Vanessa Bayer
Windle… Adam Driver
Harper… Cecily Strong
Jay Pharoah
Pete Davidson
Jon Rudnitsky
Bobby Moynihan
[Starts with a classroom with the students and adults]Vanessa: Guys, if I had a remote, I’d be hitting mute. Okay? That’s better. So we’re continuing awareness week today with four speakers who’d like to talk to you about bullying.
[Cut to Windle and Harper]Windle: Hey team. I’m Windle. This is Harper. And we’re here to talk to you about a form of mental harassment that we both got mixed up in during high school. Who’s familiar with social puppeteering?
[The students have no clue]Well, it’s surprising.
Harper: Okay, well in simplest terms, it’s manipulating others for your own amusement. Hijacking someone’s reality to feel powerful.
Windle: Here’s an example of something I did. In the sixth grade, I paid like 80 kids a buck to go up to this kid Nathan and say, “Hey, nice hat.” So, what’s the problem? Nathan wasn’t wearing a hat. If 80 kids say you’re wearing a hat, you start thinking, “Maybe I’m wearing a hat.” And watching him wrestle with that made me feel good. I took the most valuable thing he had, his mind. That’s the idea behind social puppeteering. Any question?
[Cut to the students]Jay: Yeah. How come we don’t know about this?
Pete: I know. It sounds so fun.
[Cut to Vanessa]Vanessa: Okay guys. This shouldn’t sound fun to you, okay? They’re here to tell you how bad it is.
[Cut to Windle and Harper]Harper: Yeah, absolutely. I mean guys, if you get into this, it will take over your life. I spent thousands of dollars hunting [unintelligible] [Cut to the students]
Jon: [noting down] Oh, please explain that.
[Cut to Harper]Harper: Well, I hired day labors to build an enormous replica of his room in an airplane hanger so he woke up in a three storey bed the length of an Olympic swimming pool thinking he’s now half an inch tall. I mean, I went all out. I got the people who made the Jurassic Park dinosaurs to build a giant animatronic daddy long legs he had to fight. Kid peed himself and hid in a giant lego for hours. It was pretty great. Also, wrong.
[Cut to Windle and Harper]Windle: It really will ruin your life. My brother doesn’t speak to me because I vampired him. I won’t pour you with the details.
[Cut to Jon]Jon: No, no. Please do.
[Cut to Vanessa]Vanessa: Well, in a nutshell, I hired this weird Albino dude to bite him and run away. And a week later, I started sprinkling a small amount of molly into his dinner every night. So at night he feels amazing but during the day, he feels a little bombed out because the molly was wearing off. So he started craving the night coz that’s when he got the molly. The night time became his magical time. He was convinced that he was a vampire. He bit our dad.
[Cut to the classroom]Bobby: Excuse me. I’m sorry to interrupt but I think I may have been socially puppeteered. [Cut to Bobby] See, I’m not a transfer student. I’m a 37 year old man. Two months ago, what I thought was an elite police squad hired me to pose as a high school student and gather intel about a new drug called Squiff. But I haven’t heard from them since and they definitely haven’t been paying me. So…
[Cut to Windle and Harper]Harper: Oh, yeah. You know what? I’m started to say it man, but you got 21 Jump Streeted!
[Cut to Bobby]Bobby: Wow! I can’t believe it happened to me.
[Cut to Windle]Windle: It can happen to anyone.
[Video pauses]Male voice: Don’t be a pupet. Learn more at www.stopsocialpuppeteering.org.
[The End]