There was one I read about some years back, where the prankster’s friend was sad. They cheered him up by throwing him a “You just won the lottery!” party, sending notices to the society pages and chipping in $100 each (there were like a hundred friends in on it) to throw a massive black-tie party with champagne, caviar, the works.
The sad friend–in on the whole thing–got written up in the local paper as a big winner, and the only person harmed by it was the society page dupe when it came out that it was a hoax.
One year, for April fool’s day, a friend and I made a lot of little googly-eye mice. I think they were each a cotton ball, a bit of string for a tail, and two eyes. They we snuck into the office in the evening, and scattered them around.
The next day, our coworkers found the mice. No one was harmed. It was pretty funny. People kept finding mice for most of the week, which was kind of fun, too.
So I think there are lots of harmless pranks out there, some of which could be enhanced with a large budget.
One of the guys in the office removed the automatic air freshener sprayer from the men’s room and placed it back in the knee-hole of coworker’s desk. This knee-hole was half filled with stacks of documents and publications, since storage was almost non-existent in that office. Every once in a so often, there’d be a pssssssst and the scent of peaches (or something) and coworker would go “What the $%*&^# was that??” It took him a couple of weeks to find the thing.
Way back in DOS and batch file days, when security was much less secure and we were using a mainframe system, I “modified” a coworker’s sign-on. When he logged in, a jagged line would be drawn across the screen, then a message saying “Captain, the dilithium crystals have cracked!!!” and it’d log him off. I was sooooooo proud of that! He got me back the next day with his own batch file, and that was the end of it.
My preteen nephews got the keys to their respective dad’s trucks and super glued the bumpers together at a family reunion. It held for a bit but popped loose.
If they have a trailer hitch on their car, get a Trump 2016 trailer hitch cover. Or something funny. And put a lock on it.
I put an SF Giants hitch cover on once, and locked it. They are Dodger fans. At first they didn’t notice. It’s easy to miss. Once they noticed I left it on for a couple more days before removing it.
Buy a company that handles a lot of shipping containers and boxcars. Repaint them all with the same numbers and bar codes. See how long it takes for someone to figure out what is afoot.
It would take a lot of work, but paint a mustache on a person’s mirrors so that it appears that they always have one. Impractical? Yes. But it would amuse me.
THat might be harmless, but I’d be really annoyed by it. Something that lasts past the moment of realization and turns into an inconvenience doesn’t make me laugh.
With all respect, er, have you used mirrors before? Because that wouldn’t work.
My uncle rigged an eye-beam across my aunts favorite reading chair so that when she sat down to read, the light would turn off. When she got up to get a new bulb, it turned back on.
Back in the 60’s, the same aunt had demanded a new hi-fi for her birthday. Uncle got her one, but also took his old shop-class record player out of the attic as her “birthday gift.” It was plywood and he painted it with thick battleship gray primer for aesthetics. It played way too well so he replaced the needle with the cut-off tip of a sewing needle, which produced the desired acoustic effect. When she unwrapped it he acted all excited about how he’d made it himself just for her. Then he put on a cheap LP he’d also bought so she could hear the “As good as Hi-Fi sound.” He almost didn’t survive long enough to give her the real gift.
I recall some practical joker who bought a part bench that matched the benches in New York’s Central Park and kept carrying it out of the park in locations where cops were patrolling.
Of course, they’d stop him and he’d protest that the bench was his, eventually showing the bill of sale. He’d be released and he’d repeat the exercise,
I’d take everyone in my family and my closest friends on a long expensive cruise. Then when they came home, they’d all find another family living in their houses, with different furniture, cars, everything and those people would insist that they’d always live in that house and call my friends and family members crazy.
Then I’d yell, YOU’VE been pranked!, and I’d drive my friends and family members to their brand-new, fully paid for luxury mansions. That would be a fun prank, I wish I could afford it.
I would hire the Boston Pops (with full chorus) to form a flash mob, gather around the Christmas Tree on Boston Common, hold hands, and sing the Whos’ song from How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
I was volunteering at an aid station for an ultramarathon race and we came up with an idea for a great prank. The race course is 7.5 miles out and back, with another aid station at the far end, but a race with a loop course would be even better. Send the runners off then pack up the entire aid station and disappear. The runners would arrive back at the starting point and there would be nothing there to indicate that a race started there that morning. If we could run the race on April 1 that would be perfect.
I could never beat what our seniors did back in '87.
The night before school started in the fall, they quite professionally painted every single outside door on campus. Perfectly. No drips, no mess. No evidence. Fast forward to 7:30 the next morning and 400 Freshmen wandering around campus with their schedules, totally lost. You see, all the room numbers were on the doors.
All District Maintenance had to so was show up and stencil new room numbers on. District figured that the “professional” paint job the students did saved the District about $5000 in deferred painting.
