‘Yes Men’ parody pokes painful fun

The first two people to appear on camera in “The Yes Men” are Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, two guys you’ve probably never heard of, but whose anti-globalization-

activist-cum- performance-art antics are chronicled in this pungent little documentary by Dan Ollman, Sarah Price and Chris Smith.

The third person to appear on camera, in case you missed the memo clarifying the film’s progressive/leftist stance, is filmmaker Michael Moore.

Now that Ollman, Price and Smith have gotten the film’s politics out of the way, it’s simply a matter of establishing who exactly Bichlbaum and Bonanno – part of a loose-knit coalition of provocateurs known collectively as the Yes Men – are. In short order, we learn that the two merry pranksters, as a result of a Web site (gatt.org) set up to parody that of the World Trade Organization, have made a small sideline out of getting mistakenly invited to speak at international conferences, seminars and TV talk shows as representatives of the WTO.

As bogus WTO spokesmen, Bichlbaum and Bonanno make a series of increasingly outlandish public proposals: The first has to do with vote selling, another with the advocacy of slave labor, a third calls for the recycling of human excrement into hamburgers for the Third World. But what’s so funny – and, at the same time, not so funny – about their deadpan shtick is not the content of their “material” but their audiences’ often uncritical reactions.

Like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” it takes their most offensive plan to get a real rise out of people, in this case, a college class. The political protesters profiled in this engaging portrait are as smart as they are smart-ass. Yes, “The Yes Men” is funny, but it’s the humor that hurts.

“The Yes Men” is playing at 3, 5:30 and 8 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Nov. 23-24 at The Met. Tickets are $9, $8 for students, seniors and military (227-7638).