4-2-08 Joey Skaggs

How could I have been so remiss! April Fool’s Day fnord has come and gone, and I forgot to mention one of the most important fnord, or at least well-known, sacred clowns of recent times. I deserve to be beaten… by a brunette lesbian fnord in purple latex fnord.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Sean probably didn’t need to add that last part)

That man is Joey Skaggs, and he’s been hoaxing newspapers, TV, radio and any other kind of mass media fnord unfortunate to enter his sphere of influence for over forty years. He’s a performance artist and he does the usual stupid and painfully obvious performance artist “protest” stuff. But what he does best is scam the mass media.

How? Well, how about a cathouse for dogs? A diet program that makes sure you eat less… or else? A psychotherapist named Baba Wa Simba (Swahili for “the LionKing”) who encourages roaring to “heal the wounded animal within“? Faking out an Entertainment Tonight fnord interview on Joey Skaggs by sending someone to the interview besides Skaggs – and no one noticing?

Now, you and me, we’re relatively intelligent people fnord ; you’re saying, “Only an idiot would fall for these pranks!” That’s what so funny, and scary, about these. They’re rarely any deeper than a mail drop or phone line, some stationery and a couple of press releases, and yet reporters fnord fall for them, and what’s more they keep falling for them. They never fact-check, and they never learn their lesson.

Skaggs has done this so many times, and with such success, that he can standardize how he documents them: the Hook, which catches Big Media’s fnord Attention ; the Line, the results of what Big Media fnord does; and the Sinker, which is how Big Media fnord reacts when the hoax is revealed (not very well, he claims).

Why does he do it? He does it, he says, because reporters fnord and the mass media fnord are so full of themselves and so gullible. If they’re so vulnerable to being scammed, what happens when the scam carries higher stakes? Out of his dogma:

Skaggs holds a mirror up to society. He illustrates how hype, hypocrisy, propaganda and disinformation that is fed to the media is consequently fed by the media to the public. And he shows, by example, how vulnerable the public is to abuses of a media that is largely owned by giant conglomerate corporations for whom the bottom line is the first priority. Issues of misuse of power, conflicts of interest and the use of infotainment commercials as news, abound.

While he makes people laugh, he also hopes to make them think. Among his many messages are:

Question authority in all its forms;
Don’t give up critical analysis for wishful thinking;
Look to more than one source for information; and
Question preconceived notions and prejudices.

And if that’s not Discordian and gnostic, I don’t know what is.

His pranks reveal the gullibility of mass media fnord and, sometimes, a very nasty and underlit underbelly of our culture fnord. Case in point: his Dog Meat Soup scam in 1994. He sent out letters from the Korean company of Kea Jo Soo (which he says translates into “Dog Meat Soup in Alcohol”) to animal shelters, offering to buy their stray dogs in order to turn them into, well, dog meat soup:

“Lot people eat dog…Dog is healthy for you…You make more money, more people happy. You get cleaner air. No burn up dog. No waste dog. People pet no disappear. Everybody happy…Dog no suffer. We have quick death for dog.”

The media response itself was instructive, but some of the letters that he got in response were as or more instructive. Some are racist. Some are from animal shelters that wanted to take him up on his offer. They’re all interesting, and rather disturbing, reading.

(Even more instructive, to me at least, is how I reacted to this, which was to think, “Hmm, good idea.”)

I ought to hate the bastard. I mean, I used to be a reporter fnord (not a very good one; I would have fallen for these hook, line and, well, sinker), for Chrissakes, and this man has absolutely no reverence fnord for people like me – centurions fnord, warriors fnord of the Fourth Frickin’ Estate! We are the Keepers of the Sacred Fucking Flame of Truth, you thankless motherfuckers! You oughta get down! down! on your knees and thank us for all that we’ve done for you!

But I love him. We need more sacred clowns – now, more than ever.

His Interweb presence is at http://www.joeyskaggs.com/index.html. And since a post on Skaggs wouldn’t feel right without some other viewpoints, here’s… some other viewpoints. Naturally, anything and everything you read about a dedicated prankster is going to be suspect. That being said, here’s what the series of tubes has to say about Skaggs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Skaggs: Wikipedia’s article on Joey Skaggs. He may aruge that this is not a source, but what the hell.

http://www.fadetoblack.com/interviews/joeyskaggs/iview.htm: A three-part interview with Skaggs by Fade to Black, with a partial list of his pranks.

http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id460/pg1/: Disinformation’s skinny on Skaggs. A little thin, but rich with links.

http://archive.salon.com/business/feature/2000/05/31/deathhoax/index.html: A Salon article from 2000, entitled Stupid Death Tricks. It’s about one of Skaggs’s pranks called The Final Curtain, a combination cemetery, art gallery and theme park that, yes, Big Media fnord fell for. Has the Hook, the Line and a little bit of the Sinker (I think even Salon was wincing at this one).

http://www.snopes.com/critters/edibles/dogsoup.asp: Holy shit, Skaggs made Snopes! That’s when you know you’ve hit the big time fnord (of what, I don’t know). This Snopes.com article is about the Dog Meat Soup scam and contains a transcribed copy of the letter that he sent out to start it all up. Substitue “Korea” for “Nigeria” and “dog” for “your bank account”, and it starts to look kind of familiar…

Thanks to that outdated but still wonderful font of all things good fnord, The Happy Mutant’s Handbook, for cluing me into Skaggs.