Radiolab - Smile My Ass

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

Candid Camera is one of the most original – and one of the most mischievous – TV shows of all time.  Admirers hailed its creator Allen Funt as a poet of the everyday. Critics denounced him as a Peeping Tom.  Funt sought to capture people at their most unguarded, their most spontaneous, their most natural.  And he did. But as the show succeeded, it started to change the way we thought not only of reality television, but also of reality itself.  Looking back at the show now, a half century later, it’s hard NOT to see so many of our preoccupations – privacy, propriety, publicity, authenticity – through a funhouse mirror, darkly. This episode was reported by Latif Nasser and produced by Matt Kielty.  Special Thanks to: Bertram van Munster, Fred Nadis, Alexa Conway, the Eastern Airlines Employee Association and Eastern Airlines Radio, Rebecca Lemov, Anna McCarthy, Jill Lepore, Cullie Bogacki Willis III, Barbara Titus and the Funt family.  Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.    

Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. WNYC. Alright, Latif, if you can rewind your mind back to a time when your life wasn't dominated by Alan Funt in Candy Camera Like how did how does it start? So I first I did unlike a lot of people I did not grow up watching Candid camera. I had never heard of Candy Camera when I was a kid. You never heard of Candy Camera? No, no, no, of he's up there and it's a very noticeable cut. Okay, he's one of...

He is actually no BS, a founding father in a way, of a different sort. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab. And when you least expect it, you're the one today. Okay, just to set that up. So there used to be a time in our media history where like the line between show and life was really clear. But a long came a guy named Alan Funt

who muddied that line in a way that was fascinating and would bite him in the butt. In fact, spiritually speaking, I think those bite marks are on all of our butts. So check your tush. And listen to this story from our producer, Lotto Fnauser. So I first heard about Canona Camera a few years ago and when I did, I just dove in deep.

Like I just binge all of, I watched every single clip I could get my hands on. And then that's around the time when I found out that it started as a radio show, which was even more interesting to me because I was like a radio show. I was like, well, like how does that even make? Like, what is that even? What would that be? So I called up one of the few people who have studied this.

That's right. So I'm Jacob Smith, an associate professor at Northwestern University's School of Communication, and the director of Northwestern's Masters in Sound Arts and Industries. And it turns out there's this kind of wonderful, kind of creepy backstory. Do you just want to start with World War II? Yeah. So during World War II, Alan Funt was working in the signal corps.

The signal corps is known as the nerves of the arm. The kind of communications arm for the arm forces at that time. So Funt, he's a few years out of college by this point. He is stationed in Oklahoma at Camp Gruber, and his job there is to make radio shows. For the armed forces radio. One of these shows is called the Grype Booth. The Grype, G-R-I-P-E.

The Grype Booth. Yeah. Basically, the show worked like this. Funt would get soldier stationed at the camp to come into his studio and And talk about their gripes. About like their barracks and about the food and about, you know, their girlfriend is cheating on him back home or whatever.

You know, things that were bothering them. Things that have a very good idea from morale. Oh, I think it's a great idea from morale. Really? I would imagine it would bring the soldiers down. It would bring them down, but maybe it would bring them together. Fair enough.

Anyhow, so he's bringing these soldiers into his little recording studio. And one of the things that he found was that as soon as the red light would go on, to indicate that recording was going on, Zzzz, they'd clam up. They would get tongue tied. This idea was actually called mic fright. Mic fright. And he tells these stories about how it was amazing to see these soldiers who would go

out into battle without maybe blinking an eye but break into a cold sweat at the thought of sitting in front of a microphone. So what does he do? Well so his solution was to disconnect the red light and record them secretly. So basically he'd bring them in and say, okay let's just do a practice round. Let's just talk over the things, the kinds of things you will talk about. Just for practice.

And then, when then, finally, they were ready to start. He'd be like, nah, nah, I already got it. He would get better material when they didn't know they were being recorded. Would they be okay with that? Like, so will you. Would you get permission afterwards? So is that a lie?

No, I don't think it's lie anymore. It's a sort of truth-deferred, you right, St. But according to Jacob Smith, fun was like, this is a great trick. Yes, you know, the red light goes off in the gripe booth, but a red light goes on in fun's mind. And so, after the war, he pitches this idea as candid microphone, which goes on the year on ABC in 1947. The program that brings you the sequitly recorded conversations of all kinds of people,

as they react in real life to all kinds of situations. No one ever knows when he's talking into the candid microphone. M-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m- on our candid microphones. Can you hear me? I can. That is tepid water. Teppid water, I'm sorry, the water's not... You know, not to my liking. Up to snuff. Yeah, and my standards. Why does my throat so tight? See, that's the tepid water now, all of a sudden.

Yeah. It seems not so... Bourbon would have helped. Ha ha ha ha. All right, okay, we're here to talk about much more exciting things, I think. So when you were working with Alan on candid microphone, what was he like?

Like, how did you see him? Alan was a very able, very bright young guy. He had a face of an every man. These big chipmunk cheeks. Rather short and a little plump. Probably is about 5'10". And he could chime you when he wanted to. Chime me right out of your shoes.

Or he could be... ...his wildly maniacal, overroar person. I mean, he had this huge temper. Sunni says when they were just starting the show, sometimes Alan would get so mad. He would throw things sometimes. Like, fling pencils and other producers. Well, there were only four of us and the secretary.

That was it. That was the core of what we did. And we all had to do everything. I mean, Alan... The man was the hit microphone. They even get around to you someday. That man was Alan. Alan was the arbiter, obviously, of whether we did something or didn't do something.

So what was, like, what was the goal for the show? The goal was to, yeah, now, was to reflect people as they are in their unguarded moments. We try to bring in the real McCoy on-candid microphone. That's what fascinated the fun, the beauty of everyday conversation. We go out of the studio into the world. Everyday life.

Capture our candid glimpses of people like you. What the sociologist Irving Goffman calls bugging the backstage. Right? So what we would do is... Everyday, Sunny and crew would go to their office in Manhattan. This two-room office. Sit down at their desks. And think up ideas, separately scratching our heads and say the Alan, what about this?

I'm gonna shave every day if I don't shave my wife gets right after me. Like, what if we bugged a barber shop or a magazine stand? Oh, maybe that's something we could, you know... Did you see the green shoes? Or... Green! restaurant or shoe store. I don't know where to get the cake. So what they do is they take this big clunky portable recorder. It was like a suitcase. It weighed I think maybe 60 pounds, but they put a handle on top and said it's portable. He says that they would lug around this massive suitcase to wherever it was.

They were recording and they tried to hide it so that massive suitcase to wherever it was they were recording and they tried to hide it so that no one would see it so they could record this tape which they did. In all these different locations including the women's bathroom. But by and large, the tape they gathered, fun, was disappointed to discover that it was the most uninteresting garbage you could imagine. Yeah, it was frustrating. It doesn't have, you know, the nice shape, the rise and fall, the climax that is going to keep listeners hooked.

Now, that presented us with a neat problem. They had a half hour show. Primetime. That they needed to fill. I hear how desperate I was. I was having a date, a first date with a young woman. I bugged my car and tried to see how she would sound on a first date. She found out about that. It was not amusing. That was the last date. How did it go though? It was not very interesting. You got to that point where anything was you was so

desperate to get stuff as you did unlikely things like that. So here they had this show that was supposed to be about real people, real talk, everyday conversation, but turned out that sucked. So then the question became, how can we mix it up, how can we stir it up, how can we change this into something more spectacular? And that's when Alan Funt added a little wrinkle. It's something that Jacob Smith has called, I was calling it the rile. So the basic idea of the rile is that instead of just letting people yammer on

which didn't seem to work, you gotta get in there. You gotta juice the action to get that right shape. The man with a hidden mic had a good one when he dropped into a tailor shop. Would you start to hear in candid mic is like this strange situation. Like he would go into a tailor shop with a microphone up his sleeve and he would ask the guy. I have to have a suit of clothes made up for kangaroo.

A kangaroo, that's right. A hidden safe. Oh, you can hand or ask. Like, here's another one. Play the moaning trunk. This is Sonny's favorite. He says that one day, they called a mover to come over to their office to move this trunk.

They're going to camp over with it now, okay? And inside the trunk, the mover did know this was a guy. And his job was to sound eerie, to basically moan every time the mover tried to move that trunk. Just be very gentle over there, wouldn't it? No! What is it? Never mind. The moan, every time the mover tried to move that trunk. I give us my slip. What do you mean a slip? I want to have a signature that I delivered there. I want to have a signature sign for that. My God, a slip for them. Still got off such great mold.

The classic format that worked for Allen. Where's getting people into situations. That was what it is. Where they were frustrated. No, it's not a real business. What's the other thing? It was made up kind of noise. There's no noise.

You don't hear anything. You mean I don't hear anything. Come on on thought we've been waiting since last night let's get this thing out of here and just keeps going and going and going and going it gives me the creeps to the handles on that one oh come on don't be silly never mind what it is I don't just driving them nuts until finally He's your twenty dollars to look for another truckman. They lose their temper and we get to the music And that's the climax that's the closure now the whole thing has a shape It starts slow and then crescendo cres crescendo, boom! He's inventing this new kind, a new format of entertainment. It sounds totally obvious, but this is basically like reality TV in a nutshell.

Like, this is one of the first times where you have that familiar hybrid of this highly artificial and constructed situation, but then inside of it. I've snippet of life. We've all been there. Situations where we've been frustrated, where we don't understand what's going. Situations where we bewildered. So fun would start pushing this format, tweaking it,

changing it, trying out new permutations, and sometimes it's very much like a fly on the wall. You know, there these kind of poignant segments of listening to... Um, time is time to get up. A wife trying to wake up her husband. Ah, darling, the clock rang 15 minutes ago. Alright, I have an hour. Yeah, that one's kind of beautiful.

Uh, uh, uh, that's how it's produced from Act Kilti. So intimate is what's so incredible. Right. You've got a lot to do today. You're supposed to be in early. In this one, Funt got the wife to be in on the gag. Come on darling. You can't keep this up. It's not stolen anymore. What if you rip one?

I'll be up just for you. Will you please get up? And if please go away. Goose yourself. Tom, I think if you take a shower, you'll feel good. I think if you of everyday life, but where do we stop? And obviously it did prompt letters. A few hisses and catcalls. Have you heard the one where I was just listening to it the other day where um...

Where a listener writes into complain about that one? Yeah, yeah, that was actually really cool. Oh, yeah, tell us, tell us about it. Well, so. One lady took us at our word and wrote us a few well-chosen ones that really made our ears burn. She's writing into complaint that this was, you know, crossing the line. So what Funt does is he goes up to her door to talk to her,

but he goes with a hidden mic. I'm with the American Broadcasting Company, and I wonder if I could have just a couple of minutes of your time. Is that all right? Yeah. You wrote us a letter the other day about one of our programs called the Candid Microphone and I gather from your letter that you don't like it very much. No, I don't.

Well, what are some of the things you find objectionable about it? Well, I don't like it because I think it's snooping, out and out snooping. Out and out snooping. Is that right? In your letter, you said a little, you said a little more strongly. You said you saw where a bunch of dirty, sneaking spies. Well, I suppose at the time when I was listening to the program, I felt that way.

You get to see people in their homes, except brainlessly. I heard that one program about being, what was it that you went into some man's bedroom? Oh, you mean the one where a wife awakened the husband? Awakened the husband and there was a poor fellow. He needed no, he was talking for, speaking for the public.

Because there is sort of put him in a bad light, don't you think? Well, you may have something yet, but don't you think it's funny to sound the man makes when he awaken? Yes, it's funny, but there are only for him, though, and may have something here, but don't you think it's funny to sound the man makes when he wakes? Yes, it's funny, but there only for him, though, and he's on Bedroom, and I'm sure he doesn't enjoy having the whole world know about it.

Do you? Well? Would you? What do you think most people are nervous from self-conscious in front of a microphone? Not anymore. I think most people take to a microphone very nicely. Do you feel you talk just about the same way

if you know you were talking on a microphone right right now? Yes I would. There'd be no difference what's the one? No difference. Well now look let me show you this is a microphone and what you've just said is is ready to go out from coast to coast. Does that make any difference to you? So nice to do it this point. Thanks did away. You see your mind not coming in here and talking to you this point. Thanks, did it away? You see, your mind aren't coming in here and talking to you this way. Do you think we took an unfair advantage of you? I think so at the moment.

This conversation may not be worth a nickel, but would you like to have it on the air? Yes. You would. Of course I would. Because I want the whole world to know of my opinion on this subject. Oh my god, that's amazing. She just switched. Exactly.

And you can hear in her voice this weird tension, right? I have this one advisor, her name is Jillipore. She has this idea. I'm bastardizing it. But to put it crudely, we all kind of have these two drives. One drive for privacy, we don't want people in our bedrooms listening to us. That is the height of creepiness. And then on the other hand, we have this drive for publicity. It's exciting to be the star and it's exciting to have people pay attention to you.

And these two drives, the drive for privacy, and the drive for publicity are sort of competing in us. So coming up that tension, well, it just takes off. Literally, literally, it takes off. Yes, it gets super interesting. That's after the break. I'm Chad Abumrod.

I'm Robert Proll,itch. Stay with us. This is Josh LaRouche calling from Los Angeles. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.

Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crowwich. This is Radio Lab. Let's get back to our story from a producer, a lot of Nasser, about Alan Funt, the man with a hidden microphone where we left off, he had just made a radio show called Candid Mike. Well, so it did in fact people like this program? Was it a hit? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it moves pretty quickly to television.

Candid camera with Alan Funn. In the spring of 1949, the show premieres on NBC. Welcome to the Candid camera program. And the show, it's the exact same premise. Set up weird or frustrating situations, try and catch people's reactions, but when the show goes out on TV, and here's the man who's so very murdered. According to Jacob Smith, it just doesn't catch on. A lot of viewers think that it's mean-spirited, that the subjects are being somehow mistreated. There were critics who were very unnerved and upset by it. There were people, certainly, but- Well, what did the critics say? Oh, man, I made a list here of a whole bunch of the criticisms from the 40s and 50s and they're great They're like so like they're so sweeping so okay, so so there was this one guy in the New Yorker. This is in 1950

Who said and I love this I love this for my money? Candid camera is sadistic poisonous Anti-human, and sneaky. Wait, there was another, hold on, there was another kind of great string of adjectives. Let me just find it. There's so many of these. Here, another guy, different guy from the New Yorker, he found Alan Funt, coarse, nagging, suspicious, and mis-entropic, and to make matters worse, zestfully so. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha even all through the fifties, the show, it's on and off, doesn't really get its audience.

It moves around different networks. And all the while, he's tweaking it, changing it, adapting it. And in the early sixties, he hits on something. A second little tweak that would make all the difference. Funst term was the reveal. The reveal. Now he done it here and there, but by 1962 he locks it in. You start to see this thing happen over and over at the end of segments. It's so commonplace now that it seems crazy someone even had to invent it. Classic reveal is let's say the gag is in a diner and they're serving this guy a tiny little teacup.

And what is it? I'm trying to go a bunch of things. They'd come with coffee, would it? And he wanted a big coffee mug and they serve him this tiny little teacup. Oh, I've come up. And he's like, what's going on? Just your idea to come with coffee. So this guy gets pissed off and previously,

Funt would have let that keep going. But now, right as the guy is about to blow, Funt either walks out himself or he sends someone out, and they kind of grab the guy and they're like, they show him the hidden camera on camera. And as he's looking at that hidden camera, and he's like, huh? The camera zooms in on his face. And Jacob Smith says that sometimes fun would even actually have to hold people in place for that very moment. Because one of their first reactions are to turn away or to cover their face.

So he would sometimes have to physically restrain them and turn them towards the camera so that they can capture that one fleeting moment. And in that moment you see so much on their face. They're angry, they're embarrassed, they're ashamed, they're confused. They don't know how to feel. And then right at that moment, Funt says the magic words. Smile, you're on-handed camera.

And it's all, everything's absolved, all of a sudden. Everything is made okay, and that's the moment. Everything is made okay. And then the chorus, but when you least expect it, you're the star today. Smile, you're on candy camera. Yeah. Something something. Hocus focus, you're in focus.

It's your lucky day. It's your lucky day. That's interesting. So it went from being like, you've been creeping in fire. I hate you, I was fucking. Yeah, yeah. Oh, thank you, Al, for fun. And this works much better, I take it. Yeah, it was hugely successful.

It was one of the top ranked shows from basically all of the early 1960s, millions, if not tens of millions of people, watched it. And I think part of the reason why was that without that sort of meanness, they'd bled out the meanness and people could now sort of freely see it as what it really was, which were these kind of little people's into human nature.

Like the first one I ever saw was the elevator sketch. Do you know the elevator sketch? No, the walk me through it. Oh, the elevator sketch. It's just really simple. It's really simple and it's so beautiful. The gentleman in the elevator now is a candidate star. Basic setup is Guy walks into an elevator. There's a hidden camera. He doesn't know it.

He is a fella with his hat on in the elevator. He is like everybody else wearing his overcoat in a hat, and he stands in the middle of the elevator. And then all of the other people in the elevator who we later learn are Confederate, they take off their hats. And one by one by one. One hat off, two hats off, five hats off. You're watching him through the open elevator door,

and he's just sort of standing there awkwardly and then he just sort of... Little by little. Has it taintly as he just takes off his hat and then holds it in front of his, you know, chest? And now do you think we could reverse the procedure? Watch. Then all of the people around him,

they put their hats back on. And then he's sort of just looking around and like it's almost it's happening at this it's somewhere between conscious and subconscious level and then he sort of just puts his hat back on It's really funny. It's really really this guy wasn't in on it He was not in on it. He clearly just was trying to to fit in in this weird way It's interesting like the like I never watched the TV show when I was young, but it's weird, when I was seven, we would say all the time, like smile, you're on candid camera,

even though I'd never seen the show. So it was like the idea of the show was like in a way way bigger than the actual show. Yeah, it kind of became a meme, but it was less about kind of investigating human behavior and more about vanity in this weird way. It was like this idea that this tiny sliver of your private life could be excised and then broadcast to the world.

And that idea, that idea would get away from Alan Funt, and it would go all over the world, and then it would come right back and bite him in the butt in this really funny and strange way. What happened? Well, okay, it starts like this. Hi, baby. Hi, how are you? Good, come on in. We'll start the story with this woman. Oh, we all know. Marilyn Funt. The ex-wife of Alan Funt. And we're on, do you want me to start?

We're on the plane? Okay. So it's February 3rd, 1969. New York airport. That's Marilyn Funt's daughter, Alan Funt's daughter, Juliet Funt. My mom, my dad, my baby brother and I are on a flight. Straight flight to Miami. And I'm about one and a half, so me, I don't have any personal recollection of it.

But she says she knows this story because it's like family lore. So we were in first class and we're on the flight. A largely uneventful flight. Thank you so much for flying with us. For about the first 20 minutes. Maybe an hour, who knows? There are about a hundred miles or so offshore. And, you know, they get their meals,

they go to the bathroom. And all of a sudden, shh. Man stood up in the back of the flight, and he took out a knife, and he put it to the throat of one of the flight attendants and he walked her all the way down the center aisle and into the cockpit, passing every passenger on the flight attendants and he walked her all the way down the center island into the cockpit,

passing every passenger on the flight. I did hear noises which were a little bit different in the back. That's Fred Weaver. Retired Eastern Airlines pilots. He was one of the flight crew and next to him, yes sir. Copilot Lowell Miller. They were expecting breakfast. You know I hear the knock on the door and I just opened the door. And I turned around to see who it was. There she is. The flight attendant. With the hijacker behind her with the knife up against her throat. He was agitated saying, Cuba, Cuba. He also was saying that his friend had a bomb in the back of the airplane. saying that his friend had a bomb in the back of the airplane. I do write that and I said, uh-oh, here we go. The sturdis was walking around talking with all the passengers asking them if anybody knew how to speak Spanish.

That's Jim Zach, he was back in coach. He was 11 years old at the time. I didn't think much of it until the announcement came on the loudspeaker. The pilot gets on and says, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, we have some gentlemen up here that want to go to Cuba. So we're going to a van. And then came the part of the story that I've been told was the waiting, the frozen silent staring at each other, waiting portion. But then this one woman began to recognize my father and she began to look and look

back and forth to other folks and point a little bit and there was a slow building of her certainty. And then... All of a sudden she bolted up and said, Wait a second. We are not being hijacked. It's a candid camera stunt. I'm quoting him, the plane went absolutely crazy. Everyone started laughing. People began cheering.

Oh, and look who's here. He's pulling one of his stunts. Samping their feet. The tension dripped off of them. Everyone's so relieved. People were lined up with their air sickness bags to get autographs from my father. So then they relax. And through all of this, my dad is begging.

No, I know it's not me. I'm not involved. We are being hijacked. And they said, come on, Alan. We know it's you. So Alan Funt is trying to persuade people. He's not getting any purchase. He sees behind him. He sees behind him.

He sees a priest. Right. He runs over to the priest. And said, Father, will you please help me convince these people? Tell them this is no joke. This is not a stunt. That maniac is for real. And what is it guys say?

You can't get me, Alan Marks. Oh no, you don't. Are we supposed to see a guy with a cleric, with a little collar and everything? Oh no, you don't have to. Right, right, right. Mima, where is the hijack? Uh, terrifying people up in the cockpit. Oh yeah, he stayed in the cockpit.

But eventually at some point, he hears this kind of commotion from first class. And so he does open the door. And he pokes his head out and everybody begins to applaud and applaud and applaud. We're not totally sure about that last detail might be an embellishment. But what seems clear is that around this time Alan Funt is starting to feel kind of trapped. He'd been so successful at bugging the backstage, at musking up the line between private and public and real life and showbiz that he couldn't, when he needed to, he couldn't reassert that clear line.

I was worried that he was going to come up with some idea to try to mitigate the situation and deal with it. Actually, what she says ended up happening was he got so frustrated that he decided to just deal with the hijackers himself. Yes. So he starts formulating a plant. To grab the guy and knock him to the floor and my mother's saying, Don't you do anything? You idiot, I have two babies on this plane. Leave it alone. Sit down.

So he's going to be like Zara. Yes. Apparently the flight attendants had to tell him to sit down. Like what happens now? Well, you took it to the point where now the plane is landing in what I guess the people in the plane think is Florida. People in the front of the plane know it's Cuba. No, it's Cuba, correct.

When we taxied into the terminal. We're greeted as the plane is opened by Cuban military officers. I saw a Cuban soldier, he had a gun in his hand, and he had bandaliers, you know, with lots of bullets on it. And they've been circling the airplane. And it seems at this point, everyone on the plane, for maybe the first time was like,

oh. Everybody really got it. That it was like, oh. Everybody really got it. That it was a hijacking. That was finally the reveal, just really late. And the story goes, when they're getting off the plane, when these Cuban soldiers are escorting them off the plane, he was standing at his seat. And through a twisty aspect of human psychology,

all the passengers were filing down the aisle past him. They began to take their feelings out on him, and they became angry at him. And each one of them had sort of their own grab bag of curses for him. As if he had tricked them, as if he had set them up in some way. And the last person in that line turned to my father and said, smile my ass. That just happened. Smile my ass was the closing remarks on the whole business. Smile my ass. To me, the meaning of this scene is that here's a man who he has helped create a situation where people in some kind of peril don't know that they're in peril that they've been blinded

by the device that he created. It suggests that's the beginning of something blurry which didn't used to be as much. You know, it's funny, like when I hear that plain scene, it's like, I'm almost nostalgic for that kind of confusion because what we have now is like, actually way more confusing, I think. Yeah, because we all have these cameras, so we're always taking these candid pictures of ourselves,

but like, obviously in theory they're candid, but they're not really candid because we've taken like four of them and the one we choose we put a filter on. What I think it's interesting now it is what Jacob Smith talks about as being interesting which is that uh... That's producer Matt Keeldey again, he was sort of off mic as we were hashing this out. Now what becomes fun to look at isn't looking for people in their faces they make when they find out that they're on camera.

It's like poking and pulling apart people who know that they know that they're on camera. Like what I do when I read people's Facebook pages and Twitter is like I'm trying to figure out what they were thinking when they crafted that sentence and how they were trying to represent themselves and present themselves to the world You're trying to figure out what part of that post is real. Yeah, exactly Well, what he's really saying is that is that everyone who becomes an Alan front and

And the people on the plane like the confusion is very basic like if you're going to go on Facebook Then you're a little bit of an Alan front if you're gonna go on Twitter If you're gonna do that then you're a little bit of an Alan front. If you're going to go on Twitter, if you're going to do that, then you're producing these shows. Then if you're actually trying to figure out how the other people are reacting to you, how you read them or how they're reading you. Yeah, then you're a little bit like you're stuck on the plane because you don't know what's real and what show. Yeah. In a way, if you split Alan front in half as both the showmen and the audience, now everyone is in the showmen and the audience. I could both part.

Yeah. It's like I think we're Alan Funting ourselves. Here. We're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel we're the ones that make us feel You're on Candy Camera! Enormous thanks to our producer, Lattice Fnassar. Also co-produced from Act Kieltie and a special thanks to... The Funt family, they couldn't have been more accommodating and more generous. Also Jim Zach and the Eastern Airlines Employee Association. And that's it, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krohwitch.

Thanks for listening. Dord of Message. Hey, this is Juliette Funt, reading the credit. Hello, this is Jacob Smith from Northwestern University. Crow Witch. Thanks for listening. Matthew Kielte, Robert Crowich, Andy Mills, Latis Knosser, Kelsey Paget, Aryan Watt, Molly Webster, Soren Wheeler, and Jamie York. With help from Simon Adler, Alexandra Lee Young, Abigail Kiel, and Alexandra Brennan. Our fact checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris. That's it. Okay, smile. You're on radio lab. End of message. Smile. You're on radio lab. End of message.