![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
From "The majestic jackalope and how it became a folklore legend", The Current, CBC Radio, 2022-03-29 (summary + audio, 25 minutes) (transcript):
| Matt Galloway: (host) | Is the jackalope a hoax? Is it an urban legend, is it something in between? How do you define what it is? |
| Michael Branch: (author) | Well, I mean, as a cultural phenomenon, it's much more expansive. But if we're speaking just of the Jackalope Mount, it is a hoax. But I take pains in the book to make distinctions between a hoax and, say, a con in a con, for example. We want to rip somebody off. We want to get their money or their stuff, and the ideal Khan is one in which it's never exposed. It's a crime, essentially, but a hoax exists to be exposed. It doesn't work unless it's exposed. So to use the jackalope as an example, you know, many, many people who I interviewed said, Oh yeah, I remember when my grandfather used to show me the hoax mount he had in his basement, but I didn't know it was a hoax. He told me all these fabulous stories about it, and it was only later that I got brought into the community of people who knew better. So I love the way a hoax exists to produce pleasure. It exists to create humour. But it also exists to build community because it distinguishes the line between insiders and outsiders. And when you learn the secret, you get to be part of the group that knows better and then you get to help fool the next person. So I think in an era where you know, hoaxes have been associated with a lot of stuff, that's quite terrible. It's important to remember that the hoax has existed for millennia and that it plays a role that has a cultural function. And often that function is to help define in a humorous way these boundaries between communities. |
| Matt Galloway: | I was going to say, I mean, we'll get back to the Jackalope, but you've hinted at this in sort of a sea of social media misinformation, disinformation, what people call fake news, what's the role of the hoax and what's the place of the hoax? |
| Michael Branch: | Yeah, I think the place of the hoax for me is to sort of reclaim the idea that fooling each other for fun and good humour is still something that can produce pleasure. It can still be healthy. I think that, you know, we've kind of almost decided that when we imagine things, we're imagining falsehoods and that those things necessarily hurt other people. But I think, you know, the jackalope reminds us that we often need to operate in the realm of the imagination. There's a reason why every world culture has hybrid and imagined animals in its folklore. It's universal to human culture, and I think one of the reasons it is universal is, you know, we need our monsters, we need our invented animals because we need to believe that there's a world beyond what we struggle with every day when we roll out of bed. |