The Dominion - comedy

Gerald Ford

dru — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 13:33:59 +0000

Here's Dana Carvey doing Tom Brokaw covering Gerald Ford's death in 1996.

Yes Means No!

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 21:38:21 +0000

The Yes Men dish up artistic critique to straight-faced corporate audiences

Yes-man Andy pitches his golden “leisure suit” control centre to textile executives. Visit the Yes Men website.

Batman and Robin have been replaced. Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano have updated crime fighting to fit the times: they steal the identities of the rich and deliver crap burgers to the poor. They call themselves the Yes Men and they have been making some of the freshest, most effective art I’ve ever seen.

The Yes Men started out as an unanticipated addition to their Web site, GATT.org., which is a parody of the World Trade Organization's main Web site. As a result, unobservant people looking to contact representatives of the WTO for public appearances reached the Yes Men instead. And the Yes Men gave them exactly what they wanted: two men in business attire delivering PowerPoint presentations and debates expounding the benefits of an ultra-capitalist world economy.

They state: "Small-time criminals impersonate honest people in order to steal their money. Targets are ordinary folks whose ID numbers fell into the wrong hands. Honest people impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else."

In Tampere, Finland, Andy posed as the intended speaker and delivered the keynote address originally intended for GSO textiles representative Hank Hardy Unruh. He claimed that the American Civil War was history's most unprofitable and avoidable war, since slave labour would have eventually and naturally been replaced by cheap sweatshop labour. Andy delivered the lecture wearing a gold unitard "leisure suit," complete with a giant inflatable penis containing a monitor for the control of remote workers. The audience was polite and asked no questions.

In fact, even the most uncompromisingly fascist statements made by the Yes Men in various presentations received little more than well-bred applause. Despite a presentation about selling votes to the highest bidder, a petition to expedite the onset of global warming, and a comment during a debate about how private education will cause the children of anti-globalization protesters to think along the lines of the WTO, no mouths dropped. It seems that political rhetoric, especially in North America, has become perverted so that even an outright call for dictatorship, couched in appropriate corporate lingo, is accepted in stride. Mike and Andy set out to shock their audiences with the WTO's uncensored ideology, but instead were shocked themselves when audience members revealed their Orwellian acceptance.

The only presentation that was heard rather than swallowed by audiences was delivered to a group of economic students in Plattsburg, New York. The crux of the presentation was the WTO's partnership with MacDonald's to end world hunger by recycling Western consumers' feces into new burgers in developing nations. The students recognized the idea as racist, classist and disgusting. The session ended with the budding economists throwing things at the Yes Men. The Yes Men were proud.

In most cases, the Yes Men reveal their "true" identities in press releases following public appearances. After an address in Sydney, Australia, in which Andy informed a roomful of reporters that the WTO had decided to disband because it was doing more harm than good, several thousand notices went to media all over the world. Alliance MP John Duncan even brought the WTO's "newest development" to the floor in Parliament.

Mike Bonnano is a professor of Tactical Art Media in the United States. He has been performing his Identity Correction interventions since the 1990's. An earlier "piece" you might remember was the 1993 Barbie Liberation Organization, in which the BLO bought three hundred talking Barbies and G.I. Joes and switched their voice boxes. On Christmas day, youngsters found their Barbies saying "Dead men don't tell lies," and their G.I. Joe's confessing, "I love to shop!" If the goal of art is to reach the viewer in such as way as to prompt new thoughts and initiate change, then this type of interventionist performance is perhaps the most effective art form currently in use. Most art "sits on its ass in a gallery" and preaches to the converted, whereas the Yes Men present their work to the general public where political art is most needed. This type of art is like an interactive form of graffiti.

Their current target for Identity Correction is, appropriately, the Bush administration, an administration that solicits its support mainly through words and presentations (not to mention tax cuts). The spoof Web site accompanying the campaign against Bush is www.GWBush.com, with the tag line "drug free since 1974." As in their WTO presentations, the rhetoric on their Web sites is not easily identified as parody, since much of the language employed by international businessmen and politicians is empty of real meaning (for example, the concept of pre-emptive self-defense). In a press conference, George W. Bush responded to a question about the Web site by saying "There should be limits to freedom." It seems that the Yes Men are already scripting for the President of the United States.

Many of the Yes Men's adventures and appearances are well-documented on their Web site, www.theyesmen.org. They have also been featured in a new film called The Yes Men, directed by Dan Olman, Sarah Price, and Chris Smith, whose previous credits include the 1999 Sundance Winner American Movie. The film has been viewed by audiences in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, as well as those in a number of American cities. If you are able to catch the film, please do - it is both hilarious and deeply disturbing; my favourite artistic combination.

When international gatherings of corporate executives (mistakenly) ask the Yes Men to be their keynote speakers, they are only too happy to oblige. Max Liboiron watches the results.

Satire Under Attack

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 05:02:00 +0000

When looking silly is worse than looking evil

Promotional photo for A New War by Gim Hope.

Webster's Dictionary credits literature as the traditional medium to use "trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm to expose and discredit vice or folly." Yet in today's multimedia world, satire has entered the mainstream via theatre, television, music, newspaper cartoons, radio, and the internet. Satire is an important tool for those frustrated by the corporate, sponsorship, and political agendas mixed up in their media. The Toronto Star notes that "Satire is being used by a hungry young generation as a way around the converged mainstream news media -- which often no longer serve as watchdogs."

In Canada and around the world, playwrights and webmasters are the leaders in providing an international audience with new sources of satire. RealStupidNews.com, PaulMartinTime.ca, and TheSweatShopNews.com are all recent satirical e-media sites. A Weapons Inspector Calls, by Justin Butcher (also playwright of The Madness of George Dubaya), A New War, by Gip Hoppe and Right as Ron by Judd Bloch are brand-new plays hitting theaters around the world. Both mediums are receiving their share of flack.

In the arts and in the growing satirical news genre, lines are being drawn by those whose vice or folly are the subject of unwanted wit: PaulMartinTime.ca received threats of lawsuit; Right as Ron has been denounced by the Smart family, whose family history the play satirizes.

Roy Clarke, a Zambia resident of 40 years and Post newspaper employee, is, as of January 6, awaiting the judicial review of the deportation order issued following one of his recent news columns. The piece used jungle animals to satirize a corrupt government. The Telegraph in Clarke's country of origin, Britain, notes that "charges of racism against him are unconvincing, not least because he has been married to a leading black Zambian women rights campaigner, Sara Longwe, for 35 years."

"I have been writing the column for around seven years now and what puzzles me is that this latest piece does not differ greatly in form, style, or content from what I have written before," Roy Clarke said.

Two weeks ago in Mumbai, India, playwright Kedar Shinde's TV satire prodding Deputy Chief Minister Chhagan Bhujbal's alleged scam role was aired. In indignant solidarity with Bhujbal, a group of workers belonging to the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) attacked Zee TV's offices and employees. Although he has previously been pressured to resign for many reasons (such as the very dealings being parodied), it was this act of violence on his behalf which finally prompted his resignation "on moral grounds." The Mid-Day Mumbai is hailing the sketch as the "the TV satire that brought Bhujbal down," and its sequel has already aired.

In Texas, "Stop the Madness" is on trial for the third time, now in the Supreme Court. In this mock article, printed November 11, 1999, by the Dallas Observer, a six-year-old girl is arrested for the "terroristic threat" of her report on the picture book Where The Wild Things Are. Fake quotations were attributed to two genuine public officials, court-at-law judge Darlene Whitten and her husband, district attorney Bruce Isaacks, who have taken the paper to court.

The main problem according to Whitten and Isaacks is that the parody could be confused with reality. But when reality can become so bogus and illogical as to be mistaken for farce (with false quotations like "It's time for you to grow up, young lady, and it's time for us to stop treating kids like children"), the problem isn't copyright or liability. It's the panicked and hypocritically illogical power being parodied in the first place.

When looking silly is worse than looking evil
Webster's Dictionary credits literature as the traditional medium to use "trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm to expose and discredit vice or folly." Yet in today's multimedia world, satire has entered the mainstream via theatre, television, music, newspaper cartoons, radio, and the internet. Satire is an important tool for those frustrated by the corporate, sponsorship, and political agendas mixed up in their media.- by Jane Henderson and Max Liboiron -