Today’s viral video is the following slice of cosplaying fanboy awesomeness by Improv Everywhere:

This is geektastic. My favorite is the Galactic Rebellion for Dummies book. Such a nice touch. On the surface, this is a great piece of theatrical silliness. But the venue chosen for the re-enactment created something a bit more meaningful for me. Look at the faces on the passengers at the beginning of the video. Then watch as they light up as the scene progresses and everyone sees what’s going on. There’s something deeper going on here.

The New York Subway doesn’t have a reputation for being populated by happy people. New York in general is thought of as an aggressive, angry city where people need to have warthog thick skin just to make it from home to work. Then mix in a dense population and congested travel lines. Thanks to religious extremists and the vogons who run the government, mass transit is about as fun as a rectal examination. No liquids. Take your shoes off. Say goodbye to your underwear. If you’re not going by private jet, you’ve got to deal with rude people, smelly people, crazy people, violent people and screaming babies. Sitting in a packed subway car is nobody’s idea of fun, especially with the added tension of constant threats of terrorism. Tension and fear is ever present in the eerie way people move around an airport terminal or a subway platform. Everyone is deliberate in their actions. They are deliberately quiet, deliberately still, and deliberately trying not to do anything that would attract the attention of the cops.

That mood is utterly banished in this video. People laugh. People smile. People forget how awful it is to get from point A to point B and they enjoy themselves for five minutes. The complicated web of religion, politics, fear, and public policy vaporizes and all of a sudden it’s just a few dozen people enjoying themselves. And if that’s not the pursuit of happiness, I don’t know what is. So hats off to you, you pack of guerrilla theater nerds, for bringing a little fun to a public space that is ordinarily devoid of joy. If people can laugh on the New York Subway, they can laugh anywhere.