RADICAL JESTERS
Directed by Tim Jackson. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Fri, Oct 23 (7pm).
**

Oh, the eternal struggle between wanting to change the world and actually doing something about it. I’m sure many of us believe that capitalism and its tentacles have severely undermined many of our most basic rights; we also shudder at the very thought of going out in public and making asses of ourselves in order to broadcast our discontent.

Make no mistake: I’m happy about my fundamental timidity, but as Tim Jackson’s lo-fi documentary Radical Jesters demonstrates, there are plenty of others who have no such problem with public embarrassment. And we’re not talking about irate war protesters or people who stone-facedly picket in front of corporate headquarters either. We’re talking about pranksters, culture jammers, Situationists, and guerrilla street performers — people who believe comedy is the best way to reach the hearts of the jaded masses. Embarrassment is part of their job.

The methods and goals of these groups tend to vary, but Jackson’s basic (and entirely vague) thesis is something like: the Man is keeping us down, and it’s our duty to turn the channels of His control back against Him. For Alan Abel, this means convincing HBO he’s the owner of the world’s smallest penis, and eating up 20 minutes of a primetime documentary comparing his orgasms to the storming of Iwo Jima. For the Improv Everywhere troupe, this means orchestrating a prank on the New York subway where dozens of pantsless actors get on the same car in the middle of January and pretend not to know one another. For the Surveillance Camera Players, this means performing mini Orwellian plays in front of security cameras until the cops show up.

Sometimes these performers can be quite eloquent in explaining exactly what this public mirth hopes to achieve. I particularly liked Catherine D’Ignazio of Boston’s Institute for Infinitely Small Things, a group that literalizes the directives of corporate slogans like “Rollover” and “Enjoy Life.” The ape-mask-wearing Guerrilla Girls, too, seem to have a very clear grasp on how spectacle and politics intertwine in their work.

But these groups are not all the same, and Jackson makes no attempt to explain the differences between them. Some are petty. Some are unbearably self-satisfied. Some are plain stupid. What this subject matter really needs is a director who is willing to separate the wheat from the chaff; instead, we get a fanboy’s wholesale endorsement of absolutely everyone involved — complete with mission statements and web addresses. It’s counter-propaganda, in other words, and that doesn’t help anyone.

Screening alongside Radical Jesters is Honk! (**), a short kindred-spirit documentary by Chloe Zimmerman about an annual music-in-the-streets festival in Massachusetts. In it, organizers and participants alike claim that walking around in neon costumes and blaring into tubas with anarchy logos stickered to them amounts to a radical political statement. I’m skeptical about this — to put it extremely mildly — but at least the hippies look like they’re having fun too.