Los Angeles (Reuters) -- They are two American pranksters serious about being simultaneously funny and subversive and they sometimes pose as double-talking Bush loyalists or off-the-wall officials -- the sort who offer to recycle hamburger to stop hunger.
They are the Yes Men and thanks to a new book and a documentary film, you soon might be cheering them on.
"Yes men are people who agree with the boss. They are constantly nodding to advance themselves. We agree extra wholeheartedly with people, not to advance ourselves but to make clear what they are thinking and communicate it with the rest of the world," said Yes Men co-leader Andy Bichelbaum.
Bichelbaum and his partner in "identity correction" crime, Mike Bonanno, spent three years impersonating World Trade Organization spokesmen at business conferences. These experiences form the core of the book and a documentary of their exploits, "The Yes Men," which is currently on U.S. theatrical release.
Using dark satire, a fake Web site and an arresting gold lame costume, they sought to shock their unwitting audiences with outrageous proposals to sell votes to the highest corporate bidder or to "recycle" hamburgers to cure endemic hunger.
But the joke was on the Yes Men when their audience saw the ideas as credible WTO policies.
Bichelbaum and Bonanno are having similar problems with their latest target -- President Bush and his 2004 election campaign.
"We are campaigning for Bush actually. We have a 'Yes, Bush Can!' campaign bus with a quote 'I'm telling the truth' on the side and we are traveling around the country making his policies a little more clear than he cares to make them himself," Bonanno told Reuters.
"For example we are campaigning in favor of global warming, in favor of cutting down the forests and in favor of invading more countries.
"We're taking all the double speak and spin that comes out of the Bush administration and saying it frankly. Our goal is to get people to react badly, but we can't get them NOT to take us seriously," he said.
Bonanno, 36, and Bichelbaum, 40, describe themselves as "downwardly mobile middle-classers," one of whom has a teaching job in New York and the other who has been fired from most real jobs after performing embarrassing practical jokes.
The antics started in 1993 when Bonanno performed furtive microsurgery on talking Barbie and GI Joe dolls, switching their voice boxes so the Barbies would growl "Dead men tell no lies" and the GI Joes would say "Math is too hard."
The dolls were returned to San Francisco toy stores and sold to dumbfounded kids over Christmas.
Bichelbaum, hired to program the figures for a computer action game in the late 1990s, created an army of men dressed in swimsuits with a penchant for kissing each other.
They've never been arrested (much to their surprise), they fund their Yes Men activities by grants from arts organizations, the generosity of friends and supplementing their income from giving lectures, and they've yet to come up with an idea so outrageous it had to be ditched.
"If we had come up with a satire five years ago, we might have thought that the craziest, most unbelievable thing would be to take over a country, bomb it to smithereens and establish a bunch of American companies over there to rebuild it and pay everybody lavishly from taxpayer funds for the whole thing," said Bichelbaum.
They also take part in more traditional forms of political activism, joining street protests, letter writing campaigns and supporting the "direct action" that has become a noisy and colorful sideshow to many a major political or financial gathering over the past decade.
But they hope their highly individual pranks, their Web site (www.theyesmen.org) and now the film will reach a different, if smaller group.
"We have 30,000 people on our mailing list and we are always recruiting looking for more people to join. We never intended for the Yes Men to be an insular little group," said Bonanno.
"The United States has become so polarized that the space for humor and subtlety has sharply decreased. It is rewarding when we can change the minds of one or two people but we hope to reach a broader audience," said Bichelbaum.
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