
After establishing the Ali G character on Channel 4’s The 11 O’Clock Showwith the short interview segments cited above, Ali G creator Sacha Baron-Cohen was commissioned to create his own six-part series for Channel 4, and added the character of ‘Borat’ to his repertoire. Posing as a television reporter from Kazakhstan assigned to a story on ‘how to be real English gentleman’, Borat sought out British manners expert Lady Chelsea.
Once inside Lady Chelsea’s home, site of her respected etiquette classes, Borat carefully violated almost every norm of British behaviour, even broaching such taboo topics as sex, death, and bathroom habits at the dinner table. After the Borat segment featuring Lady Chelsea was broadcast in March 2000, the well-mannered Lady was said to be ‘mortified’, and was even considering closing down her etiquette classes altogether.Such anecdotes speak volumes about the circumstances under which norms can be contravened with relative impunity; namely in the face of implicit, societally shared ideas about media integrity and political correctness. The diffusion of the media prankster phenomenon, however, detracts from the public’s faith in the media as an institution. Not too long ago the popularly held assumption was that media presentation in the western world reflected the values inherent in a democratic society: reality, truth, balance, and reason. In the intervening years we have seen a shift away from communication at face value, and movement towards the manipulation and reconfiguration of both media object and subject. By the early 1990s Scannell and Tolson viewed this proliferation of synthesis and simulation in the media as a threat to Habermas’ (1974) conception of the public sphere. While Scannell emphasises the importance of maintaining rationality as a core value in the public sphere, Tolson acknowledges the paradox of a public sphere so diverse and so fragmented that it represents everyone and thus, in essence, no one.
Meet Prankster #2: Tom Green
This is the Tom Green Show
It’s not the Green Tom Show
This is my favourite show
Because it is my show
So go the intentionally nonsensical lyrics from the theme song of MTV’s The Tom Green Show, a contemporary media phenomenon posing even more of a threat to a broadcasting sphere assumed to be truthful, decent, and reasonable. Various critics have labelled the show using terms such as 'sick, offensive, amateurish, and infantile', and Green himself admits that he does not always know where the line of acceptable prankstering lies. On the weekly television program Green partakes in such activities as surprising his parents in bed at 3 a.m. with the bloody skull of a dead animal, sucking milk from a cow’s udder, and impersonating an injured, blind, or otherwise disabled person, taking repeated pratfalls and causing physical damage to public property and/or himself. All of these events take place with cameras rolling, making a point to emphasise the uncomfortable, awkward moments usually relegated to the cutting room floor. Not unlike the performers in carnival and festive rituals referred to earlier in this essay, Green does not believe in separating the audience from the spectacle, even subjecting himself to violence, scorn, and humiliation along the way.
Clearly, Green’s interest is in creating extreme situations and provoking reactions. MTV executive John Miller sums up the appeal of Tom Green as “a live action hero for the Beavis and Butthead crowd", referring to the irremediable MTV cartoon duo whose public sphere was limited to heavy metal videos and random acts of neighbourhood vandalism. Proving MTV’s Miller right in an episode from the second season of The Tom Green Show, Green took his camera crew to several New York City electronics stores. The alleged object of the exercise was the investigation of product warranties. If an item claimed to have a one-year warranty, Green took that to mean the article was covered for a full year, regardless of the circumstances surrounding its damage. With that logic employed, Green proceeded to demolish clock radios, watches, and even a guitar, in full view of the shopkeepers, and then walk out without paying for the articles, arguing they were covered by warranties. By creating this extreme situation Green provoked extreme reactions, in spite of the presence of video cameras. Whereas some people would defer to the camera’s presence and be more lenient and accommodating under its gaze, the shopkeepers in this segment were uniformly enraged by Green’s behaviour, one even threatening to ‘kick his [expletive] [expletive]’, regardless of whether the camera was on or off. This incident suggests that an unwavering faith and belief in anyone with a camera no longer holds true, and adds fuel to the aforementioned Scannell/Tolson debate on the status of broadcasting in the public sphere in an era of synthetic media personalities and unclear rules. But there are also differences between Tom Green and the uncivilised Beavis and Butthead. Green, for example, invariably attempts to overcompensate for his wrongdoings, often asking for forgiveness or hugs from those he has trespassed against. In the exchange below between Green and a cinema security guard, note Green’s use of manipulative, childlike techniques, in this case asking for friendship from the authority figure he knows he has pushed too far.
Tom and cameraman brazenly walk in to cinema without buying tickets, with camera rolling.
Tom (to camera, while walking): We're going to sneak in to the movie now...we've slipped around the side...(he whistles to himself nonchalantly)
Tom (upon encountering the security guard): You're tall! You're fantastically tall.
Guard: I'm not taller than you. Now I'm asking you to leave or I'm going to throw you out.
Tom: You've got good security here.
(TG to camera): Of course they're a business and if everyone snuck in they wouldn't make any money.
(TG to guard): So we're friends again?
Guard: We were never friends to begin with. I have no stake in what you're doing; you have no stake in what I'm doing.
Tom: We talked a long time though. That's the beginning of a friendship, possibly. (Guard begins to break a slight smile)
Tom: Unfortunately I live on the other side of the country so it would be a long distance relationship. (pause) Maybe we just better part company now before we get too attached.
Unlike routines that rely on choreographed set-ups and punchlines, Green’s act succeeds regardless of his subjects’ reactions. The mere staging of extreme situations provides viewers with the opportunity to observe the equivalent of a car crash in slow motion, all within a context sanctioned by the masses: the media environment. Despite its many negations of broadcast protocol, The Tom Green Show succeeds in its communicative intentions, making the case for the existence of a new media language, one in which the unspoken is spoken, the off-camera becomes the on-camera, and the repugnant is the norm.
In addition to forging a distinct broadcast discourse in these ways, Green plays with conventional notions of media personality by sending out mixed messages about his identity via his appearance. Of the media pranksters studied in this essay, Green is the only one not to use what amounts to a costume to transmit signals about his persona. On the set of his television show he usually wears a suit and tie, an improbable wardrobe choice for the iconoclastic Green, but the outfit does add an aura of seriousness to the otherwise lawless goings on. And although Green comports himself like most other 20-somethings during his ‘on the street’ segments, there is something slightly suspicious and menacing about his mundane self-presentation. At a time when piercing, tattooing, and unusual hairstyles and hair colours have been adopted and co-opted by the masses, one of the few remaining ways to be different is to be inconspicuous. Dave Laing observed a similar tendency amongst the Mods in the 1960s, and Caroline Evans noticed the affinity for such ‘disappearing tactics’ amongst the rave generation of the 1990s. For Tom Green this has meant the adoption of a very ordinary physical appearance, thus casting himself as less overtly freakish than fellow pranksters such as Dennis Pennis and Nardwuar the Human Serviette, whom we will encounter next.
Meet Prankster #3: Dennis Pennis
If the media prankster is a practitioner of the punk equivalent of journalism, then Paul Kaye, creator of the Dennis Pennis character, would be happy to be considered a card-carrying member of the trade. Kaye admits that “…as a kid, I was big on John Lydon/Rotten…I guess that’s evident from the orange hair. I used to be a bedroom punk. Ruffing (sic) up my tie on the way home from school. There’s a lot of that in Pennis.” Coincidentally (or perhaps not), a quote from John Lydon/Rotten used to synopsise the punk movement, proves illustrative in an examination of the media pranksters. Lydon dubbed the efforts of the punks the 'achievements of the deformed. Like their punk brethren, the media pranksters are imbued with the rebellious spirit of the disenfranchised. Not pretty or mellifluous enough for the straight media world, the pranksters, like the punks, cultivate and capitalise on a grotesqueness, or negative charisma. They simultaneously captivate and repel.
With his fluorescent orange hair, tasteless suits, nerdglasses, and a boisterous American accent and manner (oddly, he introduces himself as representing the BBC), Dennis Pennis communicates contempt for conventional media practice and its unwritten rules about appearance, appropriateness, and journalistic decorum. Operating from this dual base as member and mocker of the media, Pennis exploits techniques Goffman (1974) termed ‘deceptive frame’. When Pennis unabashedly insults the celebrities he is ‘interviewing’, and does so in the first few seconds of the encounter, it is clear that what ‘appears’ to be going on, is not really going on at all. Rather than a balanced media encounter, this is an outright attack, a communicative bait and switch.
It is significant that Pennis, unlike fellow media pranksters Ali G, Tom Green, and Nardwuar, deals exclusively with superstar celebrities. By accosting the likes of Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Cindy Crawford, Mel Gibson, and Cher at awards ceremonies and other superstar meeting places, Pennis stages assaults on the most highly media-trained personnel. His technique is the surprise attack, essentially carpet-bombing the stars with insulting one-liners. With an arsenal filled with corny wordplay and bad puns, there is little room for interviewee rebuttal or redemption. Pennis’ pranksterism is primarily about his performance, with a large part of the appeal being celebrity schadenfreude.
Examples of Pennis’ ‘hit and run’ interviewing technique include:
Demi Moore, if it was done tastefully and they paid you enough, would you ever consider keeping your clothes on in a film?
Pierce Brosnan, I was glued to my seat during your last movie. Otherwise I would have left.
Elton John, do you know what they call you in Germany? Herr Piece!
Mel Gibson, your film did wonders for my sex life. When I went to the cinema, I slept with the whole audience.
Tom Hanks, I loved your new film “Apollo 13”… but it was completely lacking in atmosphere!
A feature unique to Pennis as media prankster is the inversion of the focus of attention in media encounters. Whereas the conventional model usually features a brief question from the interviewer, followed by an explanatory and/or anecdotal response from the interviewee, Pennis rejects this mode of interaction in favour of one which shamelessly focuses the attention on the interviewer. This scenario would be one result of the violation of broadcast protocol initiated by the media pranksters. Part of what Pennis’s act is about, then, is the repositioning of the celebrity spotlight. By brazenly disrespecting those usually surrounded by sycophants and disproportionate praise, he invokes a pleasure Fiske (1987) associates with the spectacle of wrestling, namely the “exaggeration of the pleasure of looking.”
Exaggerated pleasures notwithstanding, even Kaye tired of his celebrity-assaulting alter ego, laying the pesky Pennis to rest in 1998. “I was bored [expletive] of the whole [expletive] thing”, admitted Kaye, “…Dennis…was becoming a fat, bloated, parody of himself…falling into every cliché in the book…Killing him was important to me.” Ali G creator Sacha Baron-Cohen is reported to have similarly hung up the trademark yellow track suit earlier this year, and rumours are circulating in North America that it’s only a matter of time before everyone in North America will be able to recognise Tom Green, effectively nullifying his act. For the media prankster there is an inverse relationship between success and efficacy, and he therefore must be viewed as having a ‘best before’ date. With these parameters for the media prankster established, we are poised to meet the final protocol-defying character under consideration in this essay. It should come as no surprise that he breaks the rules set out above.
Meet Prankster #4: Nardwuar The Human Serviette
The longest surviving of the media pranksters examined in this dissertation, the quizzically named Nardwuar the Human Serviette has been performing feats of media trickery since 1987. In the early days he was armed only with a tape recorder on loan from the college radio station with which he was affiliated. Soon the help of friends with parents who owned video cameras was enlisted, and confrontations between Nardwuar and television personalities, pop stars, and heads of state were documented on both audio and video formats. The resulting footage ended up broadcast on CITR, the University of British Columbia radio station, or on occasional specials on the local cable television channel. Alternately, transcriptions of the notorious exchanges ended up in such publications as Discorder (Vancouver), Chart (Toronto), Roctober (Chicago), The Rocket (Seattle), and Flipside and Popsmear (Los Angeles). As tales of his adventures have been confined to small circulation publications and broadcasts with limited zones of transmission, Nardwuar has been able to keep a relatively low profile (especially compared to the other pranksters discussed in this essay) and not have to worry about becoming a household name or face. (Ed. Note: As of the mid 2000s this is no longer the case as Nardwuar has become one of the most popular celebrity interviewers on YouTube, where his channel boasts over 228 millions views and 1.68 million subscribers as of mid July 2020.)
That it is Nardwuar’s habit to use the title ‘Nardwuar versus _____’ in his descriptions and transcriptions of interviews, indicates his framing of the interaction as oppositional and provocative as opposed to promotional and co-operative (the usual tone of the media encounter). Not entirely dissimilar to the style forged by Dennis Pennis, Nardwuar works with a model of the media encounter as obstacle course, the major difference between the two being that the assault is over much more quickly with Pennis. On a note of convergent evolution, also observe the physical similarities between Nardwuar and Pennis, two media pranksters operating concurrently and unbeknownst to each other, on opposite sides of the Atlantic. But in stark contrast to Pennis and his stinging one-liners, Nardwuar torments interviewees with a seemingly endless string of questions, testing both mettle and patience. Often times Nardwuar finds himself under attack from the interviewee. The result of this anomalous method is an upsetting of commonly held ideas about the temper of broadcast discourse and the related role of the media personality.
The following barrage of questions posed to rock musician Rob Zombietypifies Nardwuar’s interviewing style. For the most part, the incessant questions elicited either a non-verbal or monosyllabic response from Zombie. The non-verbal responses ranged from nervous laughter to sighs of frustration, silence, and even yawns. The overt yawn, meant to be read as a cue of the interviewee’s diminishing patience and increasing agitation, is superficially addressed by Nardwuar with “you seem a bit tired, Rob”, but ultimately ignored as social cue.
Are you a fan of those true-life crime books that are put out by Time-Life Books?
Have you ever tried absinthe?
Do you know exactly where in Los Angeles that Alfalfa from the Little Rascals was shot in the head over a bad drug deal?
Have you been to a graveyard at midnight?
What do you know about human sacrifices, Rob Zombie? The Aztecs were into human sacrifices.
Have you ever been to a mortuary?
Are you into necrophilia at all, studying the history of it?
Do you own any shrunken heads?
What kind of lenses do you use to get that effect in your eyes?
The interview continued for quite some time, complete with Nardwuar’s inexplicably formal, perhaps grotesquely parodic, use of the interviewee’s full name in almost every question. In addition, note a politeness that defies reason (statements such as ‘thanks for the interview’, and ‘really appreciate your time’ repeatedly appear in the full transcript), considering the fact that Zombie has been subjected to a line of questioning resembling a mutant form of cross-examination more than an interview. As Zombie grew increasingly weary with the proceedings and it was clear the interview was drawing to a close, Nardwuar’s method takes a Dadaesque turn, as he attempts to cajole the interviewee into participating in a childlike call and response (‘doot doola doot doo’) which has become the customary grand finale of his interviews.
N: Well, thanks very much for your time, Rob. I really do appreciate it. Keep on rockin' in the free world. And doot doola doot doo...
RZ: Okay.
N: Rob Zombie? Doot doola doot doo…
RZ: (silence)
N: Hello Rob Zombie? Just to end the interview? Goodbye, thanks for your time, Rob, and doot doola doot doo...
RZ: See you later.
N: Thanks again for your time. Would you be able to finish off with that at all? Could I ask you please? Please?
RZ: A couple more times.
N: A couple more times? Okay. Doot doola doot doo...
RZ: I almost got it down.
N: Okay. Doot doola doot doo...
RZ: Keep going, it's almost funny.
N: Rob Zombie! Doot doola doot doo... Are you there on the speaker phone? Are you still there?
RZ: I'm still here.
N: Thanks very much for the interview. I do appreciate it. And doot doola doot doo...
RZ: (Silence)
(After an extended silence, it is clear Mr. Zombie has left the premises. He did not utter the meaningless linguistic units ‘doo doo’ and consummate the interaction as desired.)
Exchanges such as the above violate many tenets of media and communications theory, thus prompting questions related to sense-making and the media prankster encounter. Insight into the decoding of multiply inflected interactions may be obtained from Hartley’s (1999) work on ‘DIY’ (i.e.do-it-yourself) citizenship, a thesis informed by McKay’s (1998) definition of ‘DIY’ as a distinctive cultural force. Because of mutual ‘DIY’ cultural affiliations and bases of knowledge, there are those who implicitly know how to translate the unique language of the media prankster. In addressing the burgeoning of microcultures and the associated plethora of reinscribed meanings, Hartley identifies ’DIY’ as a fifth possible form of citizenship, following civic, political, social and cultural. In so doing, Hartley validates the efforts and activities of those operating outside and/or around the usual centres of power, such as the pranksters considered here. According to Hartley, “while cultural identity has classically been perceived as proceeding from natural or territorial authenticity…more recent identities arise from the private…world of individual lifestyle, choice, and preference…and subcultural identities based on youth, taste, or fanship of various kinds. Now we are moving…towards…citizenship based not on an authenticist notion of cultural identity, but on a radically deontextualised network of meanings which locate identity in the mediasphere, not in the public sphere.”
The exchange between Nardwuar and Graham Coxon of the British pop band Blur that follows serves as an excellent example of the media prankster as DiY culturalist and of the implicit, successful interpretation of the prankster’s cultural activity by someone inhabiting a similar universe of sensibility, taste, and information. Coxon shows his ability to recontextualise the decontextualised meanings (as referenced above by Hartley), indicating a successful transmission of meaning from the mediasphere. In this case the meaning came from Coxon’s exposure to the already discussed British media prankster Dennis Pennis. Able to read the appearance and combative style of Nardwuar as a media prankster in the Pennis tradition, Coxon implicitly understands the context of the tete a tete, and does not get flustered. He is therefore able to turn the exchange with the media prankster into an amusing volley. Those who do not understand the cheekiness, sarcasm, and simultaneously self-mocking and media-mocking nature of the prankster are unable to do so.
Nardwuar: Everybody thinks, ‘oh Blur are Mods’. You guys are not mods, are you?
Graham Coxon: No.
N: ‘Cause I always think of Mods like '65 Who, R&B, all that stuff. Mods wouldn't wear Converse. You're not Mods, are you?
GC: No, we're not Mods.
N: Like you're not Mod. You're not Mod. Like Blur are not Mod! You guys have effects pedals. What are all those effects pedals you have Graham?
GC: They're Mod pedals.
N: Yeah, ‘Mod’-ulation pedals, but I mean...
GC: (interrupting) You press one of them and a parka suddenly appears.
Tolson’s (1991) account of the ‘dialogic improvisation’ characteristic of television chat show talk is also helpful in this analysis. He likens this type of broadcast talk to a “…jazz performance, not only because it is apparently unrehearsed, but also in so far as it involves a play of thematic repetition and variation…A form of wit is demonstrated by interweaving these various topics, so that each is inflected in terms of the other…Two or three topics in the air at once and the skill of the participants consists in their ability to manipulate the dialogue to ensure that the verbal juggling act continues.”
To conclude the methods and analysis chapter, I would like to recap some of the main points. The media prankster is creating a new form of media discourse by parodying aspects of broadcast talk and mixing in elements of what Goffman has termed “informal talk”, the site where shifts in identity and topic are allowed. As opposed to being a straight inversion of the institutional language of broadcasting, this new form of discourse mixes genres in jest and in seriousness, turning media communication into a puzzle for which clues may be found in theshared networks of meaning of ‘DIY’ citizenship. In these ways the language of the media prankster demonstrates its ludic playfulness, its carnivalesque unpredictability, its punkish rebelliousness, and its ‘betwixt and between’ liminality.
