The Yes Lab, a Media Prank Incubator for Activists by The Yes Men

The Yes Lab is a project by media pranksters The Yes Men to teach other activist organizations how to creatively gain attention through media pranks and stunts. During its first trial year, the lab provided mentoring and assistance for 11 activist media campaigns. It is now expanding to a brick and mortar office at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute in New York City. Funding for the lab is being raised on Kickstarter.

For years, the Yes Men have been tinkering with side-splitting mischief as a way to fight injustice. Our latest film about those efforts, The Yes Men Fix the World, won lots of awards and was released all over the planet… but it simply did not fix the world.

So a year ago, we decided that showing what we do wasn’t enough: we needed to help people to actually do it themselves. We called our idea The Yes Lab for Creative Activism. It’s a factory for meaningful mischief, and a system for helping organizations and individuals carry out Yes Men-style actions on their own, to get media attention for important issues.