welcome to: Pandemic finds & some serious thinking about pranks

I've been away from the blog for several months. You know how it is when a global pandemic hits. Your world gets thrown into disarray. Many activities are curtailed, many new activities emerge, like a distaste for wearing things without elastic waistbands and the idea that a shower 'every few days' is sort of kind of acceptable. And there's also the finally getting to the junk draw drawer and the opening up of long ignored boxes. My junk drawer is as junky as ever but I did manage to get to piles of university papers I've written over the years, from both undergrad and grad school days, which in my case were separated by 20 years. Among other papers, some dating back to the 1980s, I came across the dissertation I wrote in 1999/2000 in the M.A. Program in Media & Communications at University of London, Goldsmiths College, located in convivial New Cross, SE London.

Also found in the box: My students card, a 1999 Tube map,
and an attractive plastic wallet to hold the pass and the map

The paper carries the somewhat unwieldy academic title "Deride and Conquer: Situating the contemporary protocol-transgressing media personality or 'media prankster". In plain English that roughly translates to: "What happens, and why, when the vocabulary of pranks collide with the world of media?". And remember, this question was being mulled over 20+ years ago. What was the world like then? Well, Amazon was but a money-losing online bookseller, Google was a year-old startup founded by a couple of grad students, and in the mainstream media sphere the $182 billion Time Warner/AOL merger looked like a great idea.

I think we need to remind ourselves what this thing called media looked like at the time. It was largely conventional terrain, made up of a small number of large broadcast networks, the cable universe, a bit of community and campus TV and radio, photocopied zines, and a small number of activist organizations, of which the culture jamming Adbusters was probably the most high profile. Anyone interested in 'hacking' media norms had to do so either outside the landscape of conventional media or by using comedy or an acceptable level of weirdness as a kind of 'back door' into these structures. The Internet was dial up only and therefore limited in what it could carry in terms of audio and video and mobile phones were costly devices that could do little more than place calls. A different world indeed.

But back to the topic at hand. I've had a longstanding interest in if, how, and when the rational and the ridiculous run head first into each other. Sometimes by design, sometimes by accident, and usually with great comic effect. Anyone who's alive in 2020, however, knows that we're now on the other side of that cliff, with the post-fact world being the norm, and affordable, ubiquitous technologies enabling the billions around the world with smartphones to operate as content creators, distributors, and even outright propagandists. We now know that the super spreading behaviour that gave us viral videos has also given us today's couldn't-be-more-highly-polarized political landscape.

As for the dissertation, there are 5 chapters in all, each of a few thousand words, and I believe the desired word count for the whole dissertation was 20,000. This was one of I think 6 papers we had to write for the M.A., the others being 5-6000 word papers on a combination of required and elective courses.

Chapters of the dissertation will appear here on the blog as I work through the old word doc I found. I'll add links and videos, fix any 20 year old typos I happen to find and, as much as my patience permits, deal with wonky formatting issues that originated in 1999 when this paper was embarked upon.

Here's the table of contents, and as the chapters go live I will add the links to the numbered chapters below. As you can see there's a bunch of theory that has been brought to bear on the topic, because, as I have learned, being serious about the seemingly un-serious is serious business.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Putting the prankster in context
Chapter 2: Literature Review: Carnival pleasures: The liminal, the ludic, the synthetic, and the spectacular
Chapter 3: Normalization & neutralization vs. rebellion & resistance
Chapter 4: Methods & Analysis: Suffering the fools? The cases of media pranksters Ali G, Tom Green, Dennis Pennis, and Nardwuar the Human Serviette
Chapter 5: Some concluding thoughts on the media prankster

And to get you into the appropriate headspace, a few clips to get you started. First, a clip of a young Sacha Baron-Cohen, appearing on a Channel 4 (UK) show called The 11 O'Clock Show in 1998. It was seeing this show that led me down the path of doing a serious academic examination of 'counterfeit' media personalities. As you'll see below, the Ali G character was still in its formative stages, not yet the confounding blend of multi-ethnic suburban rapper that the world would come to know a few years later.

It's worth thinking about how a handful of years later, in 2005, comedian Stephen Colbert became satirical conservative pundit Stephen Colbert and ended up doing more than just crack wise and entertain us nightly for close to 10 years.

And more recently Eric Andre has taken the plunge into similar waters, setting out to make what he calls 'the world's worst talk show'. In such a scenario failure is the ultimate success, and success, defined in conventional terms, is the ultimate failure.