I do not understand why pranks are funny, when they cause fear or pain or bewilderment or anger or humiliation or disgust, no matter how temporary or ultimately harmless. I loathe such pranks. I would never be friends with someone who did shit like that.
Flamingos on the lawn level, that’s okay, but beyond that, absolutely not. Nor would I spend a penny trying to disturb someone. Why???
I guess I am humorless that way.
This relates to another thread - “What would aliens not understand about earthlings?” or something. My response was ‘humor’. We don’t understand ourselves why we find certain things funny. Especially, seeing others suffer some minor misfortune.
Regarding the lottery joke - what you are supposed to do is record today’s drawing. Tomorrow, buy a ticket using the winning numbers from the recording. Give the ticket to your soon-to-be former friend and play the recording at the appropriate time with him present. Hilarity will ensue, briefly. For some reason, we find someone going from sheer ecstasy to complete disappointment to be funny. Well, some of us, I mean you, do.
Which is a pale rip-off of what Cal Tech does at the Rose Bowl.
A real one that cost money. For Valentine’s Day I send Mrs. Cad flowers. She is not all-about the traditional roses/fern/baby’s breath so they were orchids or bright vibrant mixed flowers. But of course every year on Valentine’s Day she also got an anonymous roses/fern/baby’s breath bouquet with a mildly creepy/stalker vibe card like, “I am thinking about you.”
Yes she tried to trap me but I never lied to her.
“Why would I send you roses?”
“You know I can’t afford to send you two bouquets.”
“That is bizarre. Do you know who it is?”
She even tried to get my upset by telling be that she gave the roses to the outside receptionists because they never got flowers from their boyfriends on Valentine’s Day. I told her that I thought that was an awesome idea (honestly it is).
So for 8 years this went on and in that time she went through everyone who would do that in her head. Then the idiot at FTD couldn’t find her office and somehow in calling her to find it revealed I placed the order. She called me with, “I KNEW IT WAS YOU!” Yeah right. But of course getting two bouquets for almost a decade made the gaslighting OK.
Or all of them except the winning ticket. Hilarity ensues.
I don’t know about that. One morning, the fog lifted at MIT and there was a campus police car on top of the dome. With the lights on.
Not a real car, of course, but a wood framework with the appropriate body panels attached. Inside was a battery (to power the lights), instructions on how to safely dismantle and remove the car, two mannequins in MIT police uniforms, and a box of donuts.
The Whiskey War between Canada and Denmark should qualify as an elaborate harmless prank with no expense spared. It would seem that Canada was the original instigator and Denmark the victim but then it turned into a back-and-forth with each assuming in turn the role of prank-er and prank-ee.
Use of two countries’ respective military budgets and not a (non-alcoholic) shot fired; no casualties or injuries. Presumably also much amusement on the parts of the respective “invasion” forces. Might be hard to top this, actually.
An acquaintance of mine when we were undergrads suggested faking a UFO landing. It would have been a pull-all-the-stops effort, with convincing optical phenomena, radar echoes, sounds, and even a small explosion to generate a seismic signal.
He’s now a respected Astrophysicist (and I’ve got a Doctorate in Physics, and follow UFO lore). Og only knows what we might have been able to pull off.
I have become humorless that way because I have seen how many pranks are actually really hurtful. But I do love the flamingos on the lawn variety and a few others. a
Once upon a time I was working a car race at one station in the morning and a different one in the afternoon, but was also leaving before the last on-track session for the day as I had a over-5 hour drive to complete and two passengers who, like me, needed some sleep before work in the morning.
I had forgotten my fanny pack of tools when I switched workstations midday. The people at my morning post told me to swing by and pick it up as I was leaving. When I left, one of the workers was waiting for me with it in hand. I opened the window, said “Thanks, bye!” and threw the pack into the back seat. As I tossed it, I realized it was heavy but didn’t stop to think about it as I headed for the gate.
When we got to my house and started separating our luggage so the others could continue home, I was handed the heavy, heavy pack and I knew I had been pranked. We opened it up to find it stuffed with pebbles and a bit of trash from the ground at the post. All my gear was there too. And a tiny note that said, “You’re welcome!” So, so funny. We just laughed and laughed, and then got on with task at hand. I’ll never forget it.
My favorite little gag at work was to snip off the corner of a bill and glue it under the edge of something really heavy.
Been done!
When my son graduated from high school, one fundraiser to support the all-night party was that you could pay to have someone’s lawn decorated - the person would get up, to find the lawn covered in pink flamingos with a large sign saying “You’ve Been Flocked”. It would be removed within 24 hours - and the victim’s household would be encouraged to pay it forward.
Several I’ve been involved with:
There used to be a bakery in New York, called the Erotic Bakery. Among other things, they made gingerbread men / women with all the “parts” done in icing. We would get a pair of these when we had a wedding to go to, and persuade someone in the wedding party to smuggle them into the newlyweds’ luggage.
Unfortunately, on one such occasion, the smuggler took the opportunity to dump an entire bottle of some kind of cologne into the luggage as well. YUCK!!!
Naughty cookies: harmless. Industrial-strength stinkum ruining ALL your clothes? Not harmless.
Shortly before we got married, I made some chocolate dipped marshmallows for my intended. I ALSO made several chocolate dipped cotton balls which shared the plate with the real treats. Hilarity ensued.
I’m on an email list for parents of kids about my son’s age. One list member would typically post something outrageous but plausible about once a year on… April First. People would respond to the email as if it were real, until someone spotted that it was April Fool’s Day.
So one year, she was going to be away (without access to email - this was before smartphones) from late March into early April. Another member emailed everyone BUT this person, saying “hey, let’s prank her, I’ll start a thread on such and such and we’ll devolve into a flame war”.
It worked beautifully. Everyone responded as if it were a real thing, people would “take offense” at ridiculous stuff, and so on. I still don’t quite recall how it proceeded to jogging naked on a beach…
The original person came back from her break, and started catching up on her emails, and started messaging everyone with “Oh no!!! Let’s all calm down!!!” when someone quickly messaged her to let her in on the prank - at which point she conceded that it had been a masterful prank.
So I’d list this one as somewhat less benign given that she was pretty upset for a few, but it all ended well.
The greatest prank I ever heard of was among university students sharing a house.
One of them went home to his parents for the summer. The rest decided to wall up his room.
But this was no mere sheet of plywood across the door. After making sure there were no perishables in the room, they removed the door and door frame, and put in new wooden studs across the opening. Then they wallboarded over it, applied spackle, let that dry, sanded everything smooth, and painted the new wall area to match the surroundings. Then they added a baseboard and hung a picture to complete the job.
When the traveller returned, they welcomed him as a guest and acted like they’d never heard of his room…
So how did the landlord feel about this?
That was a stunt pulled at Caltech as well. Student went home for the holidays, so they “erased” his room. Moved a wall sconce to where his door was. Then everybody claimed not to know him when he returned.
I remember seeing a video of a similar stunt. A guy decided to prank his across-the-hall neighbor. The prankster filmed himself during each stage of the construction, explaining what he was about to build. Before the final step of putting the false wall in place, he went in the guy’s apartment and enacted one last level of pissiness – he scrambled the neighbor’s DVD collection out of alphabetical order.
He then waited for his neighbor to return and filmed his reaction. He was a pretty big dude who had no problem tearing down the wall.
In college my roommate and I were the only ones who weren’t part of a fraternity on a floor. So one night we came home to shaving cream smeared all over the door and plastic wrap taped over it. Harmless but annoying to get rid of when they’d also moved all the communal trash cans.
I’ve done that.
This was probably my best prank. I gave my orchestra some sheet music. The title of the sheet music was “Mozart Tune, Silly Arrangement.” But when they played it, they found out it was not Mozart…
Brilliant!!!
Were they sight-reading?
(Brilliant. Harmless but hilarious.
… and we all here got pranked, too.)