Maybe it was Vietnam, or Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or Abu Ghraib that shook your faith in high-ranking officials. For Andy Bichlbaum, it was a childhood revelation about his Belgian grandfather’s death in World War II.
“I thought, ‘That’s like you’re on a battlefield and you’re holding a gun,’ and I’ve seen that in the movies,” Bichlbaum recalls. “But at a certain point it dawned on me that that wasn’t it … It was only about five years ago that we found out he died at Auschwitz.”
Long before the official notification, Bichlbaum had concluded that government-sanctioned racism had taken his grandfather’s life.
“It was formative for me in that I couldn’t trust power at all, and there was this unresolved distrust for powerful historical reasons,” he confides. “We all have our different reasons for distrusting power and for knowing that things can go amiss. In my case, it was very strong, immediate family reasons.”
That’s the serious motivation underpinning the seriously funny work that Bichlbaum and fellow Jewish activist Mike Bonanno do under the guise of the
Yes Men. The duo exposes the bad behavior of multinational corporations by masquerading as company representatives at conferences and on television.
In the prank shown at the beginning of their bitingly funny new documentary, “The Yes Men Fix the World,” Bichlbaum passes himself off as a Dow Chemical spokesman on a BBC newscast and announces that it’s finally taking responsibility and picking up the tab for the 1984 Bhopal catastrophe at a Union Carbide plant. (Dow bought the firm in 2001.) The story goes worldwide instantaneously, sending Dow’s stock price plummeting.
“The Yes Men Fix the World” premiered locally this summer in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, where Bichlbaum participated in a panel entitled “Social Justice As a Jewish Value.”
“Making fun of adversity, and making humor in adversity in order to fight it is, I think, a very Jewish trait,” acknowledges Bichlbaum, who’s also gay. “It’s also a very black trait. Any group that knows oppression knows humor, because there’s no alternative. At a certain point, you have to laugh and hope that there’s power in the laughter.”
The Canadian-born Bichlbaum and Bonanno (an American based in Scotland) are the latest in a long line of gutsy Jewish activists who’ve mocked the powers-that-be in outrageous ways.
“It’s sort of an obvious thing to do,” Bichlbaum explains. “You have to make laughter out of terrible things and you have to feed the media. You have to find devious ways to communicate to the rest of humanity these things that you care about.”
Bichlbaum grew up in Tucson, earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Louisiana State and was unhappily working as a computer programmer on the SimCopter game at Maxis in Walnut Creek in the mid-’90s. He stuck in some inappropriate content that wasn’t discovered until 80,000 copies were shipped. Bichlbaum was fired, but he’d stumbled on his calling.
“I hadn’t really thought of it as a political action,” Bichlbaum says, “and it kind of took me by surprise when it became an international story and I was on TV everywhere and having to come up with a reason why I’d done it. I thought, ‘This is a really cool way to make a point. Maybe this could be done on purpose.’ ”
A friend introduced Bichlbaum to Bonanno, one thing led to another, and soon they were impersonating corporations.
“There’s a strong, ancient tradition of clowns who can say things about power that you can’t communicate normally,” Bichlbaum says. “And [if] you make fun of a clown, what does that get you? ‘The clown is stupid.’ Well, yeah, the clown is deliberately stupid, and making a point. The more you focus on him, the clearer that point’s going to come across.”
“The Yes Men Fix the World” screens Sunday, Oct. 25 at 5:30 p.m. at Stanford’s Cubberley Auditorium as part of the United Nations Association Film Festival, and opens Oct. 30 at the Roxie Theatre and Sundance Kabuki in San Francisco, the Oaks in Berkeley and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.