Finally, a Jerky Boys for 2008. And savvy, politically-minded French Canadian ones at that.
The Masked Avengers (“Les Justiciers Masques” in French) prank-called Gov. Sarah Palin on Saturday, posing as French President Nicolas Sarkozy — Palin talked with comedians Marc-Antoine Audette and Sebastien Trudel for five minutes before they revealed themselves to be pranksters. A transcript can be found here — topics of conversation included hunting from a helicopter (“Sarkozy” requests that they not bring along Dick Cheney), and Palin’s admiration for Sarkozy’s “beautiful family” (it honestly sounds like she has a bit of a crush on the current Mrs. Sarkozy — though to be fair, Carla Bruni is a former model).
“She was as gullible as Britney Spears,” Trudel said in this Early Show interview, doing the candidate no favors after her recent pummeling on Saturday Night Live. The prank’s popularity online this weekend has dramatically overshadowed John McCain’s pretty funny appearance on SNL the same day (which has only racked up half a million views on NBC.com), while also highlighting one of the odd gaps in technology when it comes to media-sharing online.
See, no video exists of the prank — it’s all audio, meant initially for radio broadcast. But the easiest way for the casual web user to listen? Still YouTube. As of today, a Nov. 1 upload by YouTube user raaf123 has come close to reaching a million views, and yesterday the Avengers themselves uploaded an official version. The raaf123 version features a still image of the Avengers while the audio from the prank call plays, while the official version is a little more polished: an opening sequence of photos and text is shown while we listen as the Avengers are connected to Palin, before switching to an Avengers graphic for the duration of the call. Both put the emphasis not on what you see but what you hear — which is perfect for these videos, but ironically eschews YouTube’s original purpose.
What the Palin prank highlights from a non-political angle is that despite the fact that audio streaming has had a much longer lifespan than video, to date there’s no great solution for casual sharing — iMeem has some streaming capability, but it’s underused and well-policed, and downloads are efficient for personal use but awkward. So it’s quite common to see YouTube videos that consist of nothing but audio playing over a still image, and for situations like this Palin prank it’s an ideal solution to the problem of distribution. One wonders if an audio version of YouTube might be something for eager-beaver investors to consider. But maybe that’s a question for a stronger economy.
