Photograph: James Gourley/REX/Shutterstockīy way of example, Brodkin cites the elaborate preparation required for his stunt at a Geneva motor show in 2016. You have to think: ‘Am I going to get shot here?’ So you can’t go in half-hearted.”įore! … Donald Trump’s aides clear away the swastika golfballs spread by Brodkin at Turnberry golf course in 2016. There are so many challenges and so many ups and downs. “You need absolute single-minded determination. “You don’t want to be wired up normally to do these things,” says Brodkin. “And what is more serious than politics? What is more serious than a prime minister?” It’s an extraordinary form of comedy that can fast-track you to front pages – or a prison cell. “The best stunts or pranks are where you are inserting your comedy into a very serious area,” he says now. “For a while, I was one of the few people on the planet who, when they got arrested, was thinking, ‘That’s gone exactly as I planned!’ But in his practical joking pomp, he once made life very uncomfortable for Theresa May, whom he served with a P45 at Tory conference Donald Trump, on whose behalf he distributed Nazi golf balls at the then-presidential nominee’s Turnberry course in 2016 and Fifa president Sepp Blatter, showered in dollars by Brodkin at a 2015 news conference. Our picture was circulated by naval intelligenceīrodkin has now hung up his pranking boots, and refocused on standup with his new show Screwed Up at the Edinburgh fringe.
Who the hell wants pomposity ruling the world?” “We need them when anyone starts taking themselves too seriously. But “we need more of them,” says Simon Brodkin, one of the art form’s celebrated exponents. But also one to make you wonder: whither the great British prank, as practised with distinction by the Mark Thomases and Chris Morrises of yore? Or by Sacha Baron Cohen, who recently successfully defended a $95m lawsuit against a Republican ex-senator identified by a “paedophile detector” on Baron Cohen’s 2018 show Who Is America? We have Joe Lycett, of course, heroically changing his name to Hugo Boss and leaking spoof Sue Gray reports to a panicked parliament. The gun-lovin’ crowd shifted awkwardly in their seats. “If we give enough of these thoughts and these prayers, these mass shootings will stop,” deadpanned Selvig, as LaPierre faced him down with a gimlet stare. I t was the political prank so audacious you could hear the laughter, and the drawn breath, from the other side of the Atlantic: in May this year, within a week of the Uvalde school shooting, Jason Selvig of stunt-comedy duo The Good Liars stood up at the National Rifle Association convention in Houston, Texas, fixed its chief executive Wayne LaPierre in the eye, and thanked him for all the “thoughts and prayers” his organisation had offered over decades of mass murder.
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