Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) is a genre of game in which players act out personas in a physical setting. Though it often resembles improv theater with swords, the gameplay can (occasionally) take on more complicated, even pedagogical, characteristics.
A LARP game typically takes place in a forest or an abandoned industrial space. The fictional setting is usually either an alternate history (medieval or renaissance), a postapocalyptic future (zombified or cyberpunk), or some unique hybrid (steampunk). Elaborate costumes are de rigueur, often with prop weapons like foam battle axes or nerf guns. Participants are asked to stay “in character” throughout gameplay, which can last for hours or days. Like all games, there are goals. Sometimes the goal is simply to win a big zombie brawl in the woods, but more convoluted plotlines can involve solving baroque problems that integrate economics, sociology, religion, game theory, or law.
LARPers refer disparagingly to the outside world as mundania. While defying easy stereotypes, people who enjoy LARPs tend to also enjoy some combination of these other phenomena: murder-mystery dinner parties, long serialized paperback novels, room escape games, Ren Faire, Clue (the movie), The Walking Dead (the comic), beards, collecting mandolins, “Burning Man is lame now,” eXistenZ, the Nebula awards, etsy.com/amulets, dice, David Fincher’s The Game, the words tabard and oubliette, worldbuilding, Monty Python, craft beer, gaps of logic in Westworld, high dexterity and charisma scores, bronies, Zelda cosplay, Sleep No More, gnomes, hating Vanilla Sky, Tron Guy, and middlebrow compendiums of misinformation.
SEE ALSO: ALT-HISTORY; COSPLAY; CRISIS ACTORS; KAYFABE; THE METHOD; SIMULISM
No technique in television production has been more maligned than the laugh track, yet it somehow perseveres through decades of ridicule.
It all started innocently, as a quick hack to solve a technical problem. Charley Douglass, a sound engineer at CBS in the early ‘50s, was annoyed at studio audiences who inconveniently laughed at the wrong moments. Sometimes they chuckled too long at unfunny bits; other times, they refused to bellow with sufficient gusto. To evenly redistribute the laughter, Douglass invented a contraption that looked like a steampunk organ collided with a cyberpunk adding machine, connected on the back end to magnetic tapes with recorded laughter. By pressing buttons on the laff box (that’s actually what he called it), an orchestrator could punch up guffaws, chortles, and giggles on demand. The magical machine also acted as a sort of demographic keyboard, with inputs for specific genders, ages, and ethnicities, plus a foot pedal that controlled the duration of each laugh. One keystroke might simulate frothy housewife giggle; another, guy who missed joke but laughs anyway. Keys could be combined into melodic chords of laughter, bringing down the house in a crescendo of hilarity.
The gizmo was a success, smoothing out the aural wrinkles in programs like The Abbott and Costello Show and I Love Lucy. It was a necessary evil of this nascent era, when television was rapidly changing from live broadcast to taped recordings. Audiences were still growing accustomed to the big square tube in their living rooms, and the laugh track helped ease the transition by simulating an intimate theater experience at home. You knew when to laugh because they told you when to laugh.
Naturally, this quaint bag of laughs was quickly abused. Sitcoms in the ‘60s and ‘70s took the laff box and cranked it to eleven. Realizing canned chuckles freed them from the burden of a live audience, shows like Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch ratcheted the laugh track to egregious levels. No show could escape the canned laughter craze—beloved programs like The Muppet Show and M*A*S*H used laugh tracking, even during outdoor scenes, when a studio audience was improbable. When animated shows like The Flintstones and The Jetsons added tracks of artificial mirth, the entire illusion of a captive studio audience was finally shattered.
Show creators hated the laugh track, spurring a constant feud with network executives who believed audiences enjoyed the audio cues. To adjudicate the conflict, CBS held a controlled experiment in 1965 with its brand-new show Hogan’s Heroes. The network tested two versions of the World War II comedy—one with canned laughter, one without. The test audiences overwhelmingly preferred the laugh-tracked show. Since then, nearly all CBS comedies have contained audience laughter.
Fake laughter was far from universal though. Many beloved shows, including The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Friends, Cheers, and Seinfeld, used studio audiences for most of their laughter, only adding dashes of the canned stuff through sweetening (that’s the term of art).82
But laughter of all kinds—live or tracked—was becoming the joke of the sitcom industry, as a morose aura started to envelop the merriment. An oft-told anecdote asserted that due to track age, the laff box contained the chortles of dead people. The canard seems to have originated with Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon (1999), who ad libbed this bit of dialogue about sitcoms like Taxi:
It’s just stupid jokes and canned laughter! And you don’t know why it’s there, but it’s there! And it’s dead people laughing, did you know that? Those people are dead!83
It might have been true in the ‘70s, but the claim is likely not accurate today, as audio engineers are known to assiduously update their libraries with new snorts and snickers.
Regardless, the stench of dead laughter was in the air. Starting in the early aughts, shows began to jettison the laugh track, as most celebrated comedies of the era—The Office, Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Orange Is the New Black, 30 Rock, Community, Louie, Modern Family—abandoned the cheesy blandishment. Some programs maintain laugh tracks today (especially those on CBS), and they do tend to get good ratings. In fact, one can almost divide sitcoms into two categories—“critically acclaimed” versus “high ratings”—on whether they use a laugh track. As a generalization, shows that cozen a laugh from the viewer perform better in the ratings but seldom win Emmys.
Although widely derided, the laugh track served its purpose. Television began as a medium for viewing live events with an audience (essentially theater-at-a-distance), and it took decades for television to evolve into its own medium. The laff box allowed producers to literally play the audience, like an organ. Perhaps it was synthetic, but the technical innovation put the audience into the tube, creating a more communal experience in our homes. Today, that role—incorporating a disembodied audience—is played by social media. LOL.
SEE ALSO: CANNED HEAT; CLAPTER; CLAQUE; CRISIS ACTORS; THE FOURTH WALL; NODDY; POTEMKIN VILLAGE
At age five, he was raped. By age eleven, as a transgender hustler, he started turning tricks at truck stops in West Virginia. At fourteen, he was homeless and addicted to drugs, and by sixteen, he was institutionalized, for the first time. Somewhere along the way, he became HIV-positive, probably through his mother’s boyfriend. Because his mother burned his penis with a car cigarette lighter, or because he paid a biker to switchblade his genitals, or because of AIDS, his growth was stunted and puberty forestalled, but he took hormones in preparation for a sex change. The story of Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy sounds too horrific to be true, because it was too horrific to be true.
JT LeRoy was a fabrication, started around 1999 by Laura Albert, a thirtysomething phone sex worker in San Francisco. Through three acclaimed books of fictional memoir, one of which was titled The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, Albert transformed LeRoy into one of the biggest literary sensations of the noughties. It was an amazing feat, matched only by her uncanny charm at converting LeRoy into celebrity arm candy.
At early readings, a coterie of famous admirers, including Winona Ryder, Matthew Modine, Lou Reed, and Nancy Sinatra, would recite her work.84 But Albert eventually needed a puppet on the stage, someone to embody the It-Boy role at public appearances, so she hired her sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, to play JT IRL. Affecting a country-fried accent, Knoop donned a preposterous blond wig (invoking Andy Warhol) and huge plastic sunglasses (à la Jackie O) in public appearances and plentiful photo spreads. In retrospect, that anyone fell for this ruse is amazing.
Back at home, Albert gave good phone to her new celebrity besties—Courtney Love, Tatum O’Neal, Shirley Manson, Carrie Fisher, Tom Waits, and many others. She received career advice from Bono. For Gus Van Sant, she wrote an early draft of the script for Elephant. Asia Argento made one of her books into a movie while Knoop became her lover. She was published in Spin, The Stranger, Interview, and McSweeney’s and became a contributing editor at glossy magazines with nervy names like 7x7, Black-Book, and i-D. Only one celebrity was privy to the secret: Billy Corgan. He described the spectacle as “like being inside the Magic Kingdom.”
After seven years of running the con, her delicately crafted world finally fell apart in 2006, when her husband (oh yes, she had a husband) outed her in a New York Times story. To this day, Albert claims that she merely imagineered the character to explore aspects of her personality. To her, “LeRoy was real.” But LeRoy was also her “avatar,” her “PHANTOM LIMB,” her “pseudonym,” and her “veil”—all epithets she used to depict her creation.
A word Albert does not appreciate is “hoax.” In the documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story (2016), she snaps at a writer, “A metaphor is different than a fucking hoax.” (She prefers the more forgiving term myth.) That is some crafty dissembling, but she has a modest argument. The books were, technically, identified as “Fiction” in the bookstore.85 But how much did LeRoy’s contrived backstory and Knoop’s coy performance contribute to the enjoyment of those books? And how did the swaths of deceived “friends” feel about the illusion? And what are the ethics of manufacturing a rags-to-riches story in places where such opportunities are fleeting? Maybe “hoax” isn’t exact, but “prank” or “spoof” seem too modest of terms for such overt deceit.
“What’s being thrown out there is Multiple Personality Disorder,” she says near the end of the same documentary. “But that ain’t it. I am pulling the switch. I am making the decision to go to a different rail. I don’t know what the classification is. But I can tell you one thing, it is not a hoax.”
Today, visiting the website JTLeRoy.com redirects you to LauraAlbert.org.
SEE ALSO: CONFIDENCE GAME; A MILLION LITTLE PIECES; TATE, NAT; ROBINSON CRUSOE; SLASHFIC; SOKAL HOAX; UNRELIABLE NARRATOR; WARHOL, ANDY
Lie-to-children is a theory of education in which the truth is fudged for the greater purpose of elucidating complex subject matter. Usually delivered to students in the form of simplistic analogies, lies-to-children can also thrive outside the classroom, particularly in pop science books that disseminate generalizations to demystify arcane subjects for lay-people.86
In school, the fibs are told most often in science classes. In high school physics, for instance, the atom is commonly characterized as electrons swirling around a nucleus of protons and neutrons. This reductive depiction (the Bohr model) is easy to visualize, partially because teenagers are already familiar with the concept of planets orbiting the sun. But the solar system analogy belies a more convoluted reality (the atomic orbital model) that involves a probabilistic arrangement of electrons. Even though Niels Bohr, the physicist who formulated the “solar system atom,” would later disavow his own subatomic architecture, it persists in classrooms today, mostly because flying orbs are easier to explain than quantum theory.
Other educational white lies include the universality of Newton’s laws (as Einstein showed, the laws break down at the margins), the 476 CE fall of the Roman Empire (the eastern half of the empire endured until the fifteenth century), George Washington Carver inventing peanut butter (he didn’t; he performed massive research on legumes that led to its invention), Eurocentric flat maps (despite how it looks, Africa is 14 times bigger than Greenland), and the impossibility of square rooting a negative number (you can do it, but it yields a difficult-to-explain imaginary number). The lie-to-children theory holds that these equivocations are necessary evils, a kind of heuristic device for later revealing deeper concepts.
Introduced by scientists Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, lie-to-children gained traction as a pedagogical concept around the release of The Science of Discworld (1999), coauthored by fantasy author Terry Pratchett, who was prone to introduce a quirky analogy followed by a rejoinder, “That’s completely incorrect, but it’s a lie you can understand.” The authors would go on to suggest that all systems for groking reality rely upon such falsifiable narratives. Given how little we know about the universe, science itself might be the best example of lie-to-children—a story that helps us apprehend a nebulous universe.87
As Calvin & Hobbes frequently suggested, not only is lying to kids extremely fun, but veracity often enters through the door of allusion:
Calvin: “Dad, what causes wind?”
Dad: “Trees sneezing.”
Calvin: “Really?”
Dad: “No, but the truth is more complicated.”
SEE ALSO: AGNOTOLOGY; CUNNINGHAM’S LAW; NOBLE LIE; SANTA CLAUS; SNIPE HUNT
Huey Long was a grifter politician who for a long time seemed like the closest America would ever get to electing a populist authoritarian as president.
He hailed from Louisiana, where in 1928 the former travelling salesman became the youngest governor in state history. A charismatic orator, Long professed himself the savior of the poor and powerless, drawing huge crowds from miles around with electrifying campaign speeches that mixed hillbilly logic with ruthless demagoguery. (“So shot through with gross error,” wrote the New Orleans Picayune of his speeches, and “so careless of truth generally.”)
Once in government, the folksy huckster turned into a tyrant, quickly accruing political power through a system of embezzlement, bribes, and brute force. He instituted an infamous policy whereby all state employees were required to tithe 10 percent of their salaries to his campaign. Paradoxically, he also did more for the poor and uneducated than anyone before or possibly since. He cut taxes on farmers, brought free textbooks to schools, promoted adult literacy, and lowered utility bills. But he was wildly unscrupulous, skimming 20 percent off the top of all state contracts. When the legislature moved to impeach him for corruption, Huey paid off fifteen senators to pledge their fealty. Thwarting impeachment only made him more ruthless.
The only thing Long loved more than talking was building, and he was profuse at both. His administration erected 111 bridges and paved more than 3,000 miles of road. He gave LSU a new campus, demanded a new governor’s mansion, and built the tallest state capitol building in the country (where he was eventually assassinated). In four years as governor, he spent more than his predecessors did in twelve. In a brassy display of power, he won the 1930 election to become the U.S. senator of Louisiana but still remained its governor.
He was a brutish despot who would dragoon political opponents and seduce the masses with fatuous bunkum. He was completely unstoppable and on his way to Washington.
It is impossible not to pause here and acknowledge the obvious: Yes, he is reminiscent of Donald Trump. Demagogues often exhibit shameless ambition and share nationalist rhetoric, but the similarities between these two does not stop with generalities. Long also disingenuously claimed to descend from humble beginnings—a log cabin, no less—which would be true if the wood in his family’s manor counted as logs. Similarly, Long delivered vituperative speeches that hectored political opponents. “Always take the offensive,” he was fond of saying. “The defensive ain’t worth a damn.” He also loved attention but hated the press, so he started his own newspaper, the Louisiana Progress, which he distributed via the state police. (He regularly dispatched the state militia as his personal police force.) Even more redolent of our media environment, Long had the backing of popular conspiratorial radio host Father Coughlin, who helped circulate his populist jingoism. Neither a conservative nor a liberal, Long savaged those in his own party in fulminating speeches. A master of abuse, he created nicknames for his foes (“Buzzard Buck,” “Old Feather Duster,” “Colonel Bow Wow”), which he repeated over and over until they stuck. In one of his favorite campaign trail bits, Long asked his audience how many good suits they had at home. Four? How about three? Two? Can you afford two good suits? That crook J. P. Morgan owns 100 suits! Long himself loved colorful ties and easily owned one hundred suits. This cockeyed candor is why common folk adored him—he was a poor person’s idea of a rich person.
Long also had a spiffy four-word catchphrase. Even more lyrical than Make America Great Again, his bromide was Every Man a King. Just as Trump pinched his slogan from Ronald Reagan, Long lifted his from William Jennings Bryan, who ended his version with . . . But No One Wears a Crown. Long, however, had his own idea about who should wear the crown. (Every Man a King was also the title of his first autobiography; his second, My First Days in the White House.) To top off the uncanny parallels, there were investigations into his taxes.
Although he supported FDR in his 1932 presidential bid, Long quickly turned on the New Deal, ranting that it was not bold enough to bring America out of the Depression. FDR privately called Long one the most dangerous men in America, and it became obvious the parvenu would run for president. Under another pithy pitch, Share Our Wealth, Long promised everyone a universal basic income of $2,500 and disallowed anyone from making more than $1 million per year. With the tax bounty, Long promised free healthcare, free education, and mandatory four-week vacations. Economists quickly pointed out that the numbers didn’t add up, but in the middle of the Great Depression, the populist message would have posed an immense challenge to FDR.
Only seven years after first being elected governor, and just a month after announcing his candidacy for president, Long was assassinated, in 1935, by a respected Baton Rouge doctor, Carl Weiss. Copious conspiracy theories cast doubt, but the most accepted historical account is that Weiss killed Long because he was about to canton his father-in-law, a judge and a political enemy, out of his district. Long had also spread a rumor that the doctor’s wife wasn’t white but had “coffee blood.” That race-baiting probably didn’t help his ire. But the murder surprised no one. Everyone in Louisiana had been hypothesizing the assassination of the charlatan for years.
“God, don’t let me die,” gasped the mad king in his last breath. “I have so much to do.”88
SEE ALSO: GERRYMANDERING; KAYFABE; SWIFTBOATING
Lorem ipsum is gibberish text used as filler copy by graphic designers.
When laying out a page, designers often insert paragraphs of the placeholder text into a document, to be later replaced with real text. The standard lorem ipsum boilerplate begins:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. . . .
It’s pseudo-Latin mumbo jumbo, but the first two words translate to “pain itself.” The text derives from an obscure philosophical work by Cicero, De Finibus (“On the End”), but the words are mostly scrambled into gobbledygook. The origin of the dummy text is unknown, though it seems to have started in the 1970s and was popularized in the desktop publishing software revolution of the 1980s.
Because it is incomprehensible, designers use lorem ipsum to emphasize the visual qualities of a page over its words. It mimics writing without being writing.
SEE ALSO: 555-2368; BACKWARDS R; DARK ENERGY; DOE, JOHN; JABBERWOCKY; PHOTOSHOPPING; SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS
82 Sweetening is demonstrated with dismay in Annie Hall when Woody Allen witnesses laugh tracks being added to a live broadcast in a Los Angeles television studio. The term is also invoked in other commercial arts. When Kiss’s Alive! was released in 1975, it claimed to be a live album but many tracks were clearly sweetened, as they say, with studio overdubs to sharpen the sound.
83 Another oft-cited (but inaccurate) source for this old saw is Chuck Palahniuk’s 2002 novel Lullaby: “Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”
84 Ryder enjoyed telling the story of how she met prefame LeRoy, still a teenage street urchin, outside of the opera La Bohème. “He was a total ragamuffin.”
85 Albert can be found strenuously arguing this point, under a pseudonym, on the “Talk” tab of JT LeRoy’s Wikipedia page. She has relentlessly worked to keep LeRoy in the context of harmless worldbuilding, far away from uncouth fabulists like James Frey.
86 A hurtful person might say this entire compendium dabbles in such mendacity-to-laypeople.
87 Most academic fields have developed an unofficial vernacular for expressing their queasiness about relying upon narrative shortcuts to convey reality. In statistics, the aphorism “all models are lies” is often dispatched in service of voicing uncertainty. Economists speak of stylized facts, or broad generalization of data that are true in essence but not always in practice. Evolutionary biologists use the derogatory term just-so stories to designate quaint narratives about human behavior. And in philosophy, the concept of Wittgenstein’s ladder derives from the philosopher’s statement that while his propositions might be incorrect, they provide the ladder upon which to climb to a higher level of understanding. Wittgenstein would later repudiate his own makeshift scaffold, stating, “Anything that can be reached with a ladder does not interest me.”
88 If you can track it down, the essential documentary is Huey Long (1986) made for PBS by Ken Burns. It contains interviews with family members, downtrodden locals, and journalists from the era. The other indispensable historical account is Huey Long (1981), a biography by T. Harry Williams that won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. And, of course, there is All the King’s Men (1946), Robert Penn Warren’s fictionalized version, made into a movie that won the Best Picture Oscar in 1949.