“I fired a manager after he said to me, ‘Do something crazy and it’ll get on YouTube and your career will take off!’” comedian Christopher Titus told me in an interview this summer. “I looked at him and was like, ‘Really, that’s your plan? Really?’”

While Titus may be cynical about creating a phony exhibition as a method of infiltrating the public consciousness, media-savvy Republican Senator Ted Cruz found success using the same tactic last week when he staged what could be mistaken for a post-modern performance-art piece on the the Senate floor, but has become known as his “faux filibusterer.”