A kazoo is always a noise complaint. The bagpipe, for all its discordance, is played at funerals; the pipe organ jolts churchgoers but also moves them; even the vuvuzela offers a certain ceremony at sporting events. The kazoo, by contrast, is barely tolerated at children’s birthday parties. The instrument’s sorry reputation disappoints Rick Hubbard, a kazoo virtuoso and the founder of the manufacturer Kazoobie Kazoos. The instrument used to be valued in jazz and in R&B music, “but somewhere along the way, when they started making them out of plastic, they sort of took on the air of ‘toy,’” Hubbard said, adding, “I think it’s mostly just a marketing issue.”

At the time we spoke, Hubbard had been recruited as composer and conductor for an event that might, he hoped, help put the kazoo back on the map: an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for largest kazoo ensemble. The gathering was to be held in Macon, Ga., which has been credited, somewhat speciously, as the birthplace of the instrument. Years ago, back in 1999, Hubbard presided over a similar attempt in Cincinnati. “Thirty thousand kazoos were purchased and distributed at Oktoberfest,” he said. “There were clearly 30,000 people downtown in the streets, and myself and Weird Al Yankovic led the band.” But, he groused, Guinness declined to certify the record. Nobody had been keeping count of the attendees, nor did anyone verify that participants were playing the kazoo consistently.

For this attempt in Macon, the organizers were taking no chances. An official “adjudicator” from the Guinness World Records organization would be present. To break the record, at least 5,191 people would have to play the same tune at the same time for five minutes — in this case, a medley Hubbard had composed of songs by artists the city had claimed: the Allman Brothers, James Brown, Little Richard, Otis Redding. If enough people showed up, the event would be not simply amazing but, per Guinness’s motto, “officially amazing.” The previous record of 5,190 was set in London in 2011, at a star-studded event held during the annual children’s fund-raiser Red Nose Day. Hugh Bonneville and Chris O’Dowd played their kazoos onstage.

Macon’s marketing team had brought in a publicist named Taryn Scher, who, along with her colleagues at her firm, TK PR, had been working for months to garner media attention for the attempt. Regional coverage had been robust. But whether the required 5,191 people would come was still anyone’s guess.

For group events like Macon’s, participants must generally appear somewhere in person, a mandate that has become even harder to fulfill in the years since people fused with their homes during lockdown. And with so many digital metrics for greatness available today — followers, likes, views, shares — thousands of people gathering in one place to pursue a world record seems like a strikingly anachronistic validation. There was a time when Americans gathered by the thousands or tens of thousands routinely, whole cities turning out for the state fair or the air show, but those muscles have atrophied, and now event organizers must deploy enticements to get people to show up.

Indeed, it seems as if the records that require many people to opt into showing up somewhere, especially somewhere in the United States, have grown more elusive. The people of Macon had already twice tried to break a prior “largest kazoo ensemble” record, one that was set in Rochester, N.Y., in 2006 and involved 2,600 people. Macon’s first attempt at breaking that record took place in 2007. Only about 2,000 people showed up. Then in 2008, 717 did. The record became much harder to break in 2009, after a 3,861-strong ensemble gathered in Sydney, Australia. Then, finally, London clinched it.

In May 2024, the city of Kyle, Texas, tried to hold the largest gathering of people with the first name Kyle (no other spellings permitted). The standing first-name record was set in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2017 and drew 2,325 people named Ivan. The Kyle attempt was brought about after the 2023 Kyle Fair, which planners estimated drew nearly 1,500 Kyles. So ahead of the 2024 fair, the city decided to invite a Guinness adjudicator. But on the day of the event, only 706 Kyles participated.

The organizer of the attempt, Rachel Sonnier, was undeterred by the failure. “It was so fun seeing all these people that were so excited to be a part of something larger than themselves,” she said. “Even outside of our world-record attempt, they kind of created a little community.” In fact, in 2023, after 256 Milica Jovanovics of Serbia broke the record for “largest gathering of people with the same first and last name,” previously held by 178 Hirokazu Tanakas of Japan and 164 Martha Stewarts in New York before them, the organizers of the Jovanovic and Tanaka gatherings came together to create the International Same Name Association, which aims to promote world peace through “joyful encounters among people who share the same name.”

Joyful though those encounters may be, it’s difficult to get 250 people (Guinness’s minimum requirement for mass-participation events) to do anything, let alone kazoo in harmony. But in their ongoing attempts at Guinness World Records, companies, cities, nonprofit groups and clubs are still hoping that our lust for glory — official glory, as vetted by a 70-year-old organization — might bring us together.

There are enough distinct categories for records that each Guinness employee I asked pointed to a different one as their favorite. There are food-related records. (“I love a ‘big food’ record,” said the Guinness adjudicator Michael Empric, who would preside over Macon’s kazoo attempt. “I just did one with IHOP that was most pancakes served in eight hours” — 25,689.) There are records concerning the body’s extremes, video-game milestones, collections, feats of stamina and feats of gardening. There are records that defy categorization: “We are going to light a 510-pound man’s fart on fire, and we are interested in knowing if there is a record to be broken on the distance that the flame will go,” a hopeful once wrote to Guinness. The attempt was rejected because of safety concerns.

Each record has its own set of rules, some of them minute. The records that seem the most easily quantifiable can be the most fraught. The tallest and shortest man and woman, for instance, must be measured by a medical professional at six different times in a 24-hour period, because humans shrink throughout the day as a result of spinal compression. Consider the regulations for most dice stacked in one minute (there’s also a record for how many dice a person can stack in 30 seconds and a record for most dice stacked on a cat’s paw): “You have to start with both hands flat on the table,” said Mark McKinley, director of central record services at Guinness. “You can only start on a ‘go.’ You can only touch one dice at a time. The dice have to be this size. They have to be free-standing, and if any fall you cannot return to them.”

“There is a natural theatricality to what seems to be an over-officious organizational setup,” said Craig Glenday, editor in chief of the Guinness World Records book. “We become bogged down in rules because, otherwise, what’s the point in doing it at all?”

Glenday goes a long way toward preserving the image of bookish authority that readers might expect from the company. He has a long list of unusual facts in his Notes app titled “Abalone have five arseholes.” Employees are not able to hold world records, but before he was hired in 2002, Glenday held the record for stretching a Curly Wurly, a British chocolate bar filled with caramel, the farthest distance in three minutes (three feet).

His job is occasionally ridiculous, as when he and his colleagues test out new records in the company’s small headquarters in London, such as a recent application for “fastest time to eat individually wrapped cheese slices.” But his work is just as often mythic. He sometimes travels to adjudicate higher-profile records, particularly the bodily ones, which are his favorite. “I was a little fat kid in school,” he said. “When you’re that age, and you’ve got very little influencing you, and you find a book that said, ‘Here’s what the whole world is like, with all these amazing things happening,’ you can place yourself in that world. I might be the heaviest kid in the class, but this is nothing compared to the world.”

Glenday and the other members of the editorial team work somewhat independently from Guinness’s marketing arm, the Consultancy, created in 2010. The group was formed to capture organizations’ interest in attempting records, often mass-participation events, for promotional purposes. Attendance at large sporting events has been documented since the first edition of “The Guinness Book of Records” in 1955; outside of athletics, the first mention of a mass-participation record was the one for largest banquet, in the 1962 edition of the book. The difference now is that Guinness monetizes these attempts. Marco Frigatti, the senior vice president of the Consultancy, compared the model to the church’s acting as a patron for artists in the 1500s. “They were commissioning a lot of artwork and a lot of projects,” he said. “Somebody was paying for the artwork that we see today. And in the same way, companies have been contributing to huge record feats.”

For the largest mass-participation events, both an adjudicator and an independent auditor, who verifies total attendance, must be present. Empric and McKinley, who worked as an adjudicator before his current post, each have horror stories of having to stand before hundreds of people and deliver the bad news: that all their efforts have failed. Empric said that different organizers have chosen to break the news to attendees in different ways. Some have asked him to leave quietly without fanfare, through the back door, to avoid a “mob-scene situation.” Other clients asked him to stall, keeping the crowd on the hook in hopes that more people will show up. Then there are the organizers who prefer that he relay the unvarnished truth without delay. In those cases, he prepares an exit plan. “Once they know, I need to be evacuated,” Empric said. “Like the president.”

McKinley remembered a time when he had to go onstage after a multiday conference to announce that a corporate record attempt — “something with toilet rolls” — had not been successful. “I’m standing onstage, and the toilet rolls just were launched from every angle of the room.”

The safeguards for mass events are even more important, Frigatti said, to both wow and appease the thousands of people witnessing the proceedings but also to head off accusations that the Consultancy is “selling records.” Frigatti was adamant that while brands pay to license the Guinness name for promotional purposes, “they don’t pay for the records. And as you can imagine, the records that we do for companies are scrutinized very carefully.” He estimated that 20 to 25 percent of records attempted by organizations were failures.

Everyone at Guinness knows that mass-record attempts are hard to pull off. “There’s quite a lot of variables,” Frigatti said. “If you do food, OK, something can go wrong, but you’ve got the ingredients and the team, and you’ve probably done an attempt before on a small scale. But with people, you can’t control them.” There are exceptions, of course, where attendance is somewhat compulsory: “most people performing cartwheels” and “most people performing push-ups” are held by the United States Military Academy Corps of Cadets and the United States Air Force Academy, respectively.

“I think now there is an overload of events and experiences,” said Sam Thumm, the director of marketing for San Francisco’s Gold Bar Whiskey, who in May presided over its attempt to break two drink-related records. That weekend, Thumm said, there were at least a dozen other major events in the city. But hordes of people still arrived at the distillery on Treasure Island, 881 of them setting a record for most people simultaneously stirring drinks. They failed to break the standing record for shaking, however, which would have required 1,711 participants. Thumm marveled at how event planners of yore managed to gather millions of people. “Even when we talk about Treasure Island being built for the World’s Fair in 1939, I’m like, ‘How did these people even hear about this?’”

In 2014, the Town Council of Penzance, in Cornwall, England, tried to bring together the largest number of people dressed as pirates. They drew 14,154 swashbucklers but still fell 77 people short of breaking the record. The town spent more than 56,000 pounds on the attempt, an expenditure that the mayor of Penzance later called “a sorry business.” They tried once more to take the title in 2017 — and failed again. When the organizer of the event faced the crowd to share the bad news, he offered this explanation: “We still haven’t taught the people who go to the pub to get here on time.”

Rachel Sonnier, the organizer of the City of Kyle’s attempt, attributed their Kyle deficit in part to the weather: It was nearly 100 degrees on the day of the count. “I think we unfortunately lost some Kyles standing out in the heat waiting for registration,” she said. The main feedback she received from attendees was “more shade.” She also observed that though social media helped get the word out — participating Kyles came from 49 states and even traveled from abroad — online excitement was a poor barometer for how many people would actually show up.

But many mass-participation events succeed, of course, and those that do are made all the sweeter given the number of people involved. In September 2019, 2,344 residents of Shelby County, Ohio, broke the record for “most people opening drink cans simultaneously,” beating the previous record, set in Japan in 2018, by more than 1,200 participants and cans. For Mike Barhorst, the mayor of Sidney, Ohio, and an organizer of the attempt, events like this are antidotes to phones. “I’m older, but one of my concerns is the amount of time that kids spend on electronic devices — not only kids, but adults,” he said. “Maybe the best thing that could happen is if there was no electric power for 48 hours and people had to talk to each other.”

It’s a sentiment that James Howell, the founder of CF Fitness, shares. He recently spearheaded the largest game of red light/green light, which included 1,423 participants, most of whom were children. “You got to see the fifth graders and sixth graders who know they’re too cool for school get back to their kid mind-set,” Howell said. Those children, he believes, were motivated to put down their phones by a longing for legacy — to be part of history. “Like Mr. Beast.”

Just before 4 p.m. on Friday, March 28, the pristine plastic seats of Macon’s Atrium Health Amphitheater seemed to soften in the late-afternoon sun. When Empric arrived, he slipped on Ray-Ban aviators and surveyed the amphitheater, which was only a year old. “That concrete has not seen a lot,” he said admiringly.

Empric maintained a professional distance from organizers; when someone handed him a bag of Macon swag upon his arrival, he discreetly gave it away. Empric stood with Scher and her deputy, Brenda Cassabon. Scher wore pink sparkly earrings and a large pink sparkly ring — her title in her email signature is “The Sparkle Boss”; Cassabon’s is “Director of Sparkle Strategy.” The women had been at the amphitheater since 9:30 a.m., and Empric questioned them with the deadpan of a pilot preparing an aircraft for takeoff.

Starting at 4 p.m., participants would be counted at the gate, Scher informed him. They would be issued kazoos and ushered to designated sections. There, they would wait in groups of 50 for the attempt to begin. At 5:30 p.m., Hubbard would lead the amphitheater in a rehearsal, and at 6 p.m., the attempt would begin in earnest, policed by 100 volunteer “stewards” who would watch to make sure nobody paused kazoo-ing to take a selfie or ducked out to use the restroom midway through the medley. The stewards would then submit reports to an auditor, in this case a local accountant who was standing nearby in a patch of shade.

As 5:30 p.m. approached, the 2,500 seats had not yet been occupied; the lawn, which would need to be filled with people for the attempt to be a success, was empty except for some children with the zoomies.

In the greenroom, mutiny simmered among the stewards — only 13 of the desired 100 had arrived — some of whom had been waiting in the small space for over an hour. One woman, among the first volunteers to show up, left to use the bathroom. “You better come back,” joked Mark Ballard, an artist who was waiting by the door with his wife, Debra.

Empric walked briskly into the room, collected something from a folder he had left there and walked out again. The stewards stopped their conversations and watched him expectantly. “He was smiling,” Debra said optimistically when he marched out of the room. “Yeah,” Mark replied, “but it wasn’t necessarily an ‘I’m having fun’ smile.”

At about 6 p.m., only 1,781 participants had showed up. Cassabon, Sparkle Strategist, looked crushed. “I’m a glass-half-empty person, generally, but this week I drank the Kool-Aid,” she said. “I never should have.”

It was now up to Empric to break the news to the stewards. “If you’re a steward, you are not needed,” he told a group waiting at the end of the hall. Then he walked into the green room to tell that group the same thing. The stewards filed out somberly, Debra playing Chopin’s funeral march on her kazoo.

But 10,000 kazoos had been purchased and emblazoned with “Visit Macon,” and 1,781 people had come to play kazoo, so kazoo they would. Empric appeared onstage, remarking on the beautiful weather to cheers, but he was soon replaced by Hubbard, who guided the audience through a practice round. Then Hubbard announced that the attempt would begin.

Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle” played out across the amphitheater, Hubbard kazooing along into his microphone. The sound from the crowd was a spitty drone. Nobody except Hubbard was really capable of keeping up with the Allman Brothers during “Ramblin’ Man,” nor with James Brown during “Get Up Offa That Thing” — certainly not during the grand finale of the medley, Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” — but participants young and old obediently hyperventilated along.

Soon the attempt was over. A comedian hustled onstage, but half the audience was already rising from their seats to leave. Maybe they had already gauged from the amphitheater’s empty seats that they hadn’t broken a record that day. Or maybe they didn’t care whether they broke a record at all. Almost 2,000 people had come together on a Friday afternoon to play kazoo. It was amazing, even if not officially.