I just hid ten stuffed bunnies under my roommate’s blanket. I can’t wait for her to go to bed so I can see her reaction.
What harmless pranks have you pulled?
I once rigged my sister’s stepdaughter’s dollhouse to look as if the inhabitants had had a wild party. The daddy doll’s head was in the toilet. The mommy doll was facedown on the kitchen floor. The sister doll was standing on the coffee table, and the brother doll had a lampshade on his head. Also, various items were scattered around.
(She thought it was funny.)
My dad once moved my car out of the driveway and left a pumpkin in its place. 
My sister, when she was younger, had a stuffed animal she COULD NOT sleep without. There were nights when the whole family spent a half hour looking for that thing just so she could sleep. I doused it in water, then froze it. She didn’t think it was harmless. In retrospect, she also didn’t think the ‘attic monster’ was harmelss, and she really didn’t like the fact that the big fake decrative tree outside her bedroom would move back and forth on it’s own after dark.
For a while in highschool, I had a ‘connection’ that allowed me to get Jelly Babies. I had a friend who was a Doctor Who fan, and, with the help of some other friends, I began to make jelly babies appear wherever she went, as if they were somehow stalking her. She got a big kick out of it.
You call that harmless? What if she gets frightened by them and has a heart attack? What if she slips on them and falls down the stairs? What if she’s allergic to thwe stuffing and goes into shock?
You kids need to take responsibility for your stuffed–bunny pranks!
Don’t worry, all went well–she laughed like crazy, then started throwing them at me.
It’s all good fun… until some bunny loses an eye!
I’ve always enjoyed the occasional short-sheeting of a bed.
I’m sure I told this one before. And it’s not original to me (a colleague said she and her daughter did this to her husband).
I took a couple of cotton balls and dipped them in melted chocolate.
I took some marshmallows and did the same. I had to mess 'em up a little to resemble the cotton balls, which had no cooperated too well with the dousing.
I arranged the marshmallows, and the cotton balls, on a plate, and took them over to my fiance’s apartment.
I offered him the plate, marshmallow first. He took one, gobbled it up, and reached for another.
I subtly rotated the plate so he got a cotton ball. Then I had to practically run out of the room before I busted out laughing in his face. The bellow of outrage was everything I could have hoped for.
Why yes, it was xx years and 7 days ago that I did this. Why do you ask?
Or if you frighten someone so much that their hare turns gray.
Done to my mother when she was a little girl, and done by my mother to my niece: A little smear of peanut butter in a doll’s diaper.
This reminds me of one prank I read about: Mother of young child / baby changes baby’s diaper. Comes back into room where other parent is sitting. Says with horror “I can’t believe all of this came out of that one small child!” while showing off the loaded diaper.
Licks diaper contents. (Yes, diaper was a clean dry one, filled with PB just for that purpose).
Ahh yes, the ole peanut butter poop gag. I pulled that over 25 years ago on my girlfriend. I put some PB on the toilet seat back in my apartment, asked her if this was her doing as I scooped some up on my finger, ate it, and said "Just as I suspected it IS shit!
Your dad seems to have a delightfully wry sense of humor.
I’ve been totally pwned on this thread.
About 20 years ago, I came up with a costume for a Halloween party I was going to attend. I put on makeup to make my face look really old, wore a long black robe with a hood, a long grey beard, and a sword. I was Gandalf the Black.
I tried the costume on at home to make sure it looked good, and decided to show it to my roommate. He had no idea what I was doing, and I guess it never occurred to me to tell him. So I walked into his room quietly, expecting him to say “Hey, great costume!” or something. Instead he got this really frightened look on his and backed away from me, at first slowly then a little faster. He tripped over a chair and fell onto his back, and he was still trying to get away. It was freakin’ hilarious.
After explaining it to him and having a good laugh, he made a few suggestions for some changes in my makeup and posture. (He was an acting student.) We then hatched a plan. I was expecting a bunch of friends to come over a little later. When they did, one by one, roommate would answer the door and tell them that I had stepped out and would be back shortly, but it was OK if they wanted to wait in my (unlit) room. I’d be lying in wait for them, of course, ready to scare the bejesus out of them. Each time someone else came over, I’d do it again while the friends who had already arrived would hide in the corner giggling.
When I was in high school, I used to go over to my friend, Bruce’s house a lot. I would pull my car into a spot in his driveway next to his car, walk through the usually-open garage door and go inside.
One day I pulled up, parked my car next to his, walked into the garage, grabbed a full bag of kitty litter, placed it on the hood of his car, then went inside… all while he was there. He never noticed me doing it, whatsoever.
I never said a single word.
About an hour later when we were going to go out, we walked out through the garage and he saw the bag of kitty litter on the hood of his car. He was quite surprised and proceed to crack up when I explained to him that I put it there while he was there in the garage.
Another one we pulled on Bruce was quite funny. Bruce was driving us somewhere (I forget where) and we pulled up to a traffic light that had just turned red. My friend, Mark, waited about 10 seconds, then said in a very matter-of-fact tone, “Light’s red”. Bruce immediately started taking his foot off the brake to go through the intersection WHILE THE LIGHT WAS STILL RED when Mark shouted, “What are you doing!!! I said the light is RED!!!” We laughed hard on that one.
I send out a Word-of-the-Day list to some coworkers, based on whatever’s on the Merriam-Webster site. On April Fool’s Day of this year, though, I made up my own word: odamigachu (pron. o-dam-aye-GAW-chew), meaning a moment of delighted surprise in cinema, especially used by the Japanese. I cited Kurasawa as being a master of the form, and traced it’s history back through the classic stylings of Noh Theater, known for its lighthearted tone.
Well. No-one got it. And at a pub quiz later that week with one of the word’s recipients, he tried to work it into a sentence. Another co-worker was with us and got the joke immediately, and busted her shite laughing.
Good times!
That word deserves to exist.
When I was working in a dress shop, we’d do the normal “decorate for each holiday” thing. For Halloween, we had that fake spiderweb stuff and plastic spiders. When we put the stuff up on November 1st, I decided that the spiders needed more fun in their little plastic lives. So I convinced the assistant manager to put one in the cash register when we closed up. The store was only open 10-6, and only the manager and assistant manager had access to the register. She was there when the manager opened the register the next day.
From then on, it was my duty and privilege to place the spiders around the store where customers wouldn’t come across them, but one of the other employees would. Since spiders, snakes, and general creepy crawlies don’t bother me, nobody tried to scare ME.
My very favorite placement was when I taped a spider to the mouthpiece of the phone. My manager darn near killed me for that one.