Laughing to the bank

As usual, it was the little guys, the wrong guys, in handcuffs yesterday.

The bottom line, as the corporate types like to measure these things, is that the Turner Broadcasting guerrilla marketing assault on Boston was a fabulous success. Suddenly a no-name cartoon about a talking box of French fries is the talk of the town from coast to coast. Can you believe it, dude, those bumpkins in Boston actually thought it was, like, a real bomb? It all will eventually be turned into fodder for the stoner fans of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," part of Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" series that makes a living mocking old folks like me who just don't get it.

Yesterday the two alleged artists, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, were answering charges in Charlestown District Court. Meanwhile, Phil Kent, Turner Broadcasting chief executive, had his public relations department in Atlanta issue an apology early enough to not intrude on lunch at the Four Seasons. Sam Ewen, the chief jokester at New York-based Interference Inc. and one of Brandweek Magazine's Guerrilla Marketers of the Year, was in the bunker, out of sight, the strategy of all guerrillas when things get too hot.

You can bet that Turner Broadcasting's parent, Time Warner Inc., will pay for the mess here in Boston. This should be the shortest negotiation in the history of negotiations. The City of Boston is putting its cost at responding to the Turner scare at $750,000 -- the cost of a single 30-second spot for "Aqua Teen" on American Idol. A better starting number is 10 times that, or $7.5 million, the size of Time Warner chairman Richard Parson's most recent bonus.

The morning after, it's easy to pile on Boston authorities for overreacting. But like it or not this is life in our post 9/11 world. You don't go around planting blinking electronic devices under highway bridges and elevated subway tracks. If the geniuses at Interference Inc. -- talk about living down to your name -- didn't think about that, they should have.

Quite likely, they did. Those little square men giving the middle finger to Boston were not aimed at readers of the business pages, but at people like archer823, who in his post on Boston.com yesterday was boiling over with contempt for all the dopes in the news media, the City of Boston "and our government in general" who so overreacted.

"What I love," wrote archer823. "Aqua Teen Hunger Force has never had so much attention in the mass media news. The first five minutes of last night's news wasn't even so much about the day's events as it was explaining what Adult Swim is . . . The problem at its heart is that something like Adult Swim talks to an underground counterculture, it talks to the people who aren't really a part of mainstream society, people who are reporting on it don't understand why it exists, and what's the point.

"What else I think is hysterical," he goes on. "Boston wants $500,000 for yesterday's events. [That's $750,000 and rising, pal, but no matter.] Ted Turner is probably laughing . . . That's a fraction of what the coverage could have cost him if he went via traditional channels."

Bottom line, in a world where you get famous by being infamous, almost everyone wins. Berdovsky and Stevens, nobodies 48 hours ago, become cult figures among the counterculture set, at least for 15 minutes. Ewen, the Interference jokester, becomes a guerrilla marketing legend, and the ratings get a big bump at the Cartoon Network, a good thing for Turner executives like Kent come bonus time.

The only losers: The Boston cops and the firefighters and everyone else, dopes that they are, who went out and did their jobs well on Wednesday only to become the butt of jokes on late-night television. Life is funny, OK, but not necessarily fair.

Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.