I have often tried to explain to friends the value of the trickster motif. Here's a nice example from academia... http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&e=8&u=/nm/odd_gibberish_dc
What's even funnier is there is a story below the one you posted titled: "Man upset with penile surgery mails bomb"
In 1959, the Association for Education in Journalism invited Howard Luck Gossage, probably the most famous advertising man of his era, to give a talk at their national convention at the U of North Carolina. Gossage had no interest in doing this, and proposed that I (an intern at his agency) do it instead. The convention people said no, they wanted a well-known speaker. And so the plot was hatched. Gossage told them he was able to persuade his friend Professor John Selwyn Marsh of Bering Straits University to speak in his behalf. A splendid resume was sent, postmarked Nome, from B.S.U., and professor Marsh was welcomed to the convention as a featured speaker. His topic: The Thermodynamic Theory of Brand Selection. At the appointed hour, the presenter announced to a quite large lecture hall full of people that Dr. Marsh had been delayed, due to ice on the runway, but he had sent his paper ahead, and it would be read by one of his students, namely me. In the paper I wrote, Marsh's hypothesis was that people who are asked what their favorite products are often give false answers. To find out what products were really important, he went to people's houses at 2 in the morning, pounded on the door yelling, "Fire, fire," and then stepped back to see what products they felt were worth saving, believing their house was on fire. The problem was that many people didn't believe their house was really on fire. So in phase two of the research, Dr. Marsh actually set fire to the subjects' homes at 2 a.m., in order to get reliable data on brand importance. He wrote that Phase III was never instituted, because he had to use the balance of his grant money for bail. I rad the paper unsmilingly. The audience just sat there taking it all in. Many made notes. There was no time for questions at the end. Only 50 copies of the talk had been prepared, and at least 20 more people left their business cards so they could get copies. I've never checked, but it wouldn't surprise me if this paper were indeed cited in later academic writing.
HA! Using the same methodology, another experiment might be contrived to learn who the favorite kid is! I love the trickster! Dan B
