Jason A. Heidemann
SLIGHT OF HAM Improv Everywhere tricks us into liking its new book.
At a Starbucks in Manhattan, a young couple join the line for coffee and proceed to have a lover’s spat that ends with them storming out. Meanwhile, a dude sitting at a nearby table scrambles to wipe up his spilled coffee with a fistful of napkins. One patron’s cell phone rings while another gives up on waiting for the bathroom, saying, “That bathroom line is too long.” Suddenly, someone enters from the street holding a boom box blasting R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People” and leaves through a second door. This five-minute sequence of events happens again, exactly the same way, for a total of 12 times over an hour.
The time loop is no freak accident; it’s an elaborate prank executed by Improv Everywhere, which, according to its website, carries out elaborate “scenes of chaos and joy in public places.” Such stunts have included a subway ride in which participants (called “agents”) rode the subway for a day while sans pants, a live reading and book signing at a Barnes & Noble with the late great Russian scribe Anton Chekhov and, most notoriously, a visit to Grand Central Station in which more than 200 agents froze in place for five minutes on the main concourse (which has been imitated in cities around the world, including Chicago).
According to founder Charlie Todd, who launched the group in 2001 after successfully posing as Ben Folds for a night at a local bar, Improv Everywhere “stages events that are positive and truly hilarious, giving everyone a good experience.” The crew has pulled off dozens of stunts, many of which have been posted on YouTube, where they’ve received more than 60 million hits. This month, Todd and fellow agent Alex Scordelis mark the group’s success with their new book, Causing a Scene: Extraordinary Pranks in Ordinary Places with Improv Everywhere (HarperCollins, $19.99).
To be clear, Improv Everywhere isn’t improvisation in the traditional sense. Todd says the use of the word improv was simply inspired by New York–based improvisational theater Upright Citizens Brigade, where he now teaches. Still, the troupe loosely conforms to some improv fundamentals, such as continuously raising stakes. “There’s an improv nature in what we do,” Todd says, “in that we interact with members of the public who have no clue what’s going on and we have no clue how they’re going to interact. When you’re in an improv scene, you can’t break character; you have to commit 100 percent. It’s the same if you’re out in public doing an Improv Everywhere prank.”
But if Improv Everywhere is based on shared experiences in a public space, why a book? “What we’ve done is take all of the best and most hilarious stories and put them together in one place,” Todd says. “We go behind the scenes to reveal stuff that’s not on the website.”
It almost sounds like another Improv Everywhere prank: Hey, let’s see if we can convince our rabid fan base to shell out 20 bucks to read about the same shenanigans it can view online for free! But the stunts’ narrative, which chronicles each idea, execution and aftermath, is often more compelling than their sometimes fuzzy and incomplete YouTube clips.
While the book fails to educate with its cheesy “how to” tips on staging your own events (as if reading about the troupe’s rooftop concert by a fake U2 or its mass synchronized swimming event in a public fountain isn’t itself inspiration enough), Causing a Scene does prove that pranking has its artistic merits. “Pranking is its own art form if done well,” Todd says. “The secret to a good prank is it should be as much fun for the person getting pranked as it is for the prankster.”
Causing a Scene is out now.
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