Originally published at: Improv Everywhere spreads joy through spontaneous comedy | Boing Boing
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my friends and I would pretend we lived in a magical place called ‘musical land’ where it was normal to spontaneously burst into song and dance at any random moment
I love this. I think your friends and mine would have gotten along well.
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Or, in my case, spreads fremdschamen through spontaneous attention-seeking behavior.
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Tbf, things like Frozen Grand Central were genuinely fun and new when they did it back in the early 2000s. They just have the problems every pioneer has: it’s impossible to top yourself with every new thing you do, so you will always devalue your brand over time and, more importantly, other people will jump on the bandwagon and drown your contributions in a sea of knock-offs.
It’s easy to forget that IO were the original inventors of what then became the brief fad for flash mobs and what now is mostly an opportunity for companies to shoot ads for cheap in public spaces.
And of course now passers-by are familiar with the tropes of flash mobs, so you can never recreate the genuine bewilderment their earliest projects must have caused in those caught up in them
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For further reading:
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Yeah, I’m a pretty happy-go-lucky guy, and no curmudgeon, but as an adult I find it obnoxious to inflict one’s pathological extroversion on people who haven’t asked for it. When I’m in a train station spending waiting time with a book or trying to make a connection, the last thing I want to deal with is the nuisance of a flash mob breaking out around me. Stop trying to inflict “joy,” y’all. I’d rather find my own, thank you.
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This is the stunt I enjoyed most.
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