Three-Eyed Pig With Antlers

Did you hear the one about the three-eyed pig with antlers?

Click here to watch a clip from a television news story (NBC) about this prank.

Click here to watch a short documentary by Terry Harrison about the prank.

As an undergrad at James Madison University, in Virginia, I was interested in pushing the boundaries of the academic experience, and I found the perfect outlet to do so. I applied to be a part of an innovative interdisciplinary arts class whose course description invited students to “fuck shit up,” or at least that’s how I read it. Team-taught by Cynthia Thompson and Stuart Downs, the two placed in the same room 20 students from the fields of dance, music, visual arts, theater, and video and film production. Despite the fact that I was a sociology major who had no art cred, they let me in.

For my final project, I decided to orchestrate a media prank. Whether you consider them performance art pieces with a sense of humor or simply “pranks,” these events have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I’ve always been interested in actions that provoke thought, or which are at least funny and bizarre, causing an allergic reaction for those who can’t handle a smidgen of weirdness in their lives. However, my pranks had always been confined to my parent’s house, my elementary school, my Cub Scout den, and, later, my college dorm. This time I involved the news media.

I began by writing letters to the campus newspaper making up absurd claims about why the JMU school mascot—the Duke Dog—should be replaced with a far superior creature. They were written at the height of the PC movement backlash, so I intentionally planned to push buttons with lines like, “it is degrading to celebrate a dog that yearns to be free, but can’t…” and “it seems sexist to honor an aggressive, masculine dog wearing a crown—a symbol of historical patriarchal oppression.” Quickly, regional newspapers picked up on the story, which helped to make a nonexistent movement a reality, or at least a demented simulacrum of said reality.

To make it all appear more (sur)real, I collected over 400 signatures for a petition that favored changing the Duke Dog to “Dukie the 3-Eyed Pig with Antlers.” The fact that 400 people signed such a document fueled the paranoia of those who feared my noble cause would prevail. The proof of how big an on-campus scandal this was lies in the student paper coverage. At the height of the nuttiness, the front page of the paper listed the day’s top news stories in order of importance: 1) “Duke Dog Controversy”; 2) “Traumatic Drama at Gunpoint: Find Out How a JMU Grad Dealt with Being Shot.” Of course, this was not the first time in the history of the world that a trivial, sensationalized story trumped human tragedy; but it was the first time I went for a spin in the media machine, so it was an eye opening experience.

At the same time I was passing around the petition, a roommate who was a Student Government Association senator, Terry Harrison, submitted a bill in favor of changing the mascot. In response, a group of students started a petition to “save the Duke Dog” and submitted a legislative proposal to prevent this semiotic coup from happening. In a wonderfully absurd display of ridiculousness, during that year’s homecoming game the marching band spelled out “We Love the Duke Dog” in their tubas and wore plastic dog bones around their necks in a sign of solidarity. Fight the power. Down with the pigs. During the game someone threw into the stands an effigy of a 3-eyed pig with antlers and the crowd ripped it to shreds. One overheard conversation at the game: “Why are they ripping that stuffed animal to shreds?” “Some fags are trying to change the mascot to a three-eyed pig with antlers.” “Oh.”

What to do next? Well, a rally, of course, planned on Halloween, 1991, my 21st birthday. To ensure a high profile for the event, I officiated a mass wedding ceremony where I married about one hundred people to bananas. Two television stations showed up to cover the event, and the NBC story was broadcast on all NBC affiliates in the state of Virginia. I found out later that the footage was incorporated into a CNN story about opposition to racially offensive mascots like the Washington Redskins and the Atlanta Braves. The funniest part about the original NBC broadcast is that no one noticed that our friend Greg—dressed in the Duke Dog outfit—started simulating masturbation behind the reporter by rubbing his furry crotch.

Click here to see that footage.

Although quite a few people picked up on the fact that this was a joke, a lot more became quite angry, making me the target of many harassing phone calls and a couple cases of vandalism. (Someone stole my antlered pig lawn ornament, and when I got a replacement antlered pig, the new one was smashed to bits.) In fact, I gave lots of people the opportunity to figure out this was a joke. For instance, on some of the flyers announcing this rally I stated, “To show how serious we are, we will all marry ourselves to bananas in a mass wedding ceremony.”

Watch the ABC news footage.

After the rally and the ensuing television coverage, the largest regional paper—The Roanoke Times & World-News—ran a front page story on the whole affair. During an interview with the reporter, I decided to lie as much as possible to see what they would print without fact checking. I made up the existence of a Nancy X, a fictional woman who supposedly invented Dukie while sitting naked at a party while tripping on LSD, and casually spun a ludicrous story about the origins of the Antlered Three-Eyed Pig. I mean, of course everybody knows that the three-eye pig with antlers was a pagan symbol of sexuality, I remember telling the reporter. The article published the next day in The Roanoke Times & World-News casually explained, “Nancy X—who prefers to keep her identity hidden, although apparently nothing else—proposed a regular two-eyed pig with antlers, a pagan symbol of fertility and sexuality. But another faction wanted a three-eyed clown, so the compromised.”

Why did I go through all this trouble? Well, it was a class project and I received 3 credits toward my B.S. degree (rad!). It was also a critique of mass media. First, news outlets gave broad coverage to a trivial event when there were plenty of politically explosive issues that were either downplayed or ignored. Second, media can, in effect, make real something that is a complete fabrication. Think about what I could do—a relatively unsophisticated college student with no money and a little free time on his hands—and then compare it to the resources available to lobbying organizations and large corporations.

This prank, while fun and funny, fundamentally changed me, causing me to never look at the news the same way again. It also launched this young adult on a career path I had not previously considered: Prankster Professor.

Oh yeah, one final point... something that I think scarred me for the rest of my life: I only got a 98 for my final project. I mean, come on! What would it have taken to get those extra two points? Fer chrissakes, I was on CNN, all the NBC affiliate stations, the cover a large regional paper, and I heard that the president of the university, Ron Carrier, personally cursed my name because of the bad/weird publicity I brought to his school. What more can you ask for in a student?