He’s appeared on the BBC as a Dow Chemical spokesman apologizing for the Bhopal disaster in India; he’s spoken at conferences as a World Trade Organization representative encouraging corporations to buy votes directly from the people; and—as he revealed in an exclusive interview last month at Scratcher Bar in the East Village—he believes that inside all of us lives a metallic eight-legged, reality-obscuring machine-creature that only the funniest jokes can slay.

Meet Andy Bichlbaum, one of the masterminds of the Yes Men. Inspired by activist groups like Otpor!, which used humor to take down Serbian president and war criminal Slobodan Milošević, Bichlbaum and Occupy Wall Street have teamed up to manufacture the greatest weapon of all: laughter.

Let’s start with the basics: Why do more than march or hold a rally? What’s the point of fun, creative actions like Plus Brigades?

You want a reason to have fun? That’s pretty easy: because it’s fun. It galvanizes people. There’s that famous video of that guy dancing at Sasquatch and he’s dancing alone on a hill and beckoning people to join him. At first two or three people join him, and then after a while thousands of people have joined.

What makes people join in, aside from the fact that dancing is fun?

I think it starts with rules that are simple to follow. The other day, the clowning action at the Chase bank was really well directed. So these kids happened to be passing by on the sidewalk, and one of them asked, “So we just fall down? Is that the rule?” They totally wanted to play along. I think that’s when it’s infectious: when everyone is doing something purposefully that has some rules to it.

But isn’t "fun" something that is spontaneous and uncontrollable?

There are always rules and structure. Even within anarchist society there would be lots of rules and structure, but hopefully a lot more fun.

It seems like now we have a lot of rules, but very little fun. What’s up with that?

I can’t think of a time in history when fun has been normal. There probably have been times—I imagine the anarchists in Spain having fun all the time. But not in our society. It’s pretty radical vision: a world in which fun is normal.

Since it’s not, fun is really useful politically. First, for the prefigurative reason, because it shows people that life can be fun. Second, you can communicate a simple message pretty powerfully using fun, so it’s good for getting messages into the media.

How you do work with the media?

I think of journalists as collaborators. There are a lot of really bad journalist organizations—there’s nothing good about CNN or MSNBC—but there are a lot of journalists that are really friendly and love Occupy. When you do creative actions, it’s like you’re giving journalists an extra token that allows them to say something important.

Does using fun also change the way the message is communicated?

Definitely. If you’re angry about something, you rant. But pushing facts down people’s throats doesn’t work. Humor can really sideswipe this problem. It’s like there’s a wall between a person and if you make a joke, it’s a crack in the wall.

But aren’t we a society that prides ourselves on being rational, logical? Why don’t facts work?

Facts don’t have any emotional weight. I believe there is an objective reality, but we don’t live through facts. It’s like we’re dancing with objective reality. And some people are closer to it than others [laugh].

We build these structures inside us that are much more powerful than facts because they are ours, and they are deep and emotional. What humor does is make a crack in the wall of this structure.

Imagine it’s this big eight-legged metal thing that you’re living in that’s walking over reality—humor can knock off one of the legs so that the creature falls over, and you’re suddenly looking at the sky.

Okay… I think I’m just going to draw that monster instead of transcribe this interview.

Ha! No that probably wouldn’t work.

Then tell me more.

Well, why do oppressed people have such great jokes? The pat explanation is that they need solace, they need to laugh because they are suffering. But it also might be that they constantly need to be inventive, need to reinvent their relationship to reality because it’s so immitigable to them.

Making jokes pierces through the stupid logic that supports this system, and we laugh because we know that it makes no sense. It’s laughing at yourself for being so stupid as to believe in this system.

You know when you laugh so hard your sides are splitting? It’s because everything you thought was true is not true anymore. And then you’re left with nothing, which is hilarious in just the sheer hopelessness of it. When we create jokes about society and the way reality is and how it can be, it’s a way of getting past this reality and recreating the world.

Do you think the power of structures is derived by people believing in that power?

Of course. No one can govern without the consent of the governed. So making fun of power enables people to see in themselves how they are the power, and how they are propping it up—how we are all propping it up. And the more you can laugh at that, the more you stop doing it.

So, if you recognize the power and how you reinforce it, and if the power wouldn’t exist unless you reinforce it, then...?

Then you just go, SHIT! You collapse on the ground laughing because you are the one making these crazy decisions.

You are the thing that’s oppressing yourself?

Yeah! Why do we do that?

Ha, I don’t know. So is that the reason that your work often centers on Wall Street or the government or the NYPD? Is that your political slant coming through, or is the 1% just the funniest group to make jokes about?

They are the only people to make fun of. Why would you make fun of anyone that doesn’t have a ton of power? That’s not funny. It’s not funny to make fun of the weak. It’s just a form of reinforcement of yourself.

You do both on-the-ground actions and send out a lot of fake press releases. Why bother with the real world if we all sit in front of our computers for the majority of our lives anyway?

Because the real world is real, and the virtual world doesn’t really exist. Computers are only good for communicating simple information from one point to another, which is an improvement over the telephone, or town criers, or smoke signals.

But the smoke signal has to reference something visceral. In Egypt, Facebook was supposedly so important, but it was really useful only to tell everyone to go to Tahrir Square, and that only worked because everyone knew there was a reason to. Facebook didn’t give the reason; everyone knew why because of life.

The Yes Men's website