Be Improv Everywhere

The aim of adulthood is to try to put the brilliance of young heads on old shoulders. And to stand against the powers that want us to be surveilled, retailed, derailed and curtailed into nothingness. Improv Everywhere is doing what must be done..

When I was in 4th Class, aged 9, all the boys farted at a particular pre-arranged time by the classroom clock. The room smelt like a gasworks and the teacher was dumbfounded. On another occasion, each one of us caught a bee in the playground and we all let them go in the classroom when the clock's little hand reached 2. Dozens of bees flew around the room. Same dumbfounded authoritarian teacher.

To the arty farties, this is sometimes called situationism or even dada, and it rocks. When I was in high school, the situationist joke was for each pupil to laugh for three seconds every time the second hand reached 12. Very disturbing to authority unless you let them in on the gag - which, of course, you never must do.

On the night of my 14th birthday in 1967, ten of us walked with candles from my house through the main street of my suburb as a funerary procession for a garden bench which we sombrely carried in our funeral cortege. We were too young to know we were situationist dadaists, but that's what we were.

Improv Everywhere has big people doing similar childish group gags -- and more power to their arm.

Baz 'Dada' le Tuff, who put me onto Improv Everywhere, writes: "I liked Frozen Grand Central and the Impromptu Musical". Ah, he writeth well, does le Tuff.

See some more of Improv Everywhere's pranks at Google Video

Categories: situationism, dada, google, video