Digging around in my virtual shoeboxes to find material for a paper I’m writing on Culture Jamming, I found this interview I did with media prankster Joey Skaggs in 2001 for a tiny little short-lived zine called VIM, published by the artist Faith Pilger. Skaggs had just presented PRANKS: THE ART OF JOEY SKAGGS at the UCB Theatre as a part of the 9th Annual Toyota Comedy Festival. I was interested in talking with him about the relationship of his work to comedy. Full text is below:
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Joey Skaggs
Joey Skaggs, is a storyteller, performer and artist who uses mass media as his canvas to reach audiences around the world. He has duped the world’s most respected news outlets with his fictional news stories for over 35 years, and shows no signs of stopping. I spoke with Joey at a cafe downstairs from his Soho apartment, a few days after his performance in the 9th Annual Toyota Comedy Festival.
TT: You began your presentation by saying “I’m not a comedian”, but in a sense, you are. You’re a satirist.
JS: (laughs) Well, but I don’t do ‘stand-up’
TT: Well, sure… but I thought it was an interesting idea to include you in the festival. It’s like the producers are finally starting to realize that comedy means more than standup.
JS: I thought it was a brave and radical departure…. and I’m glad there was a turnout. I was really impressed with the range of artists that were there [in the audience] because I think it shows the audience are all kinds of possibilities. And there were all kinds of possibilities there… that were presented. It was totally cool.
TT: For people who don’t know your work…what do you do? How do you sum it up?
JS: It depends on what I think about the person who’s asking me (laughs). What I do is what I’ve always done and that is… I’m an artist, and I felt restricted by the way that the art scene, or the art world, is run, and I didn’t want to be limited to the censoring… and the acceptance, the timing… you know you have a show, or maybe a group show or maybe it’s going to be a theme show where you have to produce a work of art that goes along with that. It’s all bullshit, so I didn’t want to be limited to that. And there were so many social issues when I was growing up that I thought were really important and I felt that as a creative person, I could express what I thought about those issues creatively. I didn’t want to just throw rocks through windows or do destructive things like that, because I didn’t think that was effective. So, as an artist, I used the media as a medium, and I use deception, a lie, as a means of communicating. And if you think about what art is… art is a lie. Art is an illusion, art is a creation that is meant to deceive.
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