Balloon Boy, Circus Antics, and the Birth of Publicity Stunts

We at Hive Mind have had enough green shenanigans for one month. While we adore the topic, there’s at least one thing we love more, and that’s Balloon Boy. So for the next two weeks, we’ll fight to keep the story alive by exploring the forgotten angles in the media coverage of Falcon and Wolf, the box in the attic, and that crazy flying contraption.

Hoaxes are among the most riveting material for stories. Perhaps it’s our desire to believe in abnormal phenomena, or it’s our hope that life is unpredictable and occasionally inexplicable—whatever it is, hoaxes are irresistable. Though the media has self-flagellated its way through its relentless Balloon Boy coverage, I will argue that Richard Heene is among the best pranksters of the year, if not the decade. As all of us not-yet-famous types ought to know, it’s not that easy to enthrall an entire nation for a week and counting, but the killer recipe of endangered children, flying saucers, and bodily fluids delivered a media slam dunk that was impossible to ignore.

So with his home-brewed stunt, Heene joins the ranks of some of the world’s greatest press pranksters. It all began with P.T. Barnum, the guy with the “Greatest Show On Earth!”, who’s also credited with being the father of public relations. To drum up excitement about his shows and exhibitions, he routinely planted irresistible stories in the press. To prove to present and future Heenes that fame can grow from nothing, Barnum’s first forays into media deception came at the dawn of his show business career, with a woman named Joice Heth. He claimed she was a 161-year-old slave woman who’d been the nanny to George Washington and toured around with her. When her story grew old, Barnum wrote to a newspaper claiming she was an automaton made of whale bone and rubber. That drummed up enthusiasm, but then Heth died. An autopsy revealed that she was neither 161 nor an automaton, but Barnum, ever the professional, parried that the body in the autopsy was not the real Joice Heth.

Barnum was good, but Harry Reichenbach, a publicist, took it to another level. He lured customers into a restaurant by hawking “Brazilian invisible fish.” Though I find it unlikely that Reichenbach did both of the following stunts, he’s nonetheless credited with dressing up an orangutan in a top hat and tuxedo and releasing it in a fancy hotel for the opening of Tarzan of the Apes, and he’s revered for having smuggled a lion into a hotel room he’d reserved under the name T. R. Zann and then ordering several pounds of meat to be delivered from room service. Whichever is true, I sure wish I could swap out the forgettable press pitches I receive every day for just one of Reichenbach’s stunts.

Posted by Sandra Upson

Photo Credit: Found Shit