What's the cruelest practical joke you've heard of?

In My Humble Opinion
21

A friend of mine did this to his wife. Usually she got home from work before him but this one time she was running late. He came home and took a shower (it was the middle of a bad heat wave). Just as he walked into the bedroom to get dressed he heard her pull up. He climbed into the closet, still naked and shut the doors.

He normally got a ride to work so his car was still in the driveway and everything looked normal to her. She came in and she took a shower. She walked into the bedroom naked, opened the closet door. Then she felt someone grab her ankles. She looked down and, according to her later recollection, all she saw was a naked man in her closet. Naturally she started screaming and she pissed herself.

He jumped out of the closet, feeling really shitty about what he did. She thought he was attacking her and ran out of the room, screaming, and headed for the kitchen. He’s chasing her, still yelling he’s sorry. She finally turned around and realized this naked maniac was her husband. She stopped running but still screamed for an additional 5 minutes and then whimpered for another 15.

22

My brother went camping with a bunch of boys and girls from his middle school awhile back. I’m not sure what led up to it, but one of the girls ended up asking for a drink of water from one of the boys’ water bottle, which wasn’t actually filled with water. It was filled with vinegar.

Poor girl.

23

Two big brothers (I think they were 10 and 12) babysitting their baby brother (4). First the 12-year-old got the 4-year-old to hit him, doing the old macho I-can-take-it thing. He kept saying, “No, that’s not hard enough–hit me harder!” And the 4-year-old complied. But really, how hard can a 4-year-old hit?

Eventually, he hit his big brother pretty hard. At this point the 12-year-old collapsed and did not move. The 10-year-old moved in. “You’ve killed Larry. I’m sorry, but I have to call the cops.” Then the 10-year-old dialed Dial-A-Prayer and went through this whole thing. “Yeah, my little brother…well, he did hit him pretty hard…no, he’s not moving…no, he’s not breathing…” as the 4-year-old got more and more hysterical.

Mom got home to find a hysterical little boy who was sure he’d killed his brother. Groundings ensued.

24

This is more disgusting and gross than cruel, but since I perpetrated it myself, I know all of the details. :stuck_out_tongue:

About 6 months after getting married, my wife was in bed reading, about 10:00 at night. I walked into the kitchen and saw the remains of a decadent chocolate cake on the counter. I don’t know why the idea popped into my sick head, but I stuck my finger under the foil covering the cake and dipped it into the thick icing. Then I walked into the bedroom and made a big show of pretending to scratch my ass, hand in pajama bottoms. When I pulled my hand out I held it up in front of my face, inspecting it. The large glob of brown icing was quite visible and as she glanced up at me I sniffed it, shrugged, and stuck my finger in my mouth, pulling it out clean.

Screaming and cringing ensued, followed by smacking and tears of laughter.

25

I like it!

26

Man some people need to lighten up. I know, in the kind of ideal relationship I envision, this kind of playful back-and-forth silly gag playing would have been de riguer from somewhere in the middle part of the courtship (that kind of mischievous vixen usually captivates me totally). I would have looked at her with mock anger, daggers shooting mirthfully from the eyes, then laughed along with everyone else, and maybe ordered drinks for the house. Later I would have gotten even (maybe a spider in her sunglasses case). Now something deliberately cruel and injurious yeah that’s beyond the pale.

27

I did something similar a few years ago except it involved a new disposable diaper and some chocolate pudding. It actually made one of my grand daughters sick when I licked the diaper. That part made me feel bad.

The worst I ever seen done to someone else involved Feen-A-Mint laxative in a Chiclets chewing gum box given to someone before a 7 hour flight to Japan.

28

I removed someone’s door and replaced it with drywall. We even painted over it and hung a picture up in it’s place. :smiley:

(He was gone for Thanksgiving break from college. When he got back, we pretended not to know him and asked why he was in our house.)

29

Along with others, I’ll vote for this type being the most cruel. I see this one (with fake lottery cards) done on AFV from time to time. Everyone seems to think it’s just hilarious. I really hate this one. And no matter how silly the “winner” always acts, I feel nothing but very very sorry for them. It is not the least amusing.

It just plays on a person’s most basic needs (it almost seems to even undermine a person’s survival needs), dreams and desires. I mean who doesn’t want to do away with, or seriously reduce their stress load from bills and debt? Who doesn’t dream of helping their family do the same?

Hate it!

And no, I’ve never had this pulled on me. Someone gave my dad one last time we had a family get together. I’m proud to say, none of us were taken in by it. We were surprised and cautiously optimistic, but along with the “is this thing real? That would be neat” type comments we also were reading it very carefully and finally found the evil little disclaimer on the back.

30

I’ve got one that’s almost certainly apocryphal, but I always get a kick out of it. It’s one my high-school English teacher claims to have perpetrated, and detailed in class one day. (He was in his 70s when he told the story).

In college he lived in a dorm that was six stories high, and he and his buddy lived on the top floor. The windows in the rooms were directly across from the door. They wanted to wreak havoc on their neigbor, so they broke into his room and hung his bed out the window. They suspended it with a rope and tied the other end to the inside handle of the closed door. They then carefully removed the hinge pins, so that the only thing keeping the door in place was the latch and lock.

They went out the window and crept across the ledge to their own window, then went downstairs and outside to watch the effect.

When their poor neighbor put his key in the lock and turned it, the door flew out of the door frame and crashed through the window. Bed, rope, door, and pieces of window all came crashing down on the lawn outside the building.

Like I said - probably never happened, but it’s fun to imagine the look on the guy’s face as he watched his door whiz away.

31

May be apocryphal, but my dad told me of the practical joke that was played on all the new apprentices at his work (him included). They were shown the drill press, with it’s largest bit in place and told that they were about to be tested for bravery. While the apprentice (usually 15 years old) was led away and blinfolded, the bit was removed from the drill and it was turned on. The apprenticed was then led back and placed on the drill press, which was then lowered to the point where (if the bit was still in it) it was just about to make contact. Then the drill would be raised, the blindfold removed and the young lad allowed to go change his underwear.

Hysterical good fun. Until one of the older guys took it a bit further and when the drill was at it’s lowest (loudest) point, he reached over to tweak the shirt of the latest boy, who promptly died of a heart attack. He must have assumed the drill had caught his shirt.

My dad wasn’t really in favour of practical jokes.

32

The lottery ticket one is extremely cruel. I can only imagine what I would go through, imagining that we had won big, and then being told it was a hoax (I won’t dignify it with calling it a joke). After decades of struggling financially, I don’t think I would ever fully forgive someone who did that to me. I remember finding what looked like a $20 bill once, but it was just some advertising made to look like a twenty on one side. This was at a financial low point in my life, and I cried when I realized the twenty wasn’t real. I was planning on buying groceries with it. Karma, feel free to bite people on the ass who do things like this to other people.

My husband and I just had a discussion about the bar thing; he figures dude needs to get over himself. I am less forgiving, but I hate pretty much all practical jokes. My husband has known this for awhile; we re-inforced it tonight, I suppose.

33

Go to Youtube and put “tivo lottery” into the search engine (minus the quotation marks of course). Apparently it’s not a new thing.

34

I remember seeing a similar show in Japan many years back. The two pranks I remember:

Tough-guy actor gets told his son (late teens, strained relationship with dad) has just been arrested. Hidden cameras show him confronting his son at the station, threats and recriminations are exchanged, and the father stomps off into another room to sign some papers. Just then another officer comes in and says the son got loose and is now on the (very high) roof. Father and officers run upstairs and find the son standing on the edge threatening to commit suicide. Tearful accusations are flung, ending with the kid jumping to his death. Surprise! The police were actors and the son is sitting in a safety net one floor below.

Comedy team tries various extreme sports/stunts (actually pretty common) and Partner 1 gets volunteered to do skydiving. While Partner 1 goes up in the plane, Partner 2 stays at the FBO and watches from the ground. Plane goes up, Partner 1 jumps out, chute doesn’t open, Partner 2 watches in horror as his best friend plummets to his death. Surprise! It was a dummy, not Partner 1.

Now that I’ve had a chance to do some work in TV, I strongly suspect that everyone was in on the joke.

35

My dad isn’t a big practical joker, but he pulled one on a guy he used to work with ages ago that they still laugh about.

When we were kids, some cereal we had came with a cut out or peel off glow in the dark paper mask of various movie creatures. There was the creature from the black lagoon and dracula, that I recall. My dad worked third shift in a darkroom and had 2 coworkers. He brought one of the masks in, stuck it on the back of the door, (shone a flashlight on it, I assume, or otherwise got it ready to glow), then waited when the guy went in to develop his film. About 3 minutes after the guy entered and was working, they were treated to a blood curdling scream when he turned around and saw that glowing face. Excellent, IMHO.

36

I must admit to having done a lotto one once.

I shuffled in a fake lotto ticket with a bunch of real ones for Grandpa. He scratched it, and called Grandma over, so quietly to show her.

When he realized it was fake though he laughed it off. (I must’ve been a teen at the time). Though now I feel bad in retrospect, but he took it in stride.

My family, we do that sort of thing all the time though. Little jokes, nothing that would really hurt (we hope). My Dad once put my cousin’s Christmas gifts in tins that they had to use a can opener to open them!

I don’t usually go for practical jokes though, especially when at twelve on April Fool’s day Dad (we were with him for a vacation) told me Mom had come to pick us up. I was miserable that week, this was when I still hated my Dad but I still had to go on vacations to see him (we’re okay now, though prolonged visits drive us both nutty), and it was a day or two earlier than Mom was to pick us up. I was so excited and come running out to see her… and no one is there.

I completely FREAKED on my Dad, screamed at him and was crying and ran back to my room. I never got in trouble for it, because I think he realized that it had been in bad taste. He hasn’t done any practical jokes on me since.

37

I don’t really like anything but the simplest practical jokes and I can’t stand damage to someone’s spirit or property even in the smallest way because I have had to live through some horrible things myself and God forbid, had to deal with some extraneous shit during those times for anything stupid. That said, I participated in a practical joke once that left me as confused as the mark and I don’t know why or how it succeeded to this day.

I have posted this before but here it is:

I wouldn’t have believed this was possible unless I was a primary participant. This didn’t play out quite as offensively as it sounds but I am still not proud of it. This was as sick joke that I never thought in a million years we would be able to pull off and that is part of the reason I went along with it.

My senior year of high school, I had a friend who a continuous on-again, off-again relationship with his girlfriend. I was friends with his girlfriend too although I never thought of her that way before.It was Halloween and our friends hosted a private hayride through backroads. This was to be followed by a party at an older friends house. Apparently, my friend (I will call him Greg) wanted to be more off-again with Shelley that day and he had given some thought to the matter. On the hayride, he proposed that he get her into bed and then we somehow switch places without her knowing.

Like you, I assumed that was impossible except in movies. However, he explained that we were the same build, same hair color, and were dressed very similar that night. Furthermore the house that we were going to after had a bedroom that was unusually dark with the the super-shades closed.

I agreed to give it a try assuming it wouldn’t work. We went to the house for the party, I went into the bedroom, removed my shirt, and hid in the closet. He brought her into the bedroom, they laid on the bed and started making out real heavy. At some point he said “Let me take off my shirt”, stood up, and I knew it was my cue like we rehearsed it and he got in the closet.

You would assume that a woman could tell a substitution in lovers but she could not. We made out for a good 20 minutes and I gently grunted and groaned if talking came into play. The good news is that I didn’t want to get too deep into this whole thing and as luck would have it, she was on her period that night so there was no actual sex and I would not have done that anyway. It was mainly kissing and light petting.

After a while, I decided that had gone on long enough and I just get up silently. She asked “What are you doing?” and Greg knew that was his cue and he stepped out of the closet, I stepped in and he replied to her.

She never found out the scoop that night at all. Greg and I probably would have never told her but other people thought that it was a little much not to share so they told her. She did not believe them. Would you? I never really knew if she believed the story was real or if the story itself was the joke. In any case, we remained friends after that and I we never talked about it at all.

38

This one was mentioned earlier, and this one is pretty similar. (Warning: Audio)

39

When I was in college, a couple of guys rolled one of those giant industrial garbage cans into the handicapped shower in their dorm bathroom, filled it with water, titled it and leaned it against the door of a dude I knew (friend’s boyfriend). Then they knocked and ran. The guy opened the door and the can dumped like 75 gallons of water into his room.

The idoit pranksters ended up on the hook for what I heard was almost $100K in property and water damage to the university and numerous residents of their floor and the floor below.

40

I knew of Gay lovers in Berlin who broke up badly. While the one was sleeping, the other bricked up the door to his apartment, with quick cement, and when the guy woke up, he had a problem. Had to call the fire department to break down the wall.

It made the news, they found the guy and he was given a minimal fine and told to pay for the repair.