I hate any prank that makes a mess. Toilet papering a house? Besides being juvenile and stupid (and not funny), what a total PITA to clean up. I refused to ever participate in that shit in high school. The shaving cream thing would piss me off–I hate to clean.
If you’re going to trick someone or scare them; fine (assuming you know them well enough that it will be okay) but let them in on it before they get upset. The helicopter thing was cruel. It would be one thing if they told her 2 seconds later that it was a joke, but to let her believe for any period of time that she endangered people…no.
I’m not a fan of pranks, and will have nothing to do with participating in them, such as the fellas who wanted me to type up a letter to someone asking him to attend a try-out at a top soccer club. I refused to. I don’t care if the fella in question is a PITA who pisses you off cos he thinks he’s the World’s Greatest Goalie, I am not sending him to Glasgow to be laughed at by whomever he shows the letter too.
I remember when I was at school someone approached me and said the whole class was going to go to the Rector’s office at such and such a time to formally complain about the teacher because everyone hated him - now it’s true that teacher was a *ickhead, but I assumed that the rest of the class were playing a prank on me and that I’d be the only person standing outside the Rector’s office at the appointed time. And being a highly nervous child I’d probably have wet myself trying to explain what I was doing there…
monstro how can you say you don’t like pranks? Just a few years ago, you helped me fool my classmates into thinking that you were me, remember? The ole twin switch-a-roo trick. We got a lot of laughs out of that one. Especially since we don’t look exactly alike but just enough to fool people who aren’t paying close attention. Messed with my classmates’ heads, we did. They didn’t know why “my” face was off, so they blamed it on “my” completely new hairstyle.
But I agree, pranks that involve humiliation or playing with people’s emotions aren’t funny unless the prankster and the prankstee have a history of tricking each other and therefore don’t take things too seriously or too far.
Richard Himber, the big-band leader and magician, was a wild, expansive personality who loved practical jokes. But he was clever enough not to make them too cruel.
• He used to make veal cutlets at home, and would always bread and cook a leather outsole in the batch, which a guest would saw and saw at until they caught on and were served the real thing.
• He was a good mimic: he once learned that actor Charles Laughton was staying in a certain hotel and began impersonating Laughton, sending all sorts of strange meals and things to his suite, even countermanding room service orders from Laughton himself.
• Another good one was when he criticized a friend’s loud sportcoat – then ripped it up the back. Before the stunned friend could react, Himber marched him into a nearby, pre-selected men’s store, where he’d set aside - and paid for - an exact duplicate of the coat.
• But the best Himber story has to be the night in 1933 when his orchestra got the laugh on him. They were in the CBS studios getting ready for a big program. Himber left the studio momentarily and the band and broadcast crew took the opportunity to set all the clocks 3 minutes ahead. When the big hand reached the twelve, the announcer gave the intro, Himber gave the downbeat –and the band just played noise, blasting, scraping, screeching, clattering noise. After Himber regained his head, they all got serious. The clocks were set to time and the program went on for real.
This reminds me of something my Grandma (Mom’s mother) did to my Dad, either when he was dating Mom, or early in their marriage.
When Dad was over at Grandma’s house, she’d always fix something weird for supper. You know, the kind of stuff you could only get then from an exotic food store (like kangaroo tail soup, for instance). One time, she served up a plateful of breaded triangles. After he began eating them, she told him that they were tiger ears! He was completely grossed out!! Eventually, she admitted that it was just breaded veal cutlets. It’s been more than forty years, and Dad still hates veal!
I once asked Dad how they’d tasted. I just about died laughing when he replied, “You know, they tasted exactly like tiger ears!”
Nitpick: I’m pretty sure the prank from post #3 is actually supposed to use talcum powder rather than shaving cream.
And, yeah, if anybody did that to me, it’d drive me totally batshit because it’s so hard to clean up (and would probably do bad things to my electronics). Something like this, though, I wouldn’t mind as much, so long as the people responsible helped to clean up.
Are mild
Do not hurt anyone
I clean them up myself afterward
I know the recipient will appreciate them.
The last prank I was involved in was a VERY mild one. I was making empty boxes our of those flat cardboard things, and i had about 100 all ready to go. My boss was in her office, door shut, on the phone, so I got my coworker and we stacked all the boxes in front of her door, effectively blocking her in. Then we went home.
Now all that happened when she came out was she got a little startled, scared the cleaning lady, and knocked a whole bunch of boxes over. In the morning we laughed at her and cleaned it up.
But people are downright mean with pranks and I don’t like mean ones. And like the OP, I know I have a very good sense of humor!
I do not like pranks at all. As a young child I was always very upset when I became the victim of someone’s joke. I felt angry, horribly embarrassed and insulted to be chosen as a subject for someone’s amusement at my expense. If I tried to get even I’d get in trouble and get scolded for “not being a good sport” or “not having a sense of humor.” I detest April Fool’s Day with a passion. By now most people who know me know not to fuck with me.
And you would be the type of person who people would love to play pranks on just to see you flip out.
I like pranks that are FUNNY. I don’t like pranks that are mean-spirited or dangerous. My sense of humor is very much along the lines of Jay Mohr, Ryan “Van Wilder” Reynolds or Dane Cook. Basically arrogant, yet buffoonishishly self-depreciating humor. The Jackass stuff is funny at times, but I would probably eventually get really pissed if my friends played jokes on each other the way Johnny Knoxville and Bam Margara do. I would be mad if someone sawed my car in half.
And most of the Punked! shit, I would freakin murder Ashton Kusher. Most of that “humor” revolves around making something slightly agrivating into something REALLY agrivating (like having a waiter continue to give you the wrong meal ten times or have the valet lose your car or other such bs).
And that prank where someonce called a McDonalds pretending to be a cop and made the manager force some girl to strip down pissed me off because I just can’t believe how freakin stupid people are.
I do have to share one impromptu joke I played. A few months back there was a bomb scare in Times Square right in front of my office. The police had cordoned off several blocks and the guy with the moon-suit and the little robot came out to investigate the “suspcious package”. So as we are all watching in tense silence from our view from the 20th floor, I get an idea. Knowing I would never get such a wonderous oportunity again, I sneak quietly behind one of our interns and yell KABOOM!!!.
So it was pretty funny. Now if I played practical jokes on this guy ever single day, that would be stuid and annoying.
I absolutely hate them. I don’t consider myself a stuffed-shirt or someone full of themselves, but anything that’s deliberately done to make me nervous or panicky, publicly embarrassed, or frustrated is something that will immediately put you on my Shit List.
Essentially, I think the only people who are “entitled” to pull off these pranks are people very close to me who know me very well, and anyone that close to me will know I’ll be incredibly pissed off, so they would never do it.
That’s why I don’t mind witnessing other people play pranks on each other, because I assume that there’s a certain rapport between those parties that establish an implied “consent”. I know not everyone feels the same way I do, so if a prank is funny and not mean-spirited or cruel, and it seems clear that they don’t mind being the butt of a joke, I don’t have any objections.
Just don’t involve me. The only “prank” I’ll involve myself in is a surprise party (though if you threw me a surprise party, I’d probably never talk to you again).
Put me on the “Hate 'em!” train. I think Archive Guy said it best:
In high school, one of my best friends had a thing about pranking people on their birthdays. And I LOOOOOVE my birthday, so anything you do to make it anything less than spectacular will immediately put you on my Shit List. Which means that if I spend the whole day in a panic because I think I lost my car keys, when really you stole them to fill my entire car full of “trash” (empty soda cans, crumpled paper, etc.) so that I have to make several trips to the parking lot dumpster before driving home, well . . .
I think our other friends eventually got their fill of her, too, so on her birthday, we all pretended we had no clue what day it was.
She went home crying.
But she stopped with the annoying birthday pranks.
Yeah, that kind of twin stuff is funny. But only because we were fooling an entire group of people. Also, we gave away the punchline fairly quickly. Hell, you were standing in the back of the room the whole time!
You what kind of pranks I hate? I hate those pranks that go on forever, with everyone laughing while the target flails obliviously. In that workplace prank thread, tomndebb mentioned a prank in which coworkers loosened the jack on someone’s keyboard and watched as the target brought in tech support to fix the problem. It could definitely be said that the guy should have checked his keyboard first, but did he deserve to be embarrassed in front of people not even in on the joke? Pranks that result in someone looking like a nitwit, even if they are a nitwit, are not my cup of tea.
I like pranks that end quickly, with a harmless surprise. Like opening your desk drawer to find a bunch of rubber snakes. You can’t go wrong with rubber snakes.
Here’s the video for a most excellent school prank.
Hopefully we could all agree that this is the good kind, though I could imagine a crusty old professor getting upset at the disturbance. This one seems to like it, though.
Thanks so much for the link! I’ve watched more of this Trigger Happy TV stuff on You-tube. The Badger Attack had me laughing hysterically. I know tons of serious bird and wildlife-watchers and for some reason this video totally cracks me up. “Jesus, there he is…!”
Our English teacher has a fantastic sense of humour, but he does not appreciate pranks that disturb the orderliness of his surroundings. On April Fool’s a few years ago, one of his classes took all of the books from a bookshelf and piled them in the middle of the room, then went and hid in another teacher’s room down the hall. A few students didn’t want to be part of the prank and stayed behind. The teacher returned and was, as expected, rather pissed. He gave the remaining students a pop quiz called “What Is Your Favorite Colour?” and made it worth a decent percentage of their grade for that marking period. I thought it was rather suitable revenge.
