Two of the country’s most well-known cultural activists took the stage of the Memorial Union Theatre Wednesday night and showed the audience how they use humor to expose big corporate flaws.
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, who make up the duo Yes Men, are activists doing their part to make the world aware of all the bad things they believe big corporations get away with.
They spoke as part of the Wisconsin Union Directorate’s Distinguished Lecture Series.
The two men create satires and parodies that reveal truths about how morally-skewed the status quo is, according to University of Wisconsin professor of philosophy Russ Shafer-Landau.
The Yes Men have created two films, which have been featured at the annual Sundance Film Festival and won awards at the Frankfurt Film Festival in Germany.
Before all their work started gaining recognition, Bichlbaum and Bonanno were just the co-owners of an “anti-corporate corporation” as they put it.
“We started making fake websites in the form of satire for national organizations like the World Trade Organization,” Bichlbaum said. “People went to the websites and didn’t notice they were fake and started sending inquiring e-mails. It all started from there.”
One of the Yes Men’s biggest projects was a prank pulled on the Dow Chemical Corporation.
They tricked millions of viewers throughout the world watching the
BBC World News in Paris that Dow was taking full responsibility for the
major gas leak crisis in Bhopal, India in 1984.
Bichlbaum posed as a spokesperson from Dow apologizing for the event
many years later. The public apology came as a strange surprise to some,
but most took it as completely legitimate.
Bonanno added Dow faced a major stock plunge the following day and
lost millions of dollars in a matter of minutes. Dow was forced to deny
the false announcement immediately after.
“It’s so easy for public relations firms to pull the legs of
corporate companies for millions of dollars a year, but we do it for
virtually nothing,” Bichlbaum said.
Throughout the lecture, the duo played several video clips about other issues they have protested. UW senior Julie Lee said she enjoyed the pair’s reactions to their own videos.
“I enjoyed their presence while they showed the videos, it left a stronger impact,” Lee said.
Another UW student Raul Zbengheci, a junior, said he found the lecture very amusing.
“I thought they were clever in many ways,” Zbengheci said. “Even though their presentation basically consisted of them showing videos of themselves, it was funny.”
The question of legality came up during the lecture, since it seems unlikely the Yes Men are able to get away with most of the pranks they pull off.
Bichlbaum and Bonanno clarified how their activities would only be illegal if they involved financial scamming.
“We’ve never been brought to jail for this since it is not fraudulent,” Bonanno said. “It is up to a company to bring us to civil court if they want, which wouldn’t be a criminal issue. We’re not doing anything illegal.”
