by John Beckman
But Improv Everywhere—and its many affiliates in the Urban Prankster global network—keep switching the rules. Best known for its annual No Pants! Subway Ride, which boasted four thousand participants in 2012, and also for its free downloadable MP3 missions, which gather thousands of strangers in New York’s parks for conga lines and squirt-gun fights, Improv Everywhere holds tight to its cheeky motto of “caus[ing] scenes of chaos and joy in public places.” In the oldest American tradition, it exploits general gullibility and the desire to play along. Their book signing in Union Square by long-dead playwright Anton Chekhov played beautifully to all different members of the crowd: the “clueless” were amazed, the “misinformed” were baffled, and clued-in citizens got the full joke. No wonder Improv Everywhere’s bumptious high jinks have been embraced by the “Fun Generation,” as Anand Giridharadas pointedly calls them. Their way of “doing, doing, doing” is fiercely witty and radically inclusive. “The golden rule of pranks,” for Charlie Todd, is that “any prank should be as much fun for the person getting pranked.” Which is to say, with an excellent prank, all of society gets activated, and only the killjoys miss the joke.
Improv Everywhere is radically civil, not overtly political, and it acts on the distinctly millennial impulse to seize on any chance for fun. Indeed, even the terrorist attacks of 9/11 raised the stakes for collective fun, which historically has comforted Americans in crisis. The Onion, with its schticky midwestern irreverence, lived up to its slogan as “America’s Finest News Source,” when, having taken a respectful break during the week after the attacks, it rose above the sanctimony, jingoism, and fear-mongering that dominated the “serious” twenty-four-hour news cycle and galvanized, broadened, and soothed their readership with a flash of real patriotic fun. They put crosshairs on a map of the United States and gave it an all-American headline: “Holy Fucking Shit—Attack on America.” Who, after all, didn’t get this joke?
Post-9/11 fun also rose from the streets. Antiwar activists staged festive protests, while smaller tribes of merry pranksters—Green Dragons, Billionaires for Bush—gloried in the myopia, irony, and hypocrisy generated by Bush doctrine politics. Antic activism in the face of tragedy came, for many, to define this century’s first decade. Down in New Orleans, five months after Hurricane Katrina, twenty-seven krewes honored Congo Square’s spirit by holding defiant Mardi Gras parades, many of them mock-celebrating the sorest spots of the catastrophe—the flood damage, the looters, FEMA, the “Sewerdome,” all of the natural and social disasters that tried to drag the city down. By making their agenda delightful and comic, or by following Saul Alinsky’s “rules for radicals,” these aggrieved citizens and political activists invited even their opponents to participate and laugh—if not necessarily to get the whole joke. And for several weeks in the winter of 2011, thousands of Americans seized the Wisconsin State Capitol—chanting and singing in exhilarating defiance of the governor’s assault on state workers’ unions. The Occupy movement, formed in the rubble of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, spread this fight-the-power fun all across the globe.
OVER THE COURSE of four centuries, as if in pursuit of Thomas Morton’s wild dream, Americans have rigged up delightful new ways of busting down barriers that keep them apart, on sandlots and street corners, at parks and on beaches, forever diving back into the skirmish with other fun-loving, party-throwing, pranks-pulling, footballing, jitterbugging, motorcycling, double-dutching, masquerading, spray-painting, scav-hunting, zombie-parading, “yarn bombing,” tough-mudding, melon-launching, banner-wielding, nation-building…
And over the course of four centuries, in the spirit of William Bradford, some of the nation’s most authoritarian citizens have marveled at America’s lust for freedom. Sometimes they have tried to get involved, like slave masters joining the dance with their slaves, and sometimes they have matched the rebels’ wits, like Justice Julius Hoffman crossing swords with Abbie Hoffman during the Chicago conspiracy trials. But time and again, much to their dismay, authoritarians’ efforts to quell American liberty have only inspired wilder and wittier outbursts.
FOR THE PAST THREE DECADES, out in Mark Twain’s old Washoe Territory, in the week preceding Labor Day weekend, up to seventy thousand wild-minded citizens of the world have met in the Black Rock Desert, where they’ve built a flammable Wild West town devoted to the thrills of radical civility. In agreement that activity is the lifeblood of community, trusting in each other’s basic decency, trusting in each other’s appetites for pleasure while shedding any semblance of law, the risky citizens of Black Rock City found their town on maximum fun: artists build makeshift theme-park rides, acrobats and fire-breathers roam the desert floor, composers and musicians stage avant-garde concerts, massive dance parties rumble round the clock, bicycles circulate, “mutant” cars parade, costumes sparkle, nudity abounds—as do comedy, drugs, good manners—and the ever-present torches and camp- and bonfires grow in significance as the last night approaches, and the crowds crowd together, and the towering wooden man that has loomed all week like a hollow frame of law and order is torched at sunset with weapons-grade fireworks. This great conflagration inspires the citizens to join in the hollering fire-making frenzy and, like Bradford’s “Maenads or mummers,” to burn their own art and clothes and garbage into the echoey, smoky black sky.
What began in 1986, on San Francisco’s Baker Beach, with twenty partiers burning an eight-foot-tall driftwood anthropomorph, has exploded into a multimillion-dollar incendiary city, typically pushing radically civil fun beyond all recognizable limits. It has become an international destination, a mass-media darling, an academic cottage industry. Who knows but that Burning Man—as unlikely as Hollywood or Washington, D.C.—may actually be here to stay? Who knows but that Americans may need it? Its critics are legion. Many call it silly, dangerous, perverse. Others call it self-parody, a commercial sellout, or say it has lost its authenticity. But the participants still dive in and have a ball. And every year there are more of them. In a related trend, this one truly commercial, the rave craze of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when guerrilla youth gathered in derelict urban spaces for Ecstasy-flavored all-night dance parties, has unearthed yet another entertainment gold mine: at events like the Electric Daisy Festival, where three hundred thousand ravers crowd the Las Vegas Speedway to dance to the latest celebrity DJs, the rage for electronic dance music (EDM) eclipses even Woodstock-inspired music festivals. It’s all the latest in Barnumism, without a doubt. But is that all? Burning Man, EDM, and the viral pranks of the Cacophony Society and Improv Everywhere may signal another change in mainstream tastes. At a time when billions are staring at smartphones, glued to Facebook, shackled by ever more sophisticated shackles to their ever-larger television screens, people may be growing weary of being spectators. Maybe they’re intrigued by the chaos of the crowd. Maybe they see possibility down there. Who could blame them? Who could blame them for getting out into the air, like Plato’s hero who springs from the cave and lives a livelier life in the sun?
This spirit of renewal is as old as the land. It comes from the young, or the young at heart, and acting on it is wicked fun.
ON NOVEMBER 27, 1760, twenty-five-year-old John Adams walked into a bar. He was paunchy, tetchy, a wallflower by temperament. But this fine young Puritan was a red-blooded American, and he had an afternoon to kill. So he kicked back with a pipe, and a good sense of humor, and he watched our nation’s great story get started.
Acknowledgments
This book was written over many years, with a lot of trial and error and the help of countless people. It would never have been possible without the initial guidance of Sandra M. Gilbert, my dear friend, mentor, and dissertation adviser at the University of California, Davis, who urged me—with her own bottomless appetite for fun—to explore the rigors of this unlikely subject. Also indispensable at this early stage were the close readings and expert advice of Linda Morris, Georges Van Den Abbeele, Clarence Major, Michael Hoffman,
and Riché Richardson. Many thanks, as well, to Sarah Boushey, Erika Kreger, Eric Smith, Rod Romesburg, Andrew Gross, Lisa Harper, Jennifer Hoofard, Carl Eby, Joe Aimone, and many others among our grad-student cohort for their generous advice, criticism, and support. Among my terrifically fun friends and colleagues at the Université de Bordeaux III, Jessie Magee, Michelle Church, Alexander Earl, Zoe Bond, Paul Egan, Federico Frédéric Aranzueque-Arrieta, John Jordan, Pauline Delpeche, Michael Moses, and Yves-Charles Grandjeat made an especially strong impact on this work. For a California education, from the Washoe Territory to Lake Anza and beyond, I warmly thank, among so many others: Melissa Stein, Mitchell Rose, Lucy Rose, Grey Wedeking, Maryam Eskandari, Shoshana Berger, and all my rocking friends in the Ashby Avenue Groop.
All of my friends and colleagues in the U.S. Naval Academy English Department have given incredible support during the writing of this book. My friends (and chairs) Anne Marie Drew, Allyson Booth, Tim O’Brien, and Mark McWilliams have served as tireless advocates for travel, research, and promotion, in addition to being invaluable readers. I am deeply indebted to Charlie Nolan, Eileen Johnston, Bill Bushnell, Michael Parker, Michelle Allen-Emerson, and Temple Cone: thank you for your camaraderie and brilliant input. Many thanks to Reza Malek-Madani, the Faculty Development Center, and the Naval Academy Research Council for their constant advocacy and interest. Thanks to Christopher Simmons and the ripping music-night scene. Thanks to Hoss Mitchell and all the Galway Bay bon vivants and to Skipper Mark Elert and the Wind River crew.
Big chunks of this book were written in a cabin on breathtaking Norton Island, Maine. My unending gratitude goes to Steve Dunn and the Eastern Frontier Educational Foundation for providing this extraordinary opportunity. Among the many residents there who have touched this book with their stories, ideas, conversation, and cavorting, Brian Bouldrey, Camille Dungy, and Lesley Doyle must be singled out as paragons of American fun. Special thanks to Ammi Keller and Angela Woodward for regional anecdotes.
This book is deeply indebted to generations of historiographers and journalists whose investigations into all of these events and eras make it possible to tell fun’s broader story. It is also indebted to the many libraries where I found these scholars’ books as well as primary and unpublished materials. Many thanks to the circulation and special collections departments at Shields Library (UC Davis), Bancroft Library (UC Berkeley), Widener and Houghton libraries (Harvard), and the Beinecke Library (Yale). I am especially grateful to the generous and gifted Nimitz librarians at the U.S. Naval Academy who have supported this book’s research at every stage: Katherine Lang, David Dudek, Nick Brown, Jack Martin, Jerry Alomar, Mary Danna, and Linda McLeod in Circulation; Michael Macan in Reference; Jennifer Bryan and David D’Onofrio in Special Collections; Florence Todd and Margaret Danchik in Interlibrary Loan. Diana Lachatanere, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, provided indispensable help—as did Amber Paranick and Margaret Kiechefer (among many others) at the Library of Congress; Rick Watson at UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center; Christopher Geissler at Brown University’s John Hay Library; and Benjamin Gocker and Ivy Marvel at the Brooklyn Public Library. Many thanks to Ray Raphael for his invaluable insights and critique of my treatment of Samuel Adams, and to Andy Shernoff, the Christopher Columbus of Punk, for kindly fact-checking my account of the era that he made legend. Warm thanks to Adam Goodheart, Peter Manseau, and Washington College’s C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
The two heroes of American Fun are Steve Wasserman, my indefatigable agent at Kneerim & Williams, who has shaped and championed the manuscript for years, against all odds, and Keith Goldsmith, my ever-constant editor at Pantheon, who has encouraged and challenged me through three full drafts, always applying the full force of his powerful intellect. My deepest gratitude to both of you for your faith, patience, generosity, and commitment. Many thanks to my agent Kathryn Beaumont, who has gallantly taken over the helm from Steve. Among the many people at Pantheon who have made this book, my special thanks to Nicholas Latimer, Andrew Miller, Susanna Sturgis for her gimlet-eyed copyediting, Cassandra Pappas for her elegant designing, Pablo Delcán for the stunning jacket, Michelle Somers for getting fun attention, and Roméo Enriquez, Ellen Feldman, and Andrew Dorko for managing production with such élan.
Among all the brilliant fellows and affiliates in my wife’s Nieman year, particular thanks goes to Alysia Abbott and Jeff Howe, Ashwini Tambe and Shankar Vedantam, Alissa Quart and Peter Maass, and Beth Macy and Tom Landon for their unfailingly fun counsel and company. Among the beloved Americans, native and naturalized, who have supported and inspired me throughout this long project, I thank the following: Ed Carew has been my brother in crime since Catholic school, as have the Wahlert Golden Eagles Alan Hennagir and Thomas Lally. Bill Martin has seen me through it all. As have Gus “Gustavo” Rose and Nami “Naminko” Mun. Thomas Heise (who has too), Andrew Strombeck, and Robert Balog have guided/goaded me through bicoastal underworlds. Lev Grossman (who has too) and Sophie Gee are our model family. Jason Shaffer (who has too) is my early American maharishi. Mick Calhoun has been my brick. Tom Bissell, on this and other books, has been my godfather, and Julie Barer has been my rock. Tom De Haven and Steve Dunn are the sweetest men on earth. Glenn Keyser and Wendy Low (“Gwendy”) have always indulged me. Gary (“Sir Novitz”) Sernovitz cracks me up. Christy Stanlake and Judah Nyden have been no end of fun, as have Jeff Alexander and Amber Hoover, John and Barbara Hill, and Mick and Becky Loggins.
My parents, Ann and Jerry, and my brother, Tom, have been loving, lifelong champions of anything I pursue. My parents-in-law, Pedro and Cathy Valdes and Dan and Ximena Sessler, have been amazingly supportive.
My dearest Katy, you’ve taught me my finest lessons in life. My dearest Evita, now you’re doing it too. My dearest Marcela, you’re the heart and soul of everything I do.
IN FOND MEMORY OF GEORGE WHITMAN (1913–2011), AMERICAN FUN’S AMBASSADOR TO PARIS
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. “heroes and heroines”: “East Defies West in Dance Marathon,” New York Times, April 19, 1923, 22. See also Carol Martin, Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture in the 1920s and 1930s (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 14–15.
2. “the pioneer spirit of early America”: Frederick Nelson, “The Child Stylites of Baltimore,” The New Republic, August 28, 1929, 37.
3. “wandered aimlessly toward the door”: “Tri-State Dance Marathon Ends in 69 Hours; Police Stop It After Woman Breaks Records,” New York Times, April 18, 1923, 6.
4. “I’m Irish; do you suppose”: “East Defies West,” 22.
5. “sport, high merriment, and frolicksome delight”: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work That Defined the English Language, ed. Jack Lynch (Delray Beach, FL: Levenger Press, 2002), 202.
6. we haven’t had a history of fun: Or perhaps more precisely, we haven’t had a history of the fun-as-radical-merriment that this book endeavors to present. At least three books, from three different eras, offer mighty precedents; they give essential histories of, respectively, humor, play, and commercial amusement. Constance Rourke’s classic study, American Humor: On the National Character (1931), examines Jackson Age comic almanacs and other nineteenth-century sources and tracks several strong currents in performance and folk culture that helped to shape an American identity (New York: New York Review Books, 2004). In America Learns to Play: A History of Popular Recreation, 1607–1940 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959), Foster Rhea Dulles provides a detailed and often witty history of American recreation and play. And most recently, in his exhaustive history With Amusement for All: A History of Popular Culture Since 1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), LeRoy Ashby gives what he calls “an interpretive synthesis of almost two hundred years of American entertainment: the sale, and purchase, of fun.” It makes good sense that Ashby’s study begins in 1830, with the rise of P. T. Barnum and blackface mins
trelsy, America’s earliest innovations in the mass production of a certain kind of “fun”—amusements Ashby categorically (and rightly) divides “from the folk games, festivals, and celebrations that had marked societies around the globe for centuries” (vii–viii). To a large degree, American Fun is about the tenacity of such lingering folk fun, despite the entertainment industry’s indomitable campaign.
7. “civilizing function,” “enjoyment,” “play,” “play-element”: Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), 11.
8. “creates order, is order”: Ibid., 10.
9. “the fun of playing”: Ibid., 3.
10. “in passing,” “it is precisely”: Ibid., 10.
11. “merely” fun: Ibid., 33.
12. “only for fun”: Ibid., 8.
13. “make believe”: Ibid., 24.
14. “no other modern language”: Ibid., 3.
15. “comes from doing”: Anand Giridharadas, “America and the Fun Generation,” New York Times, October 29, 2010.
16. “pure democracy”: James Madison, “No. 10,” The Federalist Papers: Hamilton, Madison, Jay (New York: Penguin, 1961), 81. These ideas are nothing new. The notion that participatory democracy, active citizenship, and an engaged civil society all depend for their vitality on direct civic action and conflict derives from a long discursive tradition. On the short list of key texts informing this line of argument are, following the Students for a Democratic Society’s “Port Huron Statement” (1962): Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); C. Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2001); Benjamin R. Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
