Best College Pranks

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

For some reason, this became a VERY hot topic of discussion at my family’s recent Thanksgiving dinner.

My favorite college prank was during November of 1982, when a few of my USC classmates (mostly band members) asked me to join them in a little “fun” a few nights before the annual USC-UCLA football game. We released thousands of crickets in the stacks at UCLA’s Powell Library. We had no trouble sneaking them in - plastic bags and our backpacks muffled the chirping noise. Fortunately, none of us got caught. Unfortunately, we lost the game…

2

There was an entire book written about college pranks, titled, if I recall correctly, Whenever Possible, Include a Cow. I don’t know if it’s still in print.

3

Hi ho, hi ho - its off to SIMS I go . . .

But for the OP. Well lets just say I could write a book. Here are a few highlights :

  1. Dorm room doors open in, place about two cases of empty beer cans leaning slightly against door - person opens door first thing in morning making a ton of noise and scaring the hell out of them.
  2. Dorm room doors have about a quarter inch of space under them, light flat pack of BlackJacks at about 3 in the morning, slide under door - person awakes both standing straight up in bed and screaming as if world war 3 has just errupted.
  3. Throw big dorm party, first person who passes out gets written on, in permanent marker, typically on face, with exclamations such as “I am a big loser boy” and “insert member here ----->”.
  4. Dorm soda machine rips off wrong person for the nth time. Wait until you have about 20 drunken athletes hangin out, convice them soda machine needs to be punished - take soda machine to second floor laundry room and throw out window, screaming (like kids in “Lord of the Flies” after Piggy) exit dorm take all soda and all change and run like hell.
    5 SADD puts car involved in drunk driving accident out in front of caf to make a point. Get point, then get 5 friends to help you strip car of all sellable parts at 2 AM on a friday night, run like hell. Buy lots of liqour with parts have party . . . . write on someone.

I do advocate any of this behavior though in fact every story is true. Go to college and get a good education - I flirted with jail or expulsion too many times pulling crap like this. The worse part is, these are the tamer stories.

I should write a book.

4

We used to “upside-down” friends dorms & apartments. Anything that could be put upside-down was…(tables, chairs, TVs, even little things in their cabinets). Always fun to see (or better yet, hear) their reactions!!!

5

I’ve heard of the same prank, but instead you put make up and eye shadow and lip stick on the guy, then you wake him up and give him a few dollars and tell him you need things from the corner store like beer, chips, whatever. Let the store clerks in on the laugh.

6

1/ Smuggle live chicken into central libary.

2/ Place chicken into elevator.

3/ Press apropiate floor button.

4/ Quickly exit elevator and building.

7

“Include a Cow”…

This was actually a popular one back in the residences of the college I went to. It was conveniently located within walking distance from a cow-field or six, and all the res buildings were several stories high…all stairs. It’s fairly easy to lead a cow up the stairs, but they are apparently hesitant to go back down… :slight_smile:

8

Beer cans against the dorm room door? I heard about some people at my school the year before I got here leaning a trash barrel with several gallons of ice tea against someone’s door.

Then there was the misguided attempt to have a contest among the different dorms on campus to get the lowest energy consumption. People were smart and realized that the only way to win was to drive the other dorms’ energy consumption up by such things as sneaking in and running all the hot water.

The best at my school though: http://www.dropsquad.com

Basically, there’s a nine story staircase with a large open area in the center. Very attractive for dropping things down. My favorite was the 125 (I think) McDonald’s hamburgers. Or the Christmas tree.

I always wanted to take my fraternity’s Coke machine up there, drop it down the center, then collect it all and put it in its original location and call the repair company (“I swear, I just put a Canadian quarter in it”) but they didn’t really want to waste that much money or risk going to jail, the bastards.

9

Someone drunk and passed out at a party? Shave off 1/2 of their facial hair (one eyebrow, half a mustache and beard…), actually had this one done to me! Surprising how many people didn’t notice that I had only 1/2 a frigging beard!!

Dorm room door opens in? Tape newspaper over the door to seal it off, and fill the space between the door and the newspaper with popcorn. Hilarity results…

Empty a can of shaving cream into a paper bag, then slide the open end of the bag under the door to the sucker’s room, and stomp hard on the closed end!

Secure the key to sucker’s room, and when he is away, fill the room to the ceiling with balled-up newspaper…

Door opens in? Penny them in!! (slid enough pennies between the door frame and the door to put tremendous pressure on the tongue of the door lock… resulting in an inability on the part of the inhabitants to open the door… warning: in my university, doing this was considered a serious safety threat… possible expulsion!

Sucker passed out drunk? Move everything in the room (including the bed with him in it) out into an open feild nearby… arrange everything just as it was in the room…

Sucker passed out drunk? Remove his clothing, draw all over him with one of those flourescent yellow highlighter pens, turn on a black light, and leave a half-empty bottle of tequila within smelling distance of his nose…

Sucker passed out drunk? Get a camera, and take pictures of his wide-open mouth surrounded by 4 or 5 penises (peni??)… use for later blackmailing/bedeviling…

etc.

Whew! My university was rough!!!

10

Actually, it’s If at All Possible, Involve a Cow, by… uh… Neil… er, some guy who nowadays writes for the Chicago Sun-Times. I still have a copy of it, somewhere…

I’ve read it cover-to-cover, and in it the author (Neil Steinberg- that’s it! :smiley: ) opines that the greatest prank of all time was the Great Rose Bowl Hoax of 1960-something. Basically a bunch of Cal-Tech students sabotoged a flip-card show to make one of the scenes read “Caltech.” It sounds a lot more earth-shattering the way Steinberg describes it.

11

Some students from my university a few years ago went out in the middle of the night, dug a BIG hole in the middle of a nearby beach (Bondi, I seem to remember it as being) and scattered metallic debris in and around it. They then filled it up with dry ice and a couple of shop dummys made up to look like aliens. Next morning, the army turned up to investigate… They weren’t impressed.

In the middle of Sydney, there is a big movie screen billboard used to advertise scientology stuff to anyone without a personality. One year a few students broke in and set a nice multi-X rated video to run for a few hours…

Then of course there’s the old one (which I’m sure you’ve all heard before but is worth mentioning) where a student goes up to a bunch of road workers and tells them that some of his classmates are going to turn up soon dressed as cops and that they’ll want to ‘arrest’ them, but they’re only students and so don’t take any of their crap. Same student then goes to the local police station and tells the cops that there is a bunch of students dressed as roadworkers digging up a street. Then sit back and enjoy the show.

Last year was my university’s 50th anniversary, and there was an entire edition of the stident newspaper devoted to past pranks. I wish I had kept it, there were some good ones. The major prank was to send out a whole shitload of letters (a few dozen thousand) to a large geographical segment of the city informing them that as there was a shortage of Olympic tickets, then their area was selected to miss out.

This year a few hundred garden gnomes were kidnapped out of people’s gardens, and glued to Martin Place, one of the major pedestrian throughfares of the inner city.

I feel that as the years progess, the essence has run out of the tradition and people just aren’t trying as hard…

12

Some friends of mine and I went to Spring Break in Daytona Beach. We had varied accomodations, so we didn’t see one of our friends, R, until near the end of the week. Also, my friend D was the unofficial designated driver, since it was his truck we drove down in.

The last night there, R was having a party at his room. D wanted to party, so he said I was the driver that night. I dropped D and our other friend C at the hotel, then went off to find a parking spot. Unfortunately, this was a Friday, when the changing of the crowd occurs in Daytona Beach. So it took me 90 minutes to inch through the crowds on the street to a parking spot.

When I got back to the party, R was mad. D is the type of drunk that gives meaning to the phrase “Instant Asshole - Just Add Alcohol”. So he’d pissed off many people at the party. By the time I’d got there, he had just had a little more and had blissfully become the unconscious drunk. When I went to wake him up, I saw someone had spelled “FAG” on his forehead in bright blue nosecoat sunscreen. D is the quintessential redneck homophobe, so this was pretty funny. I woke him up, and C and I took him back to the truck.

D was still belligerent as we walked (“What took you so long!?”, “Why are we leaving!?”, etc.), so I wasn’t going to tell him about the sign on his forehead. As we passed people, they would point and laugh at D. He started to get suspicious, and he stopped and rubbed his forehead. When he saw the blue, he asked what it said. C couldn’t contain himself and exclaimed, “It says ‘FAG’!” Then both he and I started laughing uncontrollably. D was ever so pissed, but he couldn’t get a word of complaint in edgewise as C and I laughed all the way to the truck.

13

I think back to something I read not too long ago, about ‘things you can do with liquid nitrogen.’
(I think it was linked from a topic in here)

One comes to mind.
freeze a can of shaving cream in liquid nitrogen, and peel the can off the contents. place said contents inside someone’s car, and let the oven-like heat inside melt said contents.
2 cans will completely fill a car.

$.02

Gaston

14

Pranks you want, pranks you’ll get.

I think the best one I ever did was my freshman year at Virginia Tech. It was October 31, and the student org ran an outdoor horror movie festival in the woods … set up a big screen between two trees, logs to sit on, and scary movies galore. Once back in the dorm, I went into the shower room that night, unscrewed one of the shower heads, put in some Cherry Kool Aid powder, and then screwed the head back on. The first guy that used that shower the next morning had blood red water gushing out at him. The scream woke up half the hall.

Another guy on my hall actually crawled out of his window four stories up and over into his neighbor’s room while they were out of town. He then took the bolts out of ALL the hinges in every door in the room (front door, closet doors, etc), TPed the entire room, and left back out through the window. So these two come back to their dorm room Sunday night, put the key in the door, push … and the door falls back revealing the contents of about six rolls of toilet paper all over.

They got revenge later, though. Similar to other pranks with doors that have clearance at the bottom, they got a fan, an extension cord, and a couple of bags of flour. Bit by bit they poured the flour right at this guy’s door, then turned on the fan and blew it inside. He came back to find his entire room covered in a fine coat of flour.

Yes, it was a fun hall that year.

As for football pranks, as someone mentioned. I read an article about a prank someone played at a Clemson game, I think it was vs. NC State, but I’m not sure. A frat at the opposing school special-ordered uniforms that looked like Clemson’s, and (with the authorities looking the other way) snuck onto the field at halftime pretending to be Clemson. From what I read, the Clemson side of the stadium broke into huge cheers as they ran onto the field, ready for the second half to start. And then the “Tigers” started doing all sorts of weird stretches and warmups … ran practice plays and muffed them hilariously … all the time the CU fans in the stands getting more and more perplexed and slowly figuring out what’s going on. Finally a group of Clemson fans actually rushed the field, and the frat ran off as their team’s fans rushed the field as well to meet at midfield for a nice little brawl.

15

Off to MPSIMS

16

Yet another opportunity to post about my masterwork! Copied from my post in another thread:

One year, in February, a friend of mine named Clint decided that he’d throw a surprise birthday party for Kevin, a mutual friend, in April. He started drawing up elaborate plans, creating maps of where people should park so as not to alert him, getting Kevin’s girlfriend to pretend to be going out of town, and so forth. He was so proud of himself…thought he was Mister Sneaky. So, I decided to take him down a peg.

Clint was a very anal-retentive person. He was a total neat freak. Example: he had drinking glasses with the school logo on them. If you turned a glass so that the logo was no longer facing directly forward, he’d just HAVE to turn it back. So, my friend Stefanie and I figured we’d hit him where it hurts.

Working with Kevin, but not letting him know about his surprise party, we worked out a plan. We played Kevin and Clint perfectly: each knew of the surprise the other was getting. hehehe…

The day for the party arrived. I drove Kevin to the restaurant for his surprise party. Just after we left, Stefanie, who worked in the dorm office, gave Clint’s spare key to my crew, a band of about 8 people.

They proceeded to reverse Clint’s entire room, right to left, making it a mirror image of what it once was. His bed, television, refrigerator, phone, books, drawers, and even the posters on his walls all moved from one side of the room to the other. The only thing they didn’t have time for was the towel bars, which would have required unbolting from the wall. In less than an hour, they flipped his whole world, left to right.

Meanwhile, Kevin, myself, and the unsuspecting Clint were having a ball at Gardski’s. The party lasted a little less than two hours. Then, we headed back to the dorm.

Kevin came up to my room, two doors down from Clint’s room, so that he could see what happened. We watched Clint unlock his door and enter his room.

There was a pause. Then we heard his keys hit the floor. Then we heard, “AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!”

Kevin and I stumbled into the room, falling over ourselves laughing. Clint stood, wide-eyed, in the middle of his room, looking around in amazement, hollering, “WHO DID THIS?!” I managed to say, “Clint…” when he pointed at me: “YOU!!!”

It took two days before he figured out how I’d done it. I’d been with him, after all; I wouldn’t have had time to do it.

He tried to put his room back in order that night, but there was just too much. So, he resigned himself to living with it until school was out in May. For the rest of the semester, whenever he opened a drawer, he’d go, “Dammit!” and walk to the other side of the room.

I’m still damn proud of that one.

17

All my pranks have been posted previously… except…

Senior Prank high school: Long and short of it is: I and three guys go to school with 8 steel belted radial tires (tyres for those across the pond :slight_smile: ) and 100 ft (32-ish meters) of rope. Dude one climbs to roof of school (2 story) with other end of rope. Remaining dudes tie tires to other end one at a time and they are slowly pulled up to roof. Dude two climbs flagpole with other end of rope and ties end to ball on top. All dudes get to roof. Thread rope through tires one at a time and shake the rope to slide the tires downward (remember 2 story?) to top of flagpole. With practice, the rope can be flipped in such a way that the tire goes onto and down flagpole. Repeat with remaining tires. Get off roof. Dude two (he was a good climber) goes back up flagpole to remove rope.

Benefit? Steel belted radials must be cut off individually with bold cutters!!!

Did I mention we did this while police were patrolling at regular intervals?

Many years ago. At 10 year reunion, my history teacher (and CC coach) let on that he knew I was involved but thought it was so funny he kept his mouth shut.

sneakily,
Spritle

18

Theres a classic one:

Fraternity sends several dozen donuts one morning to a sorority in an attempt to intice them tou have an exchange with you. If the sorority doesn’t pick your house you send them the same number of empty donut boxes each containing photos of your cocks threaded through the donuts.

We used to have a few good ones, but the best was simple. We placed a trash can filled with water (and a couple of the more vindictive people claimed to have pissed in it as well) so that it was balancing against the door (door opens in). Sure enough she opened the door in the am to a flood of cold water. The reason its remarkable was because of who it was. We had a fairly wild floor in our dorm, and everyone got along and partied hard. The downer was that the ARD (Assistant Resident Director) who was second in charge over the entire dorm system (about 20,000 people) lived at the end of our floor. This was very unusual since they typically don’t live in the dorms, being full time employees. To add to the unpleasantness she was a man-hating, ultra feminist lesbian (no stereotyping here, just the way it was) with a power trip. So she liked to bust ass on anyone she could for the slightest things. Safe to say she made alot of well deserved enemies. The next day we saw a crew in ripping out her carpeting. Not especially comical, but memorable considering the circumstances. I’ll add that everyone on the floor was in on it, and we had unanimous support from both the mens and womens halls. Amazingly no one snitched. The girls probably hated her more than we did, and on numerous occasions would steal her clothes while she was in the shower. Mean, but damn its impossible to feel sorry for this woman.

19

When I was in college the first time, I lived on a alrgely senior floor. They did the water trash can to us once. Roomie and I went to probable culprit, told him “He’s a chem major. Do you have any idea of the materials he has access to? Still want to play war?”

Peace reigns.