American Fun (66 page)

59.
Improv Everywhere is radically civil
: In his interview with Shelley DuBois, Charlie Todd makes it plain: “I think a big appeal of our projects is that there is no agenda behind them—it’s comedy for comedy’s sake.” They may not be driving an agenda (even when disrupting Best Buy’s commerce), but their fun breaks the fourth wall of civil society: between the ostensible performers and observers of everyday social interaction. Which is to say, even with “comedy for comedy’s sake,” they call out citizens to react and participate in what wouldn’t otherwise be a public forum.

60.
some of the nation’s most authoritarian citizens
: In 2008, former U.S. senator and Republican presidential hopeful
Rick Santorum associated the
Democratic Party with Woodstock, sexual freedom, and what he believed to be their misappropriation of the Founding Fathers’ ideas of liberty. Channeling the spirit of
William Bradford describing Merry Mount, Santorum said, “Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about.
Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom. All of the things are about sexual freedom, and they hate to be called on them. They try to somehow or other tie this to the founding fathers’ vision of liberty, which is bizarre. It’s ridiculous.” Charles M. Blow, “Santorum and the Sexual Revolution,”
New York Times,
March 2, 2012.

61.
an academic cottage industry
: Among the recent scholarly books on the subject (not to mention countless scholarly articles) are Rachel Bowditch,
On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Katherine K. Chen,
Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009);
Theatre in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man,
ed. L. Gilmore. and M. Van Proyen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

62.
three hundred thousand ravers
: Isaac Brekken, “The New Stars in Vegas: D.J.’s and Dance Music,”
New York Times,
June 11, 2012.