It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. In this hour, pranks and hoaxes. We'll hear from a master of the artful hoax.

So I took the marketing, the merchandising of death to the ultimate extreme, and I created a Disneyland for the dead theme park.

And writer Walter Kern shares his story of being duped by a dangerous conman.

I finally felt what I had felt underneath and had covered up the whole time I was with him,

which was fear.

From mischief makers to impostors.

Today we'll explore the art of fooling others.

We all have a bit of the trickster in us. Even if you've never played a practical joke on someone, you've probably laughed at a few.

But pranks aren't just for April Fool's Day.

They can be powerful vehicles for political and social change.

Kembrough MacLeod is a performance artist who pulls politically charged pranks.

He's also a professor at the University of Iowa, and he's just come out with a history of pranking,

which goes all the way back to one of America's founding fathers, Ben Franklin.

Over the course of his life, he used over 100 different pseudonyms that he would use for satirical op-ed pieces.

In fact, soon before he died, I think about a month or so before he died, he pulled what I considered probably the best prank of his life,

in which he was satirizing and critiquing the biblical justifications used to uphold slavery.

And so he wrote a satirical editorial about how Muslims should enslave Christians,

because European Christians are the real savages.

That's an example of using mass media, the major medium of its time, the newspapers, to stir up a

public debate about something that was very important. So you're basically interested in pranks that

have some social or political value that are kind of like satirical performance art.

Yeah, a good prank is one that uses media to stir up a public conversation about important social issues,

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