And if you missed Chapter 1, you can find it here.
**********
From the ancient world’s Saturnalia to the fool of Shakespearean drama the prankster figure occupies an important place in what may be thought of as a secret cultural history. This history is one viewed through the lens of cultural trickery and pranksters. The parallel universe of the prankster has indeed travelled an interesting route: from the parodic twin of the official in ancient times, to the temporary of carnival time, to an increasingly subordinate position in the industrialized, modernized world. Today’s ultrafragmented culture, however, has provided a space for the voice of the prankster alongside the conventionally sanctioned voices of expression. The media prankster of today may be seen as transgressive, but not in the same way as his prankster predecessors.
Using Bakhtin’s framework as a base, along with that of such culturally subversive movements as Dadaism, Situationism, and punk, a central objective of this essay is to illustrate how the media prankster, not unlike the historical fool or jester figure, hides behind a façade of feigned ignorance and naivete to illuminate the comical and contradictory in official discourses.
I. Carnival
Though the media prankster is certainly a media phenomenon, the most relevant theoretical work appears to reside in the notion of the carnivalesque, a term derived from the field of literary criticism, and coined by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin theorises the carnivalesque as a way of understanding ceremonies of transgression, opposition, reversal, and renewal, all of which are intended to lift societal constraints and upset norms and power relations. All notions of absolute truth, authority, and dogma are put into suspension when viewed from the standpoint of Bakhtinian carnival.
Moving Bakhtin’s ideas from the literary world to a larger cultural studies grid, postmodern theorist John Docker has correlated such characters of carnival culture as the rogue, the clown, the fool, and the crank to “…figures who parody conventionality at the same time as they parody themselves and their own claims to truth.” Here we find a direct link to the current crop of media pranksters, whose work challenges what previously was an implicit trust between television viewer and television audience, and is now a multiply-inflected, highly subtextual form of communication. Indeed, as John Fiske has stated in a chapter entitled ‘Carnival and Style’ (Fiske, 1987), “allowing the viewer to be ‘in the know’ and to participate in the joke reverses the power relations involved in watching normal television…” The inversion of power relations is certainly one of the key issues under consideration when correlating the carnivalesque to the contemporary media prankster. It is therefore worth considering the characterisation of carnival as inimical to the existing power structures, as has been done by Bakhtin biographers Clark and Holquist. “Carnival is a gap in the fabric of society, and since the dominant ideology seeks to author the social order as a unified text, fixed, complete, and forever, carnival is a threat.”
This tradition of carnivalesque trickery provides a useful analogy for the phenomenon of the media prankster. As an inhabitant of the mundus inversus -- the upside down dimension of a right side up world -- the carnivalesque character stakes out his territory by opposing and defying the norms and standards of the day. Fast forward several centuries and we find a character who is clearly closely related to carnivalesque characters, but not as easy to situate theoretically. While we find many of the traits of his carnivalesque ancestors in the media prankster, the softness of boundaries currently existing between the mainstream and the oppositional makes it difficult to ascertain if the media prankster represents inversion from within, or inversion from without.
On this critical point of inversion, I turn to the work of anthropologist Barbara Babcock (1978). Several years before the notion of the carnivalesque became fashionable in cultural studies circles, she displayed interest in acts of ‘symbolic inversion’, defining them as
“…expressive behaviour which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion represents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values, and norms”. Babcock urges us not to make the mistake of conceiving of such inversions as activities taking place on the subcultural sidelines, affecting only the select few. “What is socially peripheral is often symbolically central”, writes Babcock, and it is in this spirit that the significance of a genus of media personality born on the symbolic sidelines of mainstream media discourse and now influencing its broader language is being considered.
The socially liberating properties of symbolic inversions, as well as their facilitation of reflexive points of view with regard to a society’s culture and practices, are at the core of their ability to exert influence. Whereas functional anthropologists have tended to view the symbolic inversions of carnival time as a site for the venting of accumulated tensions, Abrahams and Bauman (in Babcock, 1978): propose a different role: “far from constituting events that have hostility and conflict as their organising principle, carnival…appear[s] to…draw together opposing elements”. By proposing this more integrative model of carnival, the theories of Babcock, Abrahams, and Bauman encourage the conceptualisation of carnival as a constructive social and cultural activity, thus opening the door to the possibility that carnival possesses a value beyond its status as an occasional cultural event.
Suppose for a moment we frame our analysis of the media prankster within the context of carnival not as relegated to ceremonies that occur only on specified days of the year, but as a kind of constant carnival. While such a designation may just be another way of expressing the omnipresence of such features of postmodern existence as irony, irreverence, fragmentation, and reflexivity, an interesting question is raised with regard to the media prankster’s routine practice of iconoclastic, carnivalesque behaviour. This question of subversion built into the mainstream will be more closely considered in the forthcoming Methods and Analysis chapter, where issues of the shaping of mainstream broadcast discourse by traditions once considered voices of opposition and inversion will be examined in greater detail.
II. The liminal
Another helpful way of framing the phenomenon of the media prankster is by applying to it the concept of ‘liminality’. The idea derives from the work of anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, who shared a scholarly interest in the developmental stages of mankind and ‘rites of passage’ (a term of van Gennep’s coinage). The term ‘liminal’ refers to the staking out of a ‘betwixt and between’ space in which the subject has one foot in the world of childhood, foolishness and uncertainty, and the other in the world of adulthood, seriousness, and the accepted conventions of society. That media coverage of the media pranksters has invariably made allusions to their juvenile behaviour, infantile humour, and general immaturity, all paradoxically stemming from the body of a grown man, provides a case in point for life in the limen, or margin.
In this way liminality provides a very useful way of thinking about the media prankster. The space he occupies is ‘betwixt and between’ in a number of ways: between the amateur and the professional, between the ridiculous and the rational, between the childlike and the mature, between the artistic and the aberrant. Moving away from the structuralist grid of binary oppositions, Turner emphasises that the liminal character is not merely exhibiting binary differences, but is an intentionally ambiguous character, leaving it to us to determine whether his intentions are to negate, agitate, or simply play.
In the chapter ‘Betwixt and Between’ in The Forest of Symbols (1967), Turner elaborates on van Gennep’s designation of the tripartite structure of rites of passage. These three stages are separation, margin, and aggregation. Turner writes of “…the intervening liminal period [in which] the state of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) is ambiguous; he passes through a realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state.” Arguably, the liminal character has attributes from both states, past and forthcoming, though perhaps unbeknownst to him. Not unlike the impetuous teenager testing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, the media prankster has one foot positioned in the world of media structure and privilege while keeping the other in the world of free association and childhood whimsy.
III. The ludic
A third and related way of classifying the literature applicable to the study of cultural trickery is to conceive of the prank as a ludic interlude. Deriving from the Latin ludere, meaning to play, ludic activity is a key feature of carnival as well as of subcultural theory, particularly that which deals with sharply contrasting notions of work and play. Interestingly, the term ‘ludicrous’, which we now take to mean ridiculous, is directly etymologically related to ludere, indicating a clear evolution of a cultural value judgement related to purely pleasurable activities.
Subcultural theorist Jock Young (1971) has conducted some of the most significant work to date on the subterranean values of work and play. He characterises work and play as inhabiting two discrete worlds which symbolize binary oppositions; i.e. that which is work is defined by its ‘unplayfulness’, and that which is play is defined by its ‘unworklike’ quality. While the notions of work and play are central in a consideration of the media prankster, it is important to note an inherent weakness in Young’s theory. Specifically, he does not account for a situation in which work and play may commingle, complement each other, and create a new route to subversion from within. The fused work/play of the media prankster is a prime example of such commingling, with subterranean values brought into the workaday world, and elements of work structure imposed on the activity of play. Young defines the subterranean behaviour of play as that which is a hedonistic, cathartic expression of ego identity, as an end in itself. While it could be argued that the prank for prank’s sake is occasionally what the media prankster’s ‘work’ is about, thinking about the product created by the media prankster simply as play is problematic. By creating a pastiche of the media personality convincing enough to fool most onlookers, the media prankster’s ludic performances successfully encroach on the world of work, redefining both work and play in the process.
Young also references the Freudian distinction between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, and how the deferred gratification of the latter suggests a necessary stage of maturation, where one leaves behind the selfishness and indulgence of pleasure and play for social responsibility. These theories, too, are interesting to consider in light of the media prankster and his amalgamation of the principles of pleasure, reality, work, and play. What is pleasurable for the prankster, providing gratification and ego-expression, is being encased in the identity of a media professional’s ‘work’, and as such is being read as work by those duped by the skilled prankster.
Consider also de Certeau’s (1984) contribution to the conceptualisation of work and play. He calls our attention to la perruque, an apparently widespread practice in the workplace in modern day France. de Certeau defines la perruque as “…the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer”. Creative time-wasting, or creative time-poaching is what de Certeau alludes to, and in so doing expands our interpretation of the boundaries of work and work time. Thus the private is merged with the public, and the serious with the playful. In this way la perruque informs the sphere-colliding, protocol-defying actions of the media prankster, presenting a way to think about simultaneous work and play that structuralist (and much subcultural) theory does not. The problematic area is no longer the distinction between work and play or the melding of the two, but whether or not an everyday action can be viewed as resistant, by the very virtue of its ‘everydayness’.
IV. The synthetic
The single most valuable piece of writing from media studies relevant to the consideration of construction of the media personality is Andrew Tolson’s essay “Televised Chat and the Synthetic Personality” (in Scannell, 1991). Tolson focuses in on a phenomenon he calls ‘synthetic personality’ as a new site of subversion. Tolson uses the concept of synthetic personality to describe increasingly artificially-constituted media personalities. In his article he points to such 1980s media curiousities as Dame Edna Everage -- a gaudy, over-the-top, theatrical ‘dame’ of the stage played by Australian comic actor Barry Humphries -- but synthetic personality is a term that applies equally well to the contemporary media prankster. Any time there is an interplay of multiple identities and premises, it is safe to say a synthetic media personality exists. Tolson sees the synthetic media personality as emblematic of the ‘postpopulist’turn in the public sphere of broadcasting. What was once a linear, authority-based transmitter of messages has shifted toward a mode of plurality, artifice, and subtext.
It is therefore worthwhile to consider the challenges inherent in the reading of the synthetic media personality, specifically the sophisticated decoding mechanisms required to read seemingly contradictory layers of text. Meyrowitz' (1985) work on the overlapping of previously discrete spheres and the subsequent emergence of new identities proves helpful in this regard. Of particular interest to one considering synthetic aspects of today’s media personalities are Meyrowitz’s observations on the blending and blurring of the public and the private, and of childhood and adulthood. Of the media pranksters being analysed in this dissertation, all four exhibit ‘man-child’ characteristics, whether in style of dress, speech, attitude, or mannerism, as well as a blending of private and public spheres through the interweaving of fictitious and factual narratives.
Although further empirical investigation is required into how synthetic media personalities are being read (and if/how these readings are changing over time), it should be noted that as recently as January 2000, seriously discrepant readings of the synthetic media personality were being made. In this particular case the debate was over the racial and ethnic ambiguities present in the Ali G character, an admittedly tricky pastiche of Black, Asian, and White youth culture. Ten years earlier, and without the weight of considerations of ethnicity and race, Scannell (1991) observed that a group American exchange students, upon first viewing The Dame Edna Experience on British television, were unable to make any sense whatsoever of the proceedings. The juxtaposition of fact and fiction, of satire and truth, combined with the significantly divergent comic sensibilities of the Americans and the Australians, led to a completely confused reading. Where at one time uncertainty or instability of identity would have been viewed as a communicative failure, it now seems that the more intricate the personality construction, the more compelling the communicative message, regardless of any controversy or misunderstandings that may accompany the situation. That the reading of the synthetic media personality is not singularly-inflected is likely to be considered a feature, not a flaw, by its creators.
To conclude, there are a number of valuable points to consider from Tolson’s work, some which point to similarities, others which point to major differences, between the synthetic personality and the media prankster. Of particular importance is Tolson’s reference to the appearance of a ‘highly self-reflexive metadiscourse about television as a cultural institution’ evidenced by the awareness on the part of both interviewer and interviewee that what they are participating in and creating is in fact a performance. While this may have been the case with synthetic personalities of the 1980s such as Dame Edna and Max Headroom whose interviewees were in on the joke, it is usually not the case with the current lot of media pranksters.
In addition to concocting a synthetic media personality, their modus operandusis to badger interviewees with almost painfully ignorant and/or transgressive questions, then watch the interviewees squirm, joust, or attack. Still, Tolson’s point about the reflexivity of the metadiscourse evidenced in television talk is well taken, though to update his observation it should be added that the emergence of a more complex synthetic personality in the media prankster has called for the creation and circulation of a more refractory metadiscourse. Such a shift is evidenced in the move away from the generally good-natured but innuendo-laden verbal banter that typified the language of the television chat show in the 1980s, to the more adversarial, celebrity-mocking form of broadcast talk used by the media pranksters.
V. Where the narcissistic and the spectacular meet the prankster
Douglas Kellner (1995) foresaw a major turn in popular culture with his writing on the incorporation of the irreverent and transgressive into established orders of media meaning. His discussion of the early 1990s broadcast talk/media discourse exemplified by Beavis and Butthead and American radio ‘shock jock’ Howard Stern points to an interesting correlation between these figures and the media prankster. Kellner refers to the ‘narcissism and sociopathic behaviour’ of the aforementioned cartoon world characters and the real world Mr. Stern and offers the following analysis. “It is indeed curious that many of the most popular media culture figures could easily be clinically diagnosed and analysed as narcissistic: Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Dice Clay, Howard Stern, and other[s]…[they] resort to extreme behaviour and assertions to call attention to themselves…These figures are basically buffoons, sometimes entertaining and often offensive.”
Susan J. Douglas (1999) proffers further insight into the embryonic stages of the narcissistic media personality. Referring to the genre of American radio helmed by radio announcers with extreme social and political views, Douglas writes: “Growing at first out of the bitterness of political and economic alienation of the late 1970s and 1980s, some talk radio – especially the versions offered by [Howard] Stern and [Don] Imus – was a rebellion against civilisation…against bourgeois codes of decorum that have sought to silence and tame the iconoclastic, delinquent, and defiant impulses in which adolescent boys especially seem to revel and delight...There was a place – an important place – for disobedience, hedonism, disrespect, and bad taste.” At the same moment vulgarity and insolence were being championed on American radio, ‘trash TV’ -- sensationalistic, tabloidesque, and crude – was also increasing in popularity. Twitchell (1992) offers the following explanation for the phenomena: “As the economics of mass production give greater access to those previously excluded…the young, the unsophisticated, and the aggressive…the stories demanded and produced become progressively more crude and vulgar…Carnival time starts.”
Picking up on the widespread carnival spirit in media narratives, Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) introduce their concept of ‘spectacle & narcissism’. To them, the media and everyday life have become so closely interwoven that they are almost inseparable, making contemporary society an essentially performative society. Moreover, Abercrombie and Longhurst import the Debordian notion of spectacle as “…capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image" and merge it with such postmodern preoccupations as style over substance, fragmentation of subject and object, and the instability of identities. In so doing, the two provide another vantage point from which we can ponder issues of cultural production and reproduction as they pertain to the media prankster. By partnering spectacle with narcissism, Abercrombie and Longhurst present a complete circuit that offers a reasonable explanation for today’s protocol-defying, boundary-insensitive prankster figures.
Furthermore, if narcissism is to be seen more as a widely diffused cultural condition and not a personality disorder, then the behaviour and performances of the media prankster make sense as expressions of this cultural condition. In turn, the sideshow-like atmosphere which had became commonplace in the North American media during the 1980s and 1990s assists us in positioning the media prankster along a trajectory of ‘boys behaving badly’. The media prankster is unique for bringing to broadcast discourse elements of the evolving genre of synthetic personality chat identified by Tolson (1991), aspects of the happily juvenile and abrasive media personalities of the 1980s and 1990s alluded to by Kellner (1995) and Douglas (1999), and manifestations of the spectacle and narcissism described by Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998). Now into the third decade of living in an atmosphere in which defiant and disobedient media personalities are embedded, few resistant forms of broadcast talk remain. Perhaps this would explain why counter-hegemonic forces within popular culture no longer seem able to hijack the hegemonic, but instead intermingle with it, thus carving out a high profile space for oppositional voices such as that of the transgressive media personality. The next chapter of this dissertation will pay closer attention to the subject of popular culture’s co-optation of elements once considered resistant, and assess the impact of this cultural turn on conceptualizations of media personality and broadcast protocol.
Using Bakhtin’s framework as a base, along with that of such culturally subversive movements as Dadaism, Situationism, and punk, a central objective of this essay is to illustrate how the media prankster, not unlike the historical fool or jester figure, hides behind a façade of feigned ignorance and naivete to illuminate the comical and contradictory in official discourses.
I. Carnival
Though the media prankster is certainly a media phenomenon, the most relevant theoretical work appears to reside in the notion of the carnivalesque, a term derived from the field of literary criticism, and coined by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin theorises the carnivalesque as a way of understanding ceremonies of transgression, opposition, reversal, and renewal, all of which are intended to lift societal constraints and upset norms and power relations. All notions of absolute truth, authority, and dogma are put into suspension when viewed from the standpoint of Bakhtinian carnival.
Moving Bakhtin’s ideas from the literary world to a larger cultural studies grid, postmodern theorist John Docker has correlated such characters of carnival culture as the rogue, the clown, the fool, and the crank to “…figures who parody conventionality at the same time as they parody themselves and their own claims to truth.” Here we find a direct link to the current crop of media pranksters, whose work challenges what previously was an implicit trust between television viewer and television audience, and is now a multiply-inflected, highly subtextual form of communication. Indeed, as John Fiske has stated in a chapter entitled ‘Carnival and Style’ (Fiske, 1987), “allowing the viewer to be ‘in the know’ and to participate in the joke reverses the power relations involved in watching normal television…” The inversion of power relations is certainly one of the key issues under consideration when correlating the carnivalesque to the contemporary media prankster. It is therefore worth considering the characterisation of carnival as inimical to the existing power structures, as has been done by Bakhtin biographers Clark and Holquist. “Carnival is a gap in the fabric of society, and since the dominant ideology seeks to author the social order as a unified text, fixed, complete, and forever, carnival is a threat.”
This tradition of carnivalesque trickery provides a useful analogy for the phenomenon of the media prankster. As an inhabitant of the mundus inversus -- the upside down dimension of a right side up world -- the carnivalesque character stakes out his territory by opposing and defying the norms and standards of the day. Fast forward several centuries and we find a character who is clearly closely related to carnivalesque characters, but not as easy to situate theoretically. While we find many of the traits of his carnivalesque ancestors in the media prankster, the softness of boundaries currently existing between the mainstream and the oppositional makes it difficult to ascertain if the media prankster represents inversion from within, or inversion from without.
On this critical point of inversion, I turn to the work of anthropologist Barbara Babcock (1978). Several years before the notion of the carnivalesque became fashionable in cultural studies circles, she displayed interest in acts of ‘symbolic inversion’, defining them as
“…expressive behaviour which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion represents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values, and norms”. Babcock urges us not to make the mistake of conceiving of such inversions as activities taking place on the subcultural sidelines, affecting only the select few. “What is socially peripheral is often symbolically central”, writes Babcock, and it is in this spirit that the significance of a genus of media personality born on the symbolic sidelines of mainstream media discourse and now influencing its broader language is being considered.
The socially liberating properties of symbolic inversions, as well as their facilitation of reflexive points of view with regard to a society’s culture and practices, are at the core of their ability to exert influence. Whereas functional anthropologists have tended to view the symbolic inversions of carnival time as a site for the venting of accumulated tensions, Abrahams and Bauman (in Babcock, 1978): propose a different role: “far from constituting events that have hostility and conflict as their organising principle, carnival…appear[s] to…draw together opposing elements”. By proposing this more integrative model of carnival, the theories of Babcock, Abrahams, and Bauman encourage the conceptualisation of carnival as a constructive social and cultural activity, thus opening the door to the possibility that carnival possesses a value beyond its status as an occasional cultural event.
Suppose for a moment we frame our analysis of the media prankster within the context of carnival not as relegated to ceremonies that occur only on specified days of the year, but as a kind of constant carnival. While such a designation may just be another way of expressing the omnipresence of such features of postmodern existence as irony, irreverence, fragmentation, and reflexivity, an interesting question is raised with regard to the media prankster’s routine practice of iconoclastic, carnivalesque behaviour. This question of subversion built into the mainstream will be more closely considered in the forthcoming Methods and Analysis chapter, where issues of the shaping of mainstream broadcast discourse by traditions once considered voices of opposition and inversion will be examined in greater detail.
II. The liminal
Another helpful way of framing the phenomenon of the media prankster is by applying to it the concept of ‘liminality’. The idea derives from the work of anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, who shared a scholarly interest in the developmental stages of mankind and ‘rites of passage’ (a term of van Gennep’s coinage). The term ‘liminal’ refers to the staking out of a ‘betwixt and between’ space in which the subject has one foot in the world of childhood, foolishness and uncertainty, and the other in the world of adulthood, seriousness, and the accepted conventions of society. That media coverage of the media pranksters has invariably made allusions to their juvenile behaviour, infantile humour, and general immaturity, all paradoxically stemming from the body of a grown man, provides a case in point for life in the limen, or margin.
In this way liminality provides a very useful way of thinking about the media prankster. The space he occupies is ‘betwixt and between’ in a number of ways: between the amateur and the professional, between the ridiculous and the rational, between the childlike and the mature, between the artistic and the aberrant. Moving away from the structuralist grid of binary oppositions, Turner emphasises that the liminal character is not merely exhibiting binary differences, but is an intentionally ambiguous character, leaving it to us to determine whether his intentions are to negate, agitate, or simply play.
In the chapter ‘Betwixt and Between’ in The Forest of Symbols (1967), Turner elaborates on van Gennep’s designation of the tripartite structure of rites of passage. These three stages are separation, margin, and aggregation. Turner writes of “…the intervening liminal period [in which] the state of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) is ambiguous; he passes through a realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state.” Arguably, the liminal character has attributes from both states, past and forthcoming, though perhaps unbeknownst to him. Not unlike the impetuous teenager testing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, the media prankster has one foot positioned in the world of media structure and privilege while keeping the other in the world of free association and childhood whimsy.
III. The ludic
A third and related way of classifying the literature applicable to the study of cultural trickery is to conceive of the prank as a ludic interlude. Deriving from the Latin ludere, meaning to play, ludic activity is a key feature of carnival as well as of subcultural theory, particularly that which deals with sharply contrasting notions of work and play. Interestingly, the term ‘ludicrous’, which we now take to mean ridiculous, is directly etymologically related to ludere, indicating a clear evolution of a cultural value judgement related to purely pleasurable activities.
Subcultural theorist Jock Young (1971) has conducted some of the most significant work to date on the subterranean values of work and play. He characterises work and play as inhabiting two discrete worlds which symbolize binary oppositions; i.e. that which is work is defined by its ‘unplayfulness’, and that which is play is defined by its ‘unworklike’ quality. While the notions of work and play are central in a consideration of the media prankster, it is important to note an inherent weakness in Young’s theory. Specifically, he does not account for a situation in which work and play may commingle, complement each other, and create a new route to subversion from within. The fused work/play of the media prankster is a prime example of such commingling, with subterranean values brought into the workaday world, and elements of work structure imposed on the activity of play. Young defines the subterranean behaviour of play as that which is a hedonistic, cathartic expression of ego identity, as an end in itself. While it could be argued that the prank for prank’s sake is occasionally what the media prankster’s ‘work’ is about, thinking about the product created by the media prankster simply as play is problematic. By creating a pastiche of the media personality convincing enough to fool most onlookers, the media prankster’s ludic performances successfully encroach on the world of work, redefining both work and play in the process.
Young also references the Freudian distinction between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, and how the deferred gratification of the latter suggests a necessary stage of maturation, where one leaves behind the selfishness and indulgence of pleasure and play for social responsibility. These theories, too, are interesting to consider in light of the media prankster and his amalgamation of the principles of pleasure, reality, work, and play. What is pleasurable for the prankster, providing gratification and ego-expression, is being encased in the identity of a media professional’s ‘work’, and as such is being read as work by those duped by the skilled prankster.
Consider also de Certeau’s (1984) contribution to the conceptualisation of work and play. He calls our attention to la perruque, an apparently widespread practice in the workplace in modern day France. de Certeau defines la perruque as “…the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer”. Creative time-wasting, or creative time-poaching is what de Certeau alludes to, and in so doing expands our interpretation of the boundaries of work and work time. Thus the private is merged with the public, and the serious with the playful. In this way la perruque informs the sphere-colliding, protocol-defying actions of the media prankster, presenting a way to think about simultaneous work and play that structuralist (and much subcultural) theory does not. The problematic area is no longer the distinction between work and play or the melding of the two, but whether or not an everyday action can be viewed as resistant, by the very virtue of its ‘everydayness’.
IV. The synthetic
The single most valuable piece of writing from media studies relevant to the consideration of construction of the media personality is Andrew Tolson’s essay “Televised Chat and the Synthetic Personality” (in Scannell, 1991). Tolson focuses in on a phenomenon he calls ‘synthetic personality’ as a new site of subversion. Tolson uses the concept of synthetic personality to describe increasingly artificially-constituted media personalities. In his article he points to such 1980s media curiousities as Dame Edna Everage -- a gaudy, over-the-top, theatrical ‘dame’ of the stage played by Australian comic actor Barry Humphries -- but synthetic personality is a term that applies equally well to the contemporary media prankster. Any time there is an interplay of multiple identities and premises, it is safe to say a synthetic media personality exists. Tolson sees the synthetic media personality as emblematic of the ‘postpopulist’turn in the public sphere of broadcasting. What was once a linear, authority-based transmitter of messages has shifted toward a mode of plurality, artifice, and subtext.
It is therefore worthwhile to consider the challenges inherent in the reading of the synthetic media personality, specifically the sophisticated decoding mechanisms required to read seemingly contradictory layers of text. Meyrowitz' (1985) work on the overlapping of previously discrete spheres and the subsequent emergence of new identities proves helpful in this regard. Of particular interest to one considering synthetic aspects of today’s media personalities are Meyrowitz’s observations on the blending and blurring of the public and the private, and of childhood and adulthood. Of the media pranksters being analysed in this dissertation, all four exhibit ‘man-child’ characteristics, whether in style of dress, speech, attitude, or mannerism, as well as a blending of private and public spheres through the interweaving of fictitious and factual narratives.
Although further empirical investigation is required into how synthetic media personalities are being read (and if/how these readings are changing over time), it should be noted that as recently as January 2000, seriously discrepant readings of the synthetic media personality were being made. In this particular case the debate was over the racial and ethnic ambiguities present in the Ali G character, an admittedly tricky pastiche of Black, Asian, and White youth culture. Ten years earlier, and without the weight of considerations of ethnicity and race, Scannell (1991) observed that a group American exchange students, upon first viewing The Dame Edna Experience on British television, were unable to make any sense whatsoever of the proceedings. The juxtaposition of fact and fiction, of satire and truth, combined with the significantly divergent comic sensibilities of the Americans and the Australians, led to a completely confused reading. Where at one time uncertainty or instability of identity would have been viewed as a communicative failure, it now seems that the more intricate the personality construction, the more compelling the communicative message, regardless of any controversy or misunderstandings that may accompany the situation. That the reading of the synthetic media personality is not singularly-inflected is likely to be considered a feature, not a flaw, by its creators.
To conclude, there are a number of valuable points to consider from Tolson’s work, some which point to similarities, others which point to major differences, between the synthetic personality and the media prankster. Of particular importance is Tolson’s reference to the appearance of a ‘highly self-reflexive metadiscourse about television as a cultural institution’ evidenced by the awareness on the part of both interviewer and interviewee that what they are participating in and creating is in fact a performance. While this may have been the case with synthetic personalities of the 1980s such as Dame Edna and Max Headroom whose interviewees were in on the joke, it is usually not the case with the current lot of media pranksters.
In addition to concocting a synthetic media personality, their modus operandusis to badger interviewees with almost painfully ignorant and/or transgressive questions, then watch the interviewees squirm, joust, or attack. Still, Tolson’s point about the reflexivity of the metadiscourse evidenced in television talk is well taken, though to update his observation it should be added that the emergence of a more complex synthetic personality in the media prankster has called for the creation and circulation of a more refractory metadiscourse. Such a shift is evidenced in the move away from the generally good-natured but innuendo-laden verbal banter that typified the language of the television chat show in the 1980s, to the more adversarial, celebrity-mocking form of broadcast talk used by the media pranksters.
V. Where the narcissistic and the spectacular meet the prankster
Douglas Kellner (1995) foresaw a major turn in popular culture with his writing on the incorporation of the irreverent and transgressive into established orders of media meaning. His discussion of the early 1990s broadcast talk/media discourse exemplified by Beavis and Butthead and American radio ‘shock jock’ Howard Stern points to an interesting correlation between these figures and the media prankster. Kellner refers to the ‘narcissism and sociopathic behaviour’ of the aforementioned cartoon world characters and the real world Mr. Stern and offers the following analysis. “It is indeed curious that many of the most popular media culture figures could easily be clinically diagnosed and analysed as narcissistic: Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Dice Clay, Howard Stern, and other[s]…[they] resort to extreme behaviour and assertions to call attention to themselves…These figures are basically buffoons, sometimes entertaining and often offensive.”
Susan J. Douglas (1999) proffers further insight into the embryonic stages of the narcissistic media personality. Referring to the genre of American radio helmed by radio announcers with extreme social and political views, Douglas writes: “Growing at first out of the bitterness of political and economic alienation of the late 1970s and 1980s, some talk radio – especially the versions offered by [Howard] Stern and [Don] Imus – was a rebellion against civilisation…against bourgeois codes of decorum that have sought to silence and tame the iconoclastic, delinquent, and defiant impulses in which adolescent boys especially seem to revel and delight...There was a place – an important place – for disobedience, hedonism, disrespect, and bad taste.” At the same moment vulgarity and insolence were being championed on American radio, ‘trash TV’ -- sensationalistic, tabloidesque, and crude – was also increasing in popularity. Twitchell (1992) offers the following explanation for the phenomena: “As the economics of mass production give greater access to those previously excluded…the young, the unsophisticated, and the aggressive…the stories demanded and produced become progressively more crude and vulgar…Carnival time starts.”
Picking up on the widespread carnival spirit in media narratives, Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) introduce their concept of ‘spectacle & narcissism’. To them, the media and everyday life have become so closely interwoven that they are almost inseparable, making contemporary society an essentially performative society. Moreover, Abercrombie and Longhurst import the Debordian notion of spectacle as “…capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image" and merge it with such postmodern preoccupations as style over substance, fragmentation of subject and object, and the instability of identities. In so doing, the two provide another vantage point from which we can ponder issues of cultural production and reproduction as they pertain to the media prankster. By partnering spectacle with narcissism, Abercrombie and Longhurst present a complete circuit that offers a reasonable explanation for today’s protocol-defying, boundary-insensitive prankster figures.
Furthermore, if narcissism is to be seen more as a widely diffused cultural condition and not a personality disorder, then the behaviour and performances of the media prankster make sense as expressions of this cultural condition. In turn, the sideshow-like atmosphere which had became commonplace in the North American media during the 1980s and 1990s assists us in positioning the media prankster along a trajectory of ‘boys behaving badly’. The media prankster is unique for bringing to broadcast discourse elements of the evolving genre of synthetic personality chat identified by Tolson (1991), aspects of the happily juvenile and abrasive media personalities of the 1980s and 1990s alluded to by Kellner (1995) and Douglas (1999), and manifestations of the spectacle and narcissism described by Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998). Now into the third decade of living in an atmosphere in which defiant and disobedient media personalities are embedded, few resistant forms of broadcast talk remain. Perhaps this would explain why counter-hegemonic forces within popular culture no longer seem able to hijack the hegemonic, but instead intermingle with it, thus carving out a high profile space for oppositional voices such as that of the transgressive media personality. The next chapter of this dissertation will pay closer attention to the subject of popular culture’s co-optation of elements once considered resistant, and assess the impact of this cultural turn on conceptualizations of media personality and broadcast protocol.
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