The Fearless Bichlbaum Talks and _The Yes Men Fix the World_

Text by Emily Wilson

Along with partner Mike Bonanno, satirist Andy Bichlbaum (aka Jacques Servin) is the leader of The Yes Men, the culture-jamming scourge of heartless multinational corporations everywhere. Posing as executives with fake websites and credentials, these merry pranksters infiltrate, disrupt, embarrass and infuriate organizations like the World Trade Organization and any company that needs a good spanking. Over the years, the mischief-makers have punk-ed everyone from big oil to George W. Bush. (Their antics got Dubya so pissed, he actually said, "there should be limits to freedom" at a press conference.) In their new movie, The Yes Men Fix the World, Bichlbaum appears on the BBC as a Dow Chemical Company spokesman, pretends to be a Housing and Urban Development official with shocking news about New Orleans, and even plays an Exxon executive who calmly proposes a new bio-fuel called Vivoleum–made from human victims of climate change.

Heeb caught up with the fearless Bichlbaum at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s screening of The Yes Men Fix The World.

When did you start doing this? How did you [and Mike Bonanno] meet? I was living in San Francisco and I’d become a computer programmer, having to make a living as an adult. I worked my way through various bank jobs and crap jobs and ended up with a computer games job, which I really liked–working at Sims. I was transferred over to another game, Simcopter, and it was the stupidest game ever. I was in charge of the little people in the game and at a certain point I was like, this job had gone long enough. My boyfriend had left me and I was traumatized and they wouldn’t give me time off, so I was a bit pissed. So right before 80,000 copies of the game shipped to store shelves, I inserted this feature into the game where a hundred boys in swimsuits would appear and start kissing each other. They discovered it and fired me.

I told Steve Silberman, a writer for Wired, the story, but left out the break up and cast it as an activist action. His piece,"Boy ‘Bimbos’ Too Much for Game-Maker Maxis," became this worldwide media story. I was shocked and surprised. So I thought, well, I made this big story, why not do it on purpose? A couple of friends mentioned I should try and talk to Mike who had made this Barbie/GI Joe voicebox switcheroo in the 90s.

What happened with the World Trade Organization?

In 1999, when thousands of people were heading to Seattle to protest and shut it down [the conference on international trade and regulations], we couldn’t go. So we set up a fake website making fun of the organization. We were shocked when people started coming as if it were the real site. We even received an invitation to speak at a conference in Salzburg, Austria where we gave a talk on privatizing the system of voting. Instead of a complex campaign finance chain, corporations would buy votes directly from citizens. We thought this would really tick people off in the audience and we would say, "Well, it’s true. The WTO is really about this and you guys are part of the system!" But nothing happened. The audience didn’t notice that we were making a joke. They just came up and asked us questions and we had lunch.

Of the pranks in the movie, which do you think was the most effective?

Probably when I went on the BBC and spoke as a representative from the Dow Chemical Company on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopol disaster [an industrial diaster in which 500,000 people were exposed to 27 tons of toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas that leaked from a plant in India.] Three hundred million people saw it according to the BBC’s estimate and thought for a second that was reality! They thought that Dow was doing the right thing and [they] asked themselves, "Why can’t this actually happen?" More concretely, the media seized on it in a big way. It was the top story in Google News: "Dow does the right thing in Bhopal." Then, an hour later, for the rest of the day, it was the top story that there was this hoax. There were 600 articles in the U.S. press about the action, so a lot of people learned about the Bhopal catastrophe, and, at the same time, that Dow was the entity responsible for it. So in terms of communicating information and feeding into a big movement to try to force Dow to be accountable, this action more than anything else we’ve done really fed into that and served it.

One woman in Bhopal called what you did on the BBC a “cruel hoax.” How do you respond to that?

She’s actually the woman in the film who shows us around the clinic [which treats medical problems relating to the Bhopol chemical disaster]. She’s in charge there. Somebody asked her [what she thought] right when it was announced as false and she said, "That’s cruel." As soon as they understood why we had done it, she and everybody else were like, "That’s not cruel, that’s awesome!" She was an activist, not a victim of the Bhopal catastrophe.

We weren’t hurting the victims there. Most of them don’t have TVs. They don’t even have radios. It’s an extremely poor community. They’ve gotten no money from anybody for this. $500 is the average that people who lost members of their family were compensated. We’re not talking people who watch the BBC every morning, so that thing about it being cruel to the victims was entirely a media construction.

The Yes Men Fix The World is now playing in New York City and will be in select theaters nationwide October 20.

The Yes Men will receive the first ever Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change on October 23 at 6 p.m. at the opening ceremony for The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice at the New York Public Library.

What do you think?