Members of Improv
Everywhere pull pranks,
such ascgoing pantsless
in public.
Jeffery S. Taylor
NEW YORK (TNA) – Imagine you’re sitting in a crowded plaza in Lower Manhattan. It’s a calm Saturday afternoon in mid-August. Nothing seems out of the ordinary.
Then, out of nowhere, hundreds of people all around you stand up at the exact same moment. They start waving to one another. Then they’re pointing, in seemingly random directions.
They all start skipping off in the same direction, and if you ask what’s going on, the only answer you receive comes in the form of a high-five.
While you may be tempted to think you had just taken a journey into the heart of the Twilight Zone, you would actually have just witnessed the latest “mission” from New York City’s own Improv Everywhere, a group of truly merry pranksters who “cause scenes of chaos and joy in public places.”
The group maintains a Web site, on which an mp3 was posted. Anyone interested in taking part was told to download the mp3 to their iPod (or other mp3 player). Likewise they were instructed to set their watches according to a clock that was also posted on the Web site, and show up at the World Financial Center Plaza.
When they hit play on their iPod at 4 o’clock, as instructed, a disembodied voice gave instructions to the 800-plus participants (or “agents” as Improv Everywhere prefers to call them).
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Members of Improv |
Improv Everywhere was founded in 2001 by comedian Charlie Todd, whose first mission occurred shortly after he relocated to New York from North Carolina.
A friend came to visit from out of town and told him that, in the shirt he was wearing, he looked like indie rocker Ben Folds (best known for fronting Ben Folds Five).
Todd decided to go with it. As they went from bar to bar, he pretended that he was in fact Ben Folds. It wasn’t long before women were fawning all over him, asking him for autographs, and whether he’d be willing to pose for some pictures.
“I did pranks in high school and college, and always enjoyed being a prankster growing up, but it wasn’t until I moved to New York, and had that experience that night, that I realized the potential for the fun that could be had in this city,” Todd said. “Then when I wrote the story up [relating the incident], and put it on the Internet, I also realized the potential audience the Internet could provide for someone doing pranks and documenting them well.”
Around this same time, Todd became a member of the improvisational sketch comedy group Upright Citizens Brigade, which you might recall from the show they had on Comedy Central for a few years back in the late ‘90s. Todd began recruiting people to join in his shenanigans through this newfound network of comedians and actors.
“Every two months I would be in a new class, and I’d meet 15 new people, and I’d tell them about the pranks that I was doing,” Todd recalled. “Very quickly, I started getting more and more people involved.”
Five years after that first mission, Todd saw everything come full circle, as he once again pretended to be Ben Folds. Only this time, instead of a bar, he was at the Hammerstein Ballroom in front of a sold-out crowd.
“As it turned out, the bass player in [Ben Folds’] band was a big fan of the website, and had been following our pranks for a while,” Todd said, continuing, “He just told Ben, ‘Hey, we’re going to New York, we should contact this guy. He does these crazy things and the first thing he ever did was pretend to be you.’”
Soon Folds himself was emailing his imposter, setting up a prank whereby Todd and two other agents would pretend to be the band.
They took the stage to much applause. Applause quickly turned to booing as the music began to skip, not long after they had launched into their first song, making it clear that they weren’t hearing a live performance, but a recording.
Just as the audience was ready to place Folds alongside professional fakers like Milli Vanilli and Ashlee Simpson, security appeared onstage to remove the phony musicians. The real Ben Folds appeared as well and took back his “stolen” glasses and “punched” Todd in the stomach.
“It was pretty cool to have this tiny little prank that I did as a 22-year-old turn into me onstage in the Hammerstein Ballroom, in front of 3,000 people, sitting at Ben Folds’ grand piano,” Todd said.
Flynn Barrison, who played the part of the bassist in the band, was equally star-struck.
“Ben is my favorite musician, so this was pretty much a dream mission. I tend to see him in concert about once a year or so…but I don’t think I’ll be able to top this concert experience,” he said.
With more than 60 missions to their credit, however, things haven’t always gone so smoothly. In fact, Improv Everywhere has run afoul of the law on two separate occasions.
The first case of police interference came in May of 2005, with their “Fake U2” mission.
Four Improv Everywhere agents, who just happened to also be musicians, dressed up as the famous band and played an impromptu rooftop concert at Todd’s apartment building. As luck would have it, Todd lives just across the street from Madison Square Garden, where U2 was scheduled to perform.
Said drummer Chris Kula: “Musically we were pretty confident it would ‘read’ as U2. Terry (Jinn), The Fake Edge, was using the same type of amp and effects pedals as the real Edge, so the guitar sounds were very accurate.”
Kula noted the importance of matching the guitar sound, as the fake Bono – Ptolemy Slocum – was recruited for his charisma and stage presence, not his singing ability.
As for Slocum’s appearance, Kula said, “Visually, especially from four stories up, he passed the test.”
“Same for Terry. His all-black clothing, black skullcap, and goatee all read enough as The Edge to cover up the fact that he’s Asian,” he said.
Kula mentioned that he didn’t worry too much about his own look “since the drums weren’t visible from the street.”
“Plus there’s the fact that if you passed U2 drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. on the street, you probably wouldn’t know it.”
The believability factor was considerably aided by U2’s penchant for playing unannounced performances. Most notably, they played the roof of a liquor store in 1987, a performance which was filmed for the video to “Where the Streets Have No Name.”
“U2” went on an hour before the real U2 took the stage at the Garden. They got through their four-song set before the crowd gathered below, blocking traffic and yelling for more, drew the attention of New York City’s finest.
Amps were unplugged and various Improv Everywhere agents were cuffed. The six agents detained were given a charge of “unreasonable noise,” along with a summons to appear in court.
Eight months later, Improv Everywhere ran into trouble once more. This time it was as a result of their annual “No Pants Subway Ride” mission.
The name pretty much tells the tale: A group of agents ride the subway sans pants, to the delight and confusion of their fellow passengers. There had never been any problems with the event in the past, but this time they caught the attention of a police officer who didn’t like the looks of them.
“We pulled up to the 59th Street Station, and there just happened to be one cop, who I found out later was kind of a relatively new cop, and he came across the street and had 150 people in their underwear in the middle of January and didn’t really know how to handle it,” Todd said.
“So he started asking people, ‘What is this? What’s going on?’ Of course no one would tell him what was going on. Part of the whole prank is that we keep a straight face and insist that we don’t know each other, and that frustrated him.”
It frustrated him to the point of stopping the train and ordering everyone off, including fully clothed passengers who weren’t part of the prank.
“Then he started trying to arrest people,” Todd laughed as he recalled. “It was at a random point in the prank where people were putting their pants back on. I have people who come and sell pants for a dollar.
“So everyone was in the process of buying their pants from the ‘entrepreneurial vendors’ that just happened to have pants for sale. There were eight people who were just kind of unlucky and hadn’t gotten to their pants in time. So he put them in handcuffs and called for backup, and soon enough there were like 30 cops on the scene.”
Those unfortunate eight were brought to a holding cell and ticketed for disorderly conduct.
Said Todd: “I’ve discovered that disorderly conduct is a citation that you’re given when a cop knows that you’re doing something wrong, but doesn’t know what it is. Or when you’re doing something that he doesn’t like, but he can’t quite put his finger on how you’re breaking the law.”
The judge dismissed the case immediately. As Todd put it, “There were no consequences, except that eight people had to wake up early and go down to court.”
Sometimes it’s not the law, but average citizens, who react poorly to the missions.
Todd remembers one mission called “The Dollar Train” where he and a couple other agents went around, dressed in tracksuits and big dollar-sign necklaces, and handed singles out to their fellow passengers.
“Even on that mission, there’s the one guy who was like, ‘Get out of my face; I don’t want a dollar!’ So somebody is going to be negative about some things no matter what you do, but you just can’t let those people stop you from having fun,” he said.
Improv Everywhere recently shot a series of missions for an NBC television pilot. It was not picked up, but the group still harbors hope to “put IE on TV one day.”
In the meantime, they are – as always – planning new missions and updating their Web site, www.improveverywhere.com.