13 Doing It Yourself, Getting the Joke

The crowd goes silent while Robin takes it in. The disgraced kinsman is pitiable, to say the least: “His whole frame was agitated by a quick, and continual tremor, which his pride strove to quell, even in those circumstances of overwhelming humiliation.” But then as Robin locks eyes with his elder, “a bewildering excitement” fills his head, and as the members of the crowd start to chuckle, then to laugh, the “contagion” of hilarity soon envelops Robin:

He sent forth a shout of laughter that echoed through the street; every man shook his sides, every man emptied his lungs, but Robin’s shout was the loudest there. The cloud-spirits peeped from their silvery islands, as the congregated mirth went roaring up the sky! The Man in the Moon heard the far bellow; “Oho,” quoth he, “the old Earth is frolicsome to-night!”

As in his tale of Merry Mount, Hawthorne seems ambivalent about all this fun. “On they went,” he continues, “in counterfeited pomp, in senseless uproar, in frenzied merriment, trampling all on an old man’s heart.” And in the orgy’s postcoital aftermath, Robin rather dejectedly wants to return home, but a crowd member urges him to stay on a few days, suggesting his participation in the “congregated mirth” may help him to “rise in the world, without the help of [his] kinsman, Major Molineux.” Robin has contracted the wild power of the people. In getting the joke, Hawthorne seems to say, he is on his way to becoming a citizen—a DIY citizen, of course.

The story’s “senseless uproar” and “frenzied merriment” pretty accurately depicts the seventeenth-century “rough music” with which colonists tarred and feathered outcasts. The fun was scary, one-sided, sadistic, and often it did the Puritan authority’s bidding. Rough music was in most cases glorified bullying, and it seldom advanced democratic virtues—even when it was employed during the Revolution to overthrow Royalists. But the governor’s humiliation is only part of the pleasure. Hawthorne tells us how to become an American citizen. You become a citizen by getting the people’s joke. In Robin’s case, the joke is complicated. He comes to town thinking he will cash in on the monarchy. But at the same time he develops a taste for the people’s joys—their taverns, their brothels, their riotous fun. So when it turns out that authority has fallen, and that the joke is on him, he finds himself laughing louder than anyone because self-rule is what he wanted all along. The rioters crack the joke, but Robin takes it best because it means most to him.

And so it has gone throughout American history. The “Merry, Merry Boyes” got Thomas Morton’s joke that Plymouth Plantation was a joyless prison—and that people were made for frolic and freedom. The American colonists got the Sons of Liberty’s joke that England didn’t have a clue—and that government should rise up from the streets. Antebellum blacks got Brother Rabbit’s joke that the master was himself a trickster, if a duller one—and that the purest freedom was in having fun. And the forty-niners got each other’s joke that the United States was turning stiff and stodgy—and that civility was only stifled by manners. All of these American citizenry-building jokes took aim at some humorless authority or other: if you laughed at the joke, you either got it or took it, or—as in Robin’s case—both. More powerful and personal than even ideology, these American jokes created steely citizens out of their most chest-racking pleasures. They hard-wired an electric sense of humor into the national character.

Their twentieth-century beneficiaries got the big American joke: that fun—especially fun in the midst of struggle—is the personal and communal experience of freedom. All it requires is a cavalier attitude toward killjoys, tyrants, limits, and timidity. In these terms, the 1920s and the 1960s were arguably the nation’s funnest decades. They were also decades of extreme upheaval. This is no coincidence. But while many Americans responded to upheaval (clashes in values, race-and-culture wars) with hardheaded resistance and bloody rioting, the ones who got the joke had the times of their lives. (It was like surfing in the rubble under the P.O.P. pier.) All the better if a square majority thought they could shut the rebels down—that was what made it a joke to begin with! That was what made it a laugh riot! Laughter, in these cases, is a powerful metaphor for how such citizens responded to struggle: with ebullience—dancing, capering, cracking jokes. Laughter, as such, is the perfection of citizenship. It is the joy of the one joining the joy of the many in a powerful wave of common purpose.

“Congregated mirth.” “Joyous revolt.” “Revolution for the hell of it.” These are fundamentally American phrases. They capture citizens being born of laughter at moments of widespread social struggle: the Revolution, the Jazz Age, and the sixties, respectively. Such snapshots of citizens coming of age, and recognizing their exhilarating power, have inspired Americans during the barren periods, when democracy itself can look like a joke, but these images may be more than inspiring snapshots. They may be the nation’s most enduring icons, alongside Old Glory and Lady Liberty. For as the post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon brilliantly argued, a nation’s “consciousness” and its most binding “culture” isn’t created during the easy times, the peaceful times, when it can seem as if the arts and the public flourish. They are created during the periods of highest struggle, when the people’s liberties are under attack and their identity is under reconstruction. So it is that Americans have embraced fun—the playful practice of threatened liberties—during the eras examined in this book. So it is, too, that the blackface minstrels and the Buffalo Bills who amused Americans during times of leisure simulated and packaged pure American fun. As these entertainers seemed to know, such wild acts of liberty and rebellion were among the nation’s great treasures, and audiences loved to kick back and relive them.

But nostalgia isn’t the same as fun. Nostalgia, a dreamy and passive pleasure, may even be the death of fun: it is the vicarious enjoyment of your ancestors’ fun. The pioneering youth of the 1970s showed a healthy sense of the past: They dismantled it. They made it useful in the moment. Funk artists cracked gunpowder from black culture’s firecrackers; they packed it into a big, fat space-age bomb. B-boys and B-girls used their parents’ records to jimmy a head-spinning street-corner art form. Z-Boys stripped the hotdogging from sixties surf culture and retrofitted it for their urban reality. And punks, inspired by primitive rock ’n’ roll, repurposed its native thrills and rebellion to suit their own fuck-you attitudes. Each of these classes of DIY pioneers spawned a billion-dollar industry that, left to its own devices, would have erased its humble origins. But the fun they invented was so pure, so raw, that it still hits the people where they live—not out of nostalgia, but in practice. The practices themselves have become global ambassadors for radical American fun. George Clinton’s P-Funk All Stars are as mad as ever, and they still inspire insanely grooving crowds. Skateboarding and its many extreme-sport spin-offs still inspire thrashers young and old to shred, carve, rail-slide, and fly. The heritage of punk is visible everywhere—from the mainstreaming of piercings and tattoos to the guerrilla distribution of music. And breakdance crews, taggers, MCs, and DJs have become unshakable institutions among the world’s youth; indeed, hip-hop (in its many cross-pollinating forms) has become the global instrument of celebration and protest. To be sure, hip-hop was the dominant cultural expression during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.

The legacy of these 1970s thrills raises an important question: Is it still fun if you’re paying for it? Is it still fun if you buy a Burton skateboard and carve the half-pipe at your local skatepark? The answer, of course, is yes. It’s a scream. Even wearing the regulation pads and a helmet, you can tear it up on your $200 deck, and you can hone your thrashing skills. But it isn’t the fun of DIY invention, urban exploration, physical danger, and civil disorder that the Z-Boys enjoyed in 1976. It is fun within serious limits, and for all of its thrills it is (by contrast) scripted. And rather obedient. The fact that there are public skateparks and high-performance skateboards signals progress: America has embraced this sport, as it did bicycles in the nineteenth century. Towns want to make skating safe and acceptable. The economy has more opportunity to grow. America is better off for all of this. Yet such government and commercial intervention in a sport that was born of radical liberty means that the fun itself has changed; it has become mediated. For the skaters who take pride in their flashy store-bought equipment have already missed the Z-Boys’ joke: Skating is a guerrilla activity. It’s the fun of beating, not supporting, the system.

P. T. Barnum said it himself: all of business is humbug. How else could business turn a profit, if it didn’t trick you with advertising? If it didn’t hook you with its product? This particular brand of humbug was perfected in the late 1960s, when merchandise was developed and marketed and sold to make Americans feel like rebels. Now, as then, customers always pay for this privilege, and purveyors keep it safe (and generally clean) to curb their liability. They can’t afford customers taking real risks. Plus it’s bad for business to encourage real rebellion. And yet, marketers know Americans love fun—they have known this for centuries. And they know that Americans, especially kids, crave autonomy and participation, so they simulate the DIY experience at franchises like the Build-A-Bear “workshops,” where kids construct teddy bears from limited options, or “DIY” restaurants, where customers pay to grill their own steaks, fry their own pancakes, make their own Bloody Marys. These pay-to-play stores and restaurants are, in a sense, more active, more “fun,” than their traditional competition: that’s their big selling point. But in both cases (as Barnum knew) the joke is still on you: the personalized bear is a standardized mishmash, the personalized food is often inedible. As Las Vegas knows, the house always wins.

In the history of radical American fun, pleasure comes from resistance, risk, and participation—the same virtues celebrated in the “Port Huron Statement” and the Digger Papers, in the flapper’s slang and the Pinkster Ode. In the history of commercial amusement, most pleasures for sale are by necessity passive. They curtail creativity and they limit participation (as they do, say, in a laser-tag arena) to a narrow range of calculated surprises, often amplified by dazzling technology. To this extent, TV and computer screens, from the tiny to the colossal, have become the scourge of American fun. The ubiquity of TV screens in public spaces (even in taxicabs and elevators) shows that such viewing isn’t amusement at all but rather an aggressive, ubiquitous distraction. Although a punky insurgency of heedless satire has stung the airwaves in recent decades—from equal-opportunity offenders like The Simpsons and South Park to Comedy Central’s rabble-rousing pundits, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert—the prevailing “fun” of commercial amusement puts minimal demands on citizens, besides their time and money. TV’s inherent ease seems to be its appeal, but it also sends a sobering, Jumbotron-sized message about the health of the public sphere.

Computer screens are more pernicious yet, since they seize on our native DIY desires. They offer narrow, fascinating involvement—in a safer, simpler, duller realm. In this age of iPhones, iPads, and so on, tiny screens shape our consciousness from early infancy—when babies have yet to find their footing in the risky, exciting world of things—and cleverly precede our 3-D reality with flashy, lifelike 2-D simulacra. Before we can draw or read or write, we swipe and tap and click like pros. After that, from early childhood to post-retirement, we learn to funnel our entire lived experience through chintzy hand-held pixillated screens—snapping photos, shooting videos, e-mailing, texting, tweeting, updating, mapping, Googling, Foursquaring, ad nauseam. Our free time (mealtime/playtime/facetime) is forever interrupted by “snack” entertainment: bite-size junk-food games and gifs and sugar-salty puffs of news. At night, our quiet and docile crowds resemble eerie blue candlelight vigils, but our downturned faces are staring at Facebook. And when Google has its way—coming soon!—all of us will see the world through the hyperreality of screen-colored glasses.

In the digital assault on American fun, video games pack the biggest wallop. Video games, which can be the products of extraordinary creativity, replicate high levels of risk and participation (warfare, car crashes, zombie invasions) when in fact the players—like Build-A-Bear customers—fashion their avatars from the designers’ choices and spend hours, years, within prescripted worlds that demand nothing obvious in the way of personal stakes. Most deceptive may be the so-called interactive games—Wii (with its no-impact, weightless, plastic pantomime of rackets, bats, clubs, and jump ropes); Guitar Hero and Rock Band (whose would-be rock stars spend hundreds of hours becoming “expert” at punching colored buttons in sequence); and the cynically named Dance Dance Revolution (whose would-be Vera Sheppards, Shorty Snowdens, and B-boys tap out buttons instead of executing gravity-defying moves). Are the thousands of hours Americans clock with their thumbs and forefingers … fun? Or does the fun soon corrode into compulsive behavior? An endless rat maze of binary decisions? The video-game proponent Jane McGonigal, one of BusinessWeek’s “ten innovators to watch,” argues that video games are what she calls “hard fun,” a term she coins from the phrase “hard work,” because they create “positive stress” for the gamer and a sense of accomplishment. In particular, they generate an “emotional rush” of “pride,” which game designers call by its Italian name, fiero, and which is “one of the most powerful neurochemical highs we can experience.” This habit-forming rush of “hard fun,” she argues, can motivate gamers to inhabit “alternate realities,” to have “fun with strangers” under disguised identities, and ultimately, she believes, to reengage with fellow citizens in the real world. She even argues that video games will make us “dance more.”

All while staring at a television screen. The student of American fun, real fun, has to ask “Why?” Why would a vigorous and youthful and (to consider the costs of such equipment) prosperous population sacrifice its enjoyment to the screen? To the habit-forming tricks of a game designer? Clearly, as with any kind of fun, the pleasure of gaming is a reason in itself, possibly the only reason. But what sort of nation does this amusement foster? What sort of “global happiness”? A twitchy one, to be certain, and sedentary. Even for all of the vaunted worldwide connectivity of multiplayer systems, for their celebrated “fun with strangers,” gaming fosters physically isolated citizens, an atomized citizenry that finds it harder, not more inspiring, to break free from their screens and to engage face-to-face. To the student of American fun—of lively, risky, rebellious action that has set people free for four hundred years—it all just looks so safe.

When in fact it isn’t. McGonigal, in describing the neurochemistry of fiero (the gamer’s emotional benefit), locates the sensation in the “reward circuitry of the brain … which is most typically associated with reward and addiction.” As McGonigal only passingly acknowledges, fiero’s relevance to addiction is real, and a serious problem among game-playing youth. Sure, fiero, as a neurochemical fact, is a thrill that arises from any accomplishment, from an ace serve in tennis to scientific triumphs (cut to NASA’s astrophysicists wild-partying over a Mars landing, particle physicists popping champagne over the Higgs boson discovery), but the mind-blowing humbug of video games is to deliver higher and stronger fiero for lower levels of accomplishment, and to keep it coming in rapid doses. What is more, the effects that enhance this often violent experience make it larger, and larger than life. Games have amplified television’s habit formation by making it minimally interactive and by overpowering the brain’s reward center: after winning the World Cup, or World War II, or saving the world from aliens or zombies, gamers lose interest in real accomplishments. Or they become intimidated: after spending months in front of the television, perfecting your free throw becomes a distant achievement. Like the lethal “Entertainment” in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, video games dead-end their players’ willpower into a cul-de-sac of absolute withdrawal.

Tom Bissell tells a harrowing tale in his brilliant book Extra Lives: his video-game addiction led to a cocaine addiction that allowed him to play more video games. A recent Google search for “Video Game Addiction Treatment” yielded 207,000 hits and treatment centers around the world. The American Psychiatric Association has the condition slated for inclusion in its next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but the research is in its infancy. Video gamers feel the thrill of reward, but what “rewards” do they actually reap after hours, days, and years of “hard fun”? And what rewards does the nation reap? McGonigal acknowledges such hazards, and she also mentions an industry-specific anomie called “gamer regret,” but in downplaying them she rather games the facts, hailing a new generation of games that “go beyond flow and fiero” and “provide a more lasting kind of emotional reward.” This may be so, but such nutritious fare doesn’t account for video games’ runaway popularity; first-person-shooter junk food does. She also says that “very big games represent the future of collaboration,” and she may be right. The student of fun thinks it’s too soon to celebrate.

IN 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling declared that corporations merit the free speech of any legal citizen and thus are allowed unlimited political broadcasts. That same year, the “American” corporation General Electric earned $14.2 billion worldwide, $5.1 billion of that in the United States, and paid $0.00 in U.S. taxes. GE even claimed a $3.2 billion tax benefit. When these figures hit the news, the public was outraged, but GE’s spokesperson was unflappable: “We did not owe any,” she said. According to the Supreme Court decision, corporations deserve all the rights of citizens, including a bully pulpit for electing government leaders, but at the same time their immense collective power—especially when they assume “multinational” identity—lets them shirk the citizen’s basic responsibilities. This fact spells despair for the nation’s vitality—if its “vitality” (as the word denotes) rests with actual human beings. Hence, in March 2011, when GE recanted and announced that they were returning their $3.2 billion “refund,” the Associated Press immediately published the story. What great news! GE revealed that it had the conscience of an everyday citizen! But the press release was a hoax, of course. It was the latest coup of the ingenious Yes Men, a pair of trickster citizens who have been calling out corporations since the 1990s. In this case, all the nation got back from GE’s staggering profits was congregated—if bitter—mirth.

Our nation’s vitality doesn’t rest with corporations. It rests with people—not only as voters but as active citizens with the potential energy of “physical bodies,” as Saul Alinsky, legendary activist extraordinaire, writes in his classic Rules for Radicals. Bodies are the agents of political action, especially among those whom he calls the “Have-Nots,” those whose resources are “no money” and “lots of people.” His advice for activating the citizens’ bodies might as well be a recipe for American fun: “Use the power of law,” he suggests, “by making the establishment obey its own rules. Go outside the experience of your enemy, stay inside the experience of your people”—or, in other words, if you’re an American colonist in the 1760s, bewilder the British by parading your freedom and acting like Samuel Adams’s “True Patriots.” Alinsky goes on: “Emphasize tactics that your people will enjoy. The threat is usually more terrifying than the tactic itself”—emphasize tactics, that is to say, like the decades of fun on Pinkster Hill and, a century later, in the Savoy Ballroom, enjoyable tactics that may have threatened uptight contemporaries but ultimately harmed nobody. “Once all these rules and principles are festering in your imagination,” he concludes, “they grow into a synthesis.” And that synthesis—that prank, that party, that hoax, that joke—could plant the seeds of what the moral-sense philosopher Adam Ferguson called “national felicity,” the rough, raw, and widespread fellow-feeling that can keep a nation feeling young and that can, in the best cases, unite its citizenry, from the least of the have-nots to the richest of the haves.

Our nation’s vitality rests with people. It rests with prisoners and illegal immigrants; with the homeless, unemployed, and poor; and with the ever-dwindling middle class as well as with presidents and CEOs. Rereading history, where the people are heroes and creativity flourishes in times of greatest struggle, one sees the vitality of American democracy cropping up in some low-down places: trading posts, dockyards, mining camps, taverns. Most remarkably, America’s most original culture, America’s most durable culture—now an immeasurable international rhizome of hip-hop, techno, rock, dance, style, slang, humor, sports, whatnot—got its roaring start in the southern slave quarters, among Americans who valued possibly more than anyone the liberty and equality that they were denied. Among people who held tight to their forbidden African herita ge while embracing their new American conditions. Among people who were witty enough to tell the joke, nimble enough to get the joke, and tough enough to take the joke.

Doing it yourself is individualist fun. Getting the joke is collectivist fun. Together they foster a strong, smart nation. American democracy hasn’t been fortified by passive citizens, not by the obedient, gullible, or accepting, not by citizens who wait to be governed and not by thugs doing demagogues’ bidding, but by active, resistive, DIY citizens who take pleasure in agency and group definition. It’s a fundamentally American idea: citizens should be defined as much by their fun as by their work or service or duty. It’s also a distinctly American phenomenon that these four principles (work, service, duty, and fun) can and should be one and the same—as they were for the “Mohawks” storming Griffin’s Wharf, as they were for the Yippies showering the NYSE with cash, as they were for the Yes Men writing GE’s press release. They may not have known it at the time, but when, in 1973, Cindy and Clive Campbell threw their back-to-school bash and urged the crowd to new levels of ecstasy, they were doing the work of exemplary citizens, honoring the past and providing for the future. For all they knew they were just having fun, but they did it with a shrewd and playful creativity that unleashed the people’s constructive power.

Americans in recent decades—gender activists, in particular—have been deliberate in binding these four principles. In 1985, the Guerrilla Girls, a pseudonymous collective of female artists, took on the overwhelmingly male New York arts establishment with comic posters, a “penis count” at the Met, and other street actions—all executed in gorilla masks. (Their antic movement is still going strong.) Also in the 1980s, New York’s drag balls, whose heritage stretches back to the Savoy Ballroom, gained new force and splendor and acceptance, thanks in part to Jenny Livingston’s documentary, Paris Is Burning (1990), and to this day are a spinning disco-ball hub for the nation’s transgender community.

In the early 1990s, B-girls and Riot Grrrls pushed back hard against male-chauvinist rap and punk. On Thursday nights in L.A.’s Leimert Park, for example, at the hip-hop institution called Project Blowed, female MCs like Venus, Tasha Kweli, and the legendary Medusa—considered “the queen and high priestess” of the L.A. underground—defeated men and women in fierce rap battles and on the floor in break-dance cyphers. Flashing her double-W hand sign and honoring the long heritage of African-American women, Medusa—like Bessie Smith, with whom a male competitor once respectfully compared her—also made daring claim to her sexuality, even in rap battles with tough male opponents quick to write her off as a “ho.” But her deft lyricism and ferocious irony put the best of rappers on their back feet. As the hip-hop scholar Marcyliena Morgan demonstrates, Medusa’s “crowd-pleasing anthem,” “My Pussy Is a Gangsta,” flips the street code and satirizes both men and women: men, by “us[ing] gangsta, a hiphop term associated with misogynistic, predatory, and sadistic men,” to refer to “a woman’s sexual and reproductive organ”; women, by calling out the ones who wield their “femininity,” as Medusa puts it, “to their extreme advantage.”

Also in the early 1990s, when macho hardcore had lost its momentum, giving way to less political (and more commercial) speed metal, the Riot Grrrl punk scene launched in Washington State and shot across the country. Technically and musically masterful Grrrl bands—spearheaded by the likes of Bikini Kill and Bratmobile—revitalized the punk ethos for a new generation of do-it-yourself, up-yours, uncompromising feminists. If NOW inspired the “second-wave” feminists in 1966, rejecting the counterculture’s cavalier tone in favor of unambiguous anger, then Riot Grrrls energized the young “third wave” with all the irreverence, obscenity, and swagger of the hardcore punk movement. They resuscitated Lester Bangs’s “Program for Mass Liberation,” rejecting the music industry’s love affair with grunge and running with small labels like Kill Rock Stars; mocking “beergutboyrock” and needling self-important male rockers who lacked what the band Sleater-Kinney called “rock ’n’ roll fun.” Riot Grrrls’ new wave of fire-breathing zines (Fuckapotamus, Something Smells, Puberty Strike, Teenage Gang Debs) sported creativity, power, and comedy and declared independence from male-dominated rock. Riot Grrrl attitude made a comeback in 2011, when women staged “SlutWalks” in seventy-six cities around the world and reclaimed their miniskirts as symbols of power. “When was the last time feminism was this much fun?” The Nation’s Katha Pollitt asked. Riot Grrrl–inspired stunts made world news in 2012, when three members of Pussy Riot, Russia’s multicolored-balaclava-sporting feminist punk collective, were sentenced to two years of penal-colony time for performing their anti-Putin, putatively blasphemous “Punk Prayer” in a Moscow cathedral. That same year, oversize-underpants-wearing female “Volunteers” staged disruptive pranks and playfully resistive feminist street theater throughout the People’s Republic of China.

A look back over the past half century shows a groundswell of ethnic- and identity-based groups whose long-standing parties, conventions, and parades broke the levees in the eighties and nineties. For more than a century “Mardi Gras Indians”—New Orleans neighborhoods and gangs paying tribute to Native Americans who sheltered blacks during slavery—have staged once-violent, now intensely playful showdowns of masquerade and mimicry. For generations a New Year’s Day Mummers’ Parade has strutted and blared its outlandish mummery through the center of Philadelphia. Gay Pride parades, originating in the 1969 Stonewall riots, have grown the world over into weeklong hootenannies. Plus: Chicanos’ Cinco de Mayo, black Texans’ Juneteenth, Trekkie conventions, Civil War reenactments, underground-comics fairs, Coney Island’s Mermaid Parade, San Francisco’s Folsom Street leather fair, Deadhead tribes, sock-burning sailors, grrrl-powered roller derby leagues, and the riotous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally whose participant population every year since 2000 has eclipsed that of South Dakota, in whose Badlands the party goes down. While the nation’s teenagers blow major bucks on the official holidays of Homecoming and Prom, they still fight for their rights to unchaperoned dances, heedless house parties, and, most fun of all (sorry, administrators), Senior Skip Day and Senior Prank.

And in the long tradition of revolutionary-era broadsides, Washoe newspapers, sixties undergrounds, and punk-rock zines, a DIY bonanza in fun information dominates the Internet. On blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Urban Dictionary, people get the joke. These technologies and more—many of them “free,” if not always in the Diggers’ purest sense—have excellent potential for creative fun: they foster public debate and media parody; they get people producing their own films and music and forming networks without corporate sponsorship; they allow strangers to throw spontaneous parties on sidewalks and department-store floors—the site, indeed, of the first millennial flash mob, when some one hundred citizens answered the call to pile onto a rug at the flagship Macy’s. Whether triggering nonpartisan pillow fights in Union Square, or politicized ones at the NYSE, the swarming trends in the millennium’s first decade seemed to marry the nineteenth-century mass hoax with the twenty-first-century mass prank.

The American ringleader of this global circus, a not-for-profit P. T. Barnum of hands-on high jinks, is the neo–Merry Prankster Charlie Todd. Influenced by such twentieth-century troublemakers as situationist Guy Debord, comedian Andy Kaufman, his mentors in the Upright Citizens Brigade, and, naturally, Abbie Hoffman, Todd founded an organization called Improv Everywhere—a Web-based collective, based in New York City, devoted to “causing scenes”—or what they called “missions” performed by “agents.” Starting small in 2001 with spoof celebrity sightings and bemusing performances in downtown Starbucks, they stepped up their game in 2006 by swarming a Best Buy with employee look-alikes. Their instructions, which forbade agents to bring cameras (and being spectators), made this caveat: “only show up if you are wearing the proper dress and are ready to participate and have fun.” Eighty agents turned out in khakis and royal-blue polos; otherwise they made for a “really diverse group of agents,” which as Todd recalls “added to the fun.” Harmless chaos ensued. It tickled agents and customers and “lower-level employees” alike. But as Todd had discovered with other retail pranks, “the managers and security freak[ed] out.” (The cops, when called, were superfluous: as usual, their prank was perfectly legal.) In 2007, in Grand Central Terminal, 207 agents froze in place for five minutes, and Improv Everywhere’s name went viral: agents repeated the prank worldwide, morning talk shows wanted replays (Improv Everywhere pranked them for the favor), and commercial interests staged copycat ads—passing the joke on to unwitting consumers.

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.