Yes, I remember that episode as well. I haven’t listened to it again, but IIRC, in it Improv Everywhere had a faux birthday celebration for a guy in a bar whom a) they didn’t know and b) it wasn’t his birthday. He went along with it, but had second thoughts later.
I suppose it largely depends on how your brain is wired. If you were introverted, you probably wouldn’t like being caught in the middle of a fake birthday party that’s staged to go up on the Internet too much. (You can probably tell by my 'nym how I’d feel about it.)
That or “Theater space in NYC is ridiculously expensive, and riding the subway is cheap! With a little: plus, we couldn’t get anyone to come to our stage shows, so we brought them to you!”
They’re quietly sitting, reading, sleeping, eating. They really only
want to get to their destination as soon as possible and get off the
train. They’re fooled into believing it’s someone’s birthday, their
emotions manipulated, and they join the celebration—and then they’re
told, “Hey, we were just having some fun. It’s nobody’s birthday.”
They’ve been duped for the purposes of posting the event on social
media.
How long will these injustices be allowed to continue?
Surely, now that Jeff Sessions is Attorney General, something can be done about this on the federal level.
Except it really isn’t.
And by the way, I really don’t get how, now, we hate Improv Everywhere all of a sudden. Richard Kaufman really needs to do some research: every other previous mention of Improv Everywhere on bb.net has been full of adulation.
I can foresee Mr. Kaufman giving us the inside scoop on Parisian mimes: "They actuallycantalk!" Those ‘walls’ they are pushing against: they’re imaginary!
It seems like there’s a fairly cogent distinction to be drawn between ‘theatre’ of the flavor that involves showing up with suspended disbelief and the expectation that the actors will spend the evening keeping the disbelief off the ground; and the sort where the actors infiltrate the venue and retroactively declare the event to have been a performance.
Context counts a great deal for whether something is a ‘lie’ or just a statement that is false.
I don’t understand the sudden hate for Improv Everywhere either, especially since they have been positively covered by Boing Boing for almost a decade.
Hey, if you want to be emotionally manipulated into helping a bunch of entitled asshats make a quick buck off you while paying you jack shit for using you, and then treated like a pariah when you recognize them for what they are and don’t cave to their equally manipulative attempt to pressure you into giving up your legal right to be left alone and not dragged into their scam, then by all means be my guest. But for the rest of us just trying to survive the day, maybe skip the faux-good condescension.
You want me to work for you? Then pay me!
I am so sick and tired of the presumption that we should all be thrilled to work for free for any prick with a con that enough people haven’t figured out yet.
