In Popular Culture
- Many Facebook games operate on a pyramid scheme system where you are greatly hindered in the game play unless you recruit your friends and family to play the game too.
- Stanton, a character of Charles Maturin's famous novel Melmoth the Wanderer, while put in Bedlam by his relative, finds a plan, written by some of his predecessors in the room he is placed. It is a plan of baptising all the population of Ottoman Empire, beginning with the Turkish ambassador, and is a classical pyramid scheme.
- The feature film Children of Invention tells the story of a mother who gets entangled in a pyramid scheme.
- The novel Welcome to the N.H.K. features a story arc wherein the main character is caught up in a crooked multi-level marketing scam called 'Mouse Road'.
- On the NBC sitcom The Office, it is revealed that Michael did not attend college because he lost all his tuition money in a pyramid scheme. At a later date, the same character unintentionally attempts to recruit members of his staff into selling calling cards, not realizing that he had been conned into a pyramid scheme until it is made clear by an employee.
- Season one of the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show, features an episode in which Jeremy becomes involved in a pyramid scheme after being ignorantly drawn into it by his neighbor Toni, whom he's trying to sleep with.
- "The Fighter (2010 film)" features Dicky Ward attempting a pyramid scheme to help pay for his brother's training.
- In the Sitcom "Two and a Half Men" Alan runs a Ponzi scheme in the episode 'That Darn Priest' in the name of his chiropractor business until Rose finds out and threatens to tell all his investors if he doesn't stop
Read more about this topic: Pyramid Scheme
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)