You can listen to Jean Shepherd himself tell the story of the "I, Libertine" hoax during a radio show here: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/06/the-i-libertine.html It's 40 min long, but well worth it and hilariously funny. I've always been fascinated by this story, it speaks volumes of the world we live in and how people are easily influenced and manipulated.
Hundreds of his shows from the 50s through to the 70s are archived at archive.org—so many in fact that I was able to locate the very first show I ever listened to as a kid decades ago. I hadn't heard the episode since its original broadcast but I recognized it immediately which indicates how vividly he can tell a story.
A couple of particularly good ones that I remember:
The part that particularly ticked me was that journalists were literally writing about having had lunch with a non-existent person. Further confirmation (bias) for the thesis that most media will publish lies without compunction.
'The imaginary author appeared in a column by the Post‘s Earl Wilson. “Had lunch with Freddie Ewing today…” he shared. Having once profiled Shepherd for his paper, Wilson presumably was in on the joke.'
Btw if this has peaked your interest in Jean Shepherd and you want to hear more, Hearing Voices podcast did a two part tribute to him called "A Voice In the Night":
There's also a decent amount of his radio shows recorded and digitized by fans under the name "The Brass Figlagee" which is also available as a podcast @ http://shepcast.blogspot.cz
No pun :) All I wanted to do was share more stuff about Shep because this is the exact path that got me into him - discovering "I, Libertine", listening to the HV two-parter and then trawling the Brass Figlagee archives
First thing I do after reading this story: search online to make sure this is not itself a hoax. Seems legitimate though, or somebody has planned the hoax since 2009.
I was interested to note that Theodore Sturgeon, who ended up writing the real "I, Libertine", is the same science-fiction writer and author of the famous "Sturgeon's Law": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
A delightful story .. I tried to work out a way such a hoax could be played out today, and I'm sure there are other examples .. I figure, though, that with Google and the interwebs, either one of two things can happen: a) Nobody gets hoaxed because they figure it out rapidly, or b) everyone gets hoaxed because: hivemind.
Actually, now that I think of it, probably both conditions can occur simultaneously .. ouch. We really are a hive species.
My reasons for this are a) it is very difficult to find any pre-2005 citation for the joke, despite one supposed reference from 1975; b) the details of the story don't seem to me very plausible given what I know of comedians; and c) it's the kind of thing Penn Jillette would do.
So the story may have already played out in the modern era, if not in this case then perhaps in others: the 'Net is so full of nonsense and mis-information it would be very hard to tell. Social fragmentation of information sources likely makes it even easier today... you could argue that Birthers and the like are an example of this kind of hoax (or victims of it.)
It's a peek into the insider game of comedy. Every group has some gag, some saying that gets circulated that doesn't leave that group due to lack of context -- you had to be there type things -- or due to it being risque and taboo, like the Aristocrats. A similar thing for newspaper writers would be the Order of the Occult Hand [1], in which writers tried to slip that phrase into copy without the editors discovering it. These things are not cataloged because cataloging them would defeat the whole purpose. While the net has a lot of info, there's quite a bit of inside baseball that doesn't make it online.
Gilbert Gottfried used the joke in 2001 after a 9/11 joke backfired terribly, although the movie was apparently already in progress then, the author of the article says it was a well-known inside joke. http://observer.com/2001/10/observatory-6/
Having everything easily accessible through Google doesn't help. People just don't check the facts.
Some untruths even spread dispite the poster knowing the source isn't reliable, just because they have a vested interest in the subject. Blatant racism against gypsies an arabs spread like wildfire on Facebook in sweden this way.
It was the way the DJ and his audience were openly 'discussing' the hoax on the radio show and feedback in the evenings that I found interesting (and funny).
Suspect any gentle conspiracy like that now would have to be in a closed forum or mailing list or something.
Google would not help as people rarely hit the web to know more. If at all, current web with Twitter and Facebook in there would further ease spreading hoaxes. And we do see so many examples of that every now and then.
Great fun -- but this version of the prank is probably only about 85% accurate. It's not clear the phantom book ever did make any best-seller lists, though it certainly did get talked about. Here's a 2013 telling from The Awl that's a little more careful with the details:
http://www.theawl.com/2013/02/the-man-behind-the-brilliant-m...
