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The Yes Men's provocative anticonsumerist pranks tend to be hit-or-miss, with some of their more outlandish stunts not quite clicking because no one could possibly believe them in the first place.

If fooling people is their measure of success, it looks like their latest looks like it's hit the bullseye: Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNBC all took a Yes Men press release that claimed to come from the Chamber of Commerce at face value. (more...)

slideshow Did your New York Post look stranger than usual this morning? Rumors have been swirling for a while now that the Yes Men, those fun folks who brought New Yorker's last year's fake New York Times, were cooking up something new. Turns out it was a fake New York Post, which was handed out this morning to commuters city-wide. SLIDESHOW: Fake New York Post While last November's fake Times announced the end of the Iraq war, today's fake Post is all about the environment. Nothing like printing papers to save trees! The fake Post reports, (real Post-style!) on secret environmental reports predicting "massive climate catastrophes, public health disasters." Considering the recent resurgence of swine flu probably more than pre-coffee reader was taken in by the front page alone. (more...)

Are the Yes Men losing their touch? The latest stunt from the leftie pranksters/activists is the "Survivaball, "a gated community for one™" that purports to help people cope with climate change by living in laser-firing, iceberg-navigating monstrosity that can be powered by sucking the life force from cows. It claims to be sponsored by "the world's largest companies," including ExxonMobil, Ford, and Deutsche Bank. According to Gawker, they're planning to demonstrate its features in the East River next week. The Yes Men have been stirring up trouble since the early 2000s with pranks like handing out fake New York Times and impersonating HUD officials post-Katrina. They had a film made about them in 2003 focusing on their exploits that did well on the film festival circuit, and during the Bush Administration their anticorporate stunts were a beacon of hope to many on the political left who felt disenfranchised. Their latest is a funny concept, and I LOLed at some of the fake demo videos. But how does it stack up to Yes Men stunts of old? One key difference: Their old pranks always tried to be plausible. (more...)