Of course this was a very different time and pretty much everything about the media landscape has changed in the intervening years. However -- I think there are still some thought provoking chunks here, particularly in the context of phenomena that live on the inside of 'the system' vs. those that live on the outside of 'the system' and how no gatekeeper platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and SoundCloud erased those divisions at first, and over time (as often happens) have become integrated into the commercial backbone of the media and advertising industries. Let's get this vintage media studies party started then.
Chapter 1 / Introduction
- Taken from the box of Very Important Pennis: Uncut, featuring celebrity ego assassin Dennis Pennis
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| Source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246354/ |
Dennis Pennis doesn't exist anymore. In a way he never did. He was the construct of British comic actor Paul Kaye, a character Kaye created, through which he merged a new hybrid of journalism, comedy, and rebellious attitude. As of yet this confluent form has gone unnamed, but with the emergence of a number of these characters in various locales around the world, it appears we are witnessing the emergence of a distinct genre of media personality and broadcast discourse. This phenomenon will hereinafter be referred to as the 'media prankster'.
Though the media pranksters examined in this dissertation differ from one another in several critical ways, part of the argument I wish to make with this work is that particular characteristics common to all of them point to the emergence of a new species of media personality, one which has not yet received academic attention. What binds these characters together is a collective skepticism toward notions of media authority, professionalism, and authenticity. Whereas media personalities once exhibited role-modelling behaviour and spoke a language of limited discourse, the media prankster represents a rejection of the rule-governed world of officialdom and a move toward the incorporation of the counter-hegemonic and the vernacular into the general stream of broadcast discourse.
So what constitutes the media prankster? What sets him apart from other irreverent media personalities or even media ‘troublemakers’ or activists? Before the constituent parts of the media prankster can be more closely considered, it is important to clarify what the media prankster is not, as pranks involving the media take many forms, and the focus of this dissertation is on a particular character operating in a particular environment at a particular cultural moment. It is important, therefore, to emphasise that the agenda of the media prankster considered in this essay skews far more toward the comical and entertaining than the social or political. The distinction between pranksters and tricksters who use the media as a medium, but do so with a much more political message and activist agenda, and the media pranksters as referred to in this essay, is therefore key to establish at this juncture.
When considering the distinguishing features of this picaresque new breed of media personality, issues of media grammar and power come into play. Broadly speaking, the media prankster assumes a persona and appearance that, while inarguably peculiar and incongruous, possesses enough of the requisite features to be read as legitimate media personality. He presents himself as a media personality in the sense that most of us have come to understand and trust the media personality. This implied trust is predicated on media norms and conventions being read as significations of authority and truth. The question at hand thus becomes: what happens when this trust is betrayed, when the media encounter is inverted and subverted, with the foolish masquerading as the serious, the interviewee forced into the role of interviewer, and the implicit social contract of the situation is disavowed?
The borders of the relationship between the media personality and the subject have been repositioned by the appearance of this genus of character, calling for a new way of thinking about media personality and media discourse. To this end, the key research question being asked in this dissertation is: using which theoretical frameworks may we better understand the media prankster? The secondary research questions to be dealt with are: how is the protocol of communication and the media encounter being stretched and ultimately transgressed by the media prankster, and what are the effects of this violation? This essay seeks to illustrate the general broadening of media discourse initiated by the media prankster’s disruptive tactics, and to point to a new model of subversion. Rather than aim to undermine the existing authoritarian framework of the media, the media pranksters seem more intent on re-setting the parameters of what constitutes legitimate media, and placing their own celebrity and media-lampooning slant in the reshaped discourse.
Research into this topic revealed a significant number of examples of this yet- to-be-defined genre of media personality. It turned out that several countries boast variations on the media prankster theme. Whether it is Australia, Norway, or North America, it is possible locate a media personality variously playing the innocent, the jester, and the provocateur, wrapping himself in the sheath of media culture, while contravening its very rules. However, owing to the relative newness of the prankster phenomenon, and the fact that the object of most of media studies has been issues of reader and text, political economy, audience research, and more recently fan studies and celebrity culture, the field of inquiry known as media studies is not on its own particularly helpful in a consideration of the topic. Therefore, in this research I will be turning to such areas as anthropology, literary criticism, and various aspects of cultural studies theory in an attempt to better situate and understand this newly emerging persona.
This dissertation will present four case studies of the media prankster to illustrate these points, two from North America and two from the U.K. While these characters share a number of characteristics, the finer features of their respective styles suggest variations on a theme, which in turn suggests a certain depth to this cultural phenomenon. The prankster cannot be so simply understood that a single set of criteria suffice as an explanation. We need instead to consider the larger cultural circumstances surrounding the emergence of the media prankster, a creature (probably not coincidentally) spawned by a saturated media environment and a highly-ordered, technology-driven world. To this climate of control, organisation, and predictability the media prankster brings his own ideas, undoubtedly informed by such postmodern markers as irony, pastiche, parody, self-referentiality, simulation, and contradiction.
In North America we see this new breed of prankstering personality manifested in Tom Green of MTV’s The Tom Green Show. Green’s show, which has been airing on MTV since 1997 (prior to that for two years on Canada’s Comedy Network, preceded by two years on a local cable channel in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), has quickly become one of the most popular programs on the network. Also hailing from Canada, a less commercially successful but no less notorious practitioner of this strange new hybrid of journalism, comedy, and performance art is cable access/campus radio anti-star Nardwuar the Human Serviette. Breaking most of the rules of journalism, personal comportment, and basic human interaction, Nardwuar’s run as media prankster (1987-2000) is by far the longest of any of the characters examined in this essay. (Ed. Note: Nardwuar is now the happy beneficiary of a second life on YouTube, where, at the time of this post, he has 1.68 million subscribers and over 228 million views, placing him in the top 3% of all YouTube channels.)
In the U.K. the most high profile examples of the contemporary media prankster are Dennis Pennis (BBC 2, 1995-1997) and Ali G (Channel 4, 1999-2000). Pennis is best known for such television programmes as: VIP: Very Important Pennis, Pennis Uncut, Dennis Pennis RIP: Too Rude To Live, and Dennis Pennis’ Enormous Election, the latter being Mr. Pennis’ lateral move from the ridiculing of larger than life celebrities to the skewering of larger than life politicians. Ali G, the newest of the media pranksters, rose to prominence with the two minute segments he submitted to Channel 4’s 11 O’Clock Show, which featured the self-proclaimed ‘voice of yoof’ (sic) engaging in rapspeak-laced debates with spokespeople from law, medicine, the military, and assorted academic and political fields. In addition to regaling us with Ali G, the hip hop hero of indeterminate ethnic/racial background, Sacha Baron-Cohen, the comic actor who plays Ali G, has also created Borat, a Kazakhstani reporter on assignment in Great Britain. Both the Ali G and Borat characters will receive consideration in the methods and analysis segment of this essay, appearing in Chapter 4.
While an initial tendency may be to think about the media prankster as one who seeks to reveal the hypocrisy of polite society, serving as a kind of safety valve for societal constraints and providing binary oppositions to the accepted code of conduct, such a viewpoint would be selling the phenomenon short. With the boundaries of the mainstream constantly shifting to accommodate a multitude of cultural products and practices, to situate the now widely embraced media prankster in a subterranean zone of resistance would be inaccurate.
The aim of this essay, instead, is to place the media prankster in a theoretical framework that correlates his behaviour to a lineage of cultural tricksters as well as to new, more inclusive approaches to subcultural traditions of resistance and detournement. The literature review appearing in the next chapter will seek to accomplish this positioning by bringing together various strands of anthropological, subcultural, and cultural studies theory to formulate a rational universe for the media prankster.
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