See here for a very, very, well done prank involving a wall that wasn’t there before.
I bring you the infamous head in a pot (warning: sound is a little loud at first)
Whoa-who was that? That sounds vaguely familiar.
One of my best friend in high school pretended to be really pissed at me one April Fool’s when were freshman. Since we were always getting into little spats, it was probably normal.
I wasn’t fooled, though. On the bus ride home she started to tell me, and I turned and said, “April Fools!” Probably somewhat cruel, but at the time, I was rather amused.
I too think the Irish anthem one is cute.
I have no idea why practical jokes bother me down to my very core. I’ve always hated them since I can remember.
Maybe it is the " Candid Camera" scarring, I don’t know, but stuff like that makes me cringe.
That’s odd! I just came in here to say that making someone think they won the lottery is about as mean as you can get.
Bennett Cerf told the story of the nastiest practical joke he’d ever heard, played on a bridegroom. Too much champagne at the reception had done the groom in completely. When he awoke, his arm was in a cast. He had broken it, his ‘friends’ told him mournfully, falling from a swinging chandelier. The poor schlep spent his entire honeymoon with a perfectly good arm in a plaster-of-paris cast.
I’ll only take part in practical jokes (and even then, reluctantly) with people I know and like well enough that the victim will understand it’s meant good-naturedly. And if you get it wrong, and the victim doesn’t like it, you should apologize. Otherwise, it’s not really a joke, more like hazing.
Re: The OP’s example: That is definitely the cruelest practical joke I’ve heard of, and I think the mother is some kind of psycho.
My co-worker Nick is pretty notorious around here for his ridiculously tidy desk (he says it’s because he’s working with classified documents and can’t leave them out, but we all know he just plays Minesweeper all day). A couple of days ago, when Nick was out of the office, another co-worker Clive decided to mess up Nick’s desk as a joke. Nick got his revenge though: the next time Clive was away, Nick tidied Clive’s desk. That blew his mind.
OK, that one wasn’t particularly cruel, so here’s another story. Back in 2001 when I was living in the University hostels, a bunch of us got into a bit of a habit of playing practical jokes on each other. Normally these would involve breaking into someone’s room and turning everything upside down or wrapping everything in newspaper or something.
One day Andy was out for the weekend, so we hit his room. Can’t remember exactly what we did–I think we took his door off its hinges or something. But when he got back, he told us that his best friend had committed suicide and he was away that weekend for his funeral. He also strongly implied that the prank succeeded in making him feel worse. Of course we felt pretty bad about that, so we restored his room and tried to be generally supportive over the next few days. I was 90% certain he was playing an elaborate prank (which he was), but I simply couldn’t call him on it. Had he been telling the truth, accusing him of lying would be one of the most horribly insensitive things I could do.
He came clean after a few days, but our practical jokes seemed to lose their punch after that.
I’ve told this before on the boards, I know, but it applies here.
My husband has an acquaintance who’s been dating the same woman for 7 or 8 years. She really wants to get married, but he doesn’t. (Long backstory on all that that everyone knows, small towns being the way they are.)
Anyway, some years ago, he went down on one knee and proposed. Thrilled, she accepted immediately. Then he said, “April Fool!”
They’re still together, and still not married. Myself, I might have killed him on the spot.
OK, this is the worst revenge I can think of, and it’s a practical joke only in the sense that everyone was laughing but the victim.
When a friend of mine was in middle school, he was the chubby, nerdy, D&D kid. There was one bully who was particularly awful to him, beating him up every day, stealing his stuff, etc. So finally my friend had had enough.
This was a small town, and after digging a little he uncovered a nasty bit of information- this bully had been molested by his father. So, my friend made flyers to that effect, complete with Photoshopped pics (well, probably cut-and paste) of said kid getting it in the butt from his dad. And he proceeded to post them all over school.
Last he heard, the kid transferred schools and his family moved away he was so humiliated. I find it absolutely horrible, no matter how much of a douchebag the kid was.
“Hazing” isn’t the word I would use; more like intentionally being cruel and hurtful to another person for no particular reason, except possibly your own amusement. (Don’t mean to attack you - I just really hate practical jokes.)
We had a good one going a few years back just before Deer season.
We passed out a 1-800 number that was a phone sex number, and said the state is trying to give out more antlerless permits. Well some of the recipients “didn’t get it”, and looked up the number and called the DNR. They got flooded with calls and had to issue notices over the radio and in the papers not to call in as there were no permits to give out.
I once donated some money to the Scientologists in my friend’s name.
This was about 2 weeks ago, and he hasn’t bitched yet, so I don’t know if anything has become of it yet. But the intent is fairly cruel.
Here is a story of a practical joke I pulled, after which I ended up feeling absolutely horrible remorse.
I was dating a guy named Brian, long before the Internet, cell phones, and all the usual means of modern communication – back when people actually used the postal system.
My girlfriend and I had some stupid teenage girl magazine (the only good thing I can say about myself in the context of this story is that it wasn’t our standard reading material; we had bought it for the express purpose of laughing at it). We looked at all the advertisements in the back for correspondence courses to teach you to be a model / become a fashion nail consultant / whatever.
So, we filled in all the forms you could send in to get more information with my boyfriend’s name and address (feminizing his name with variations - Bree, Briana, etc). However, we didn’t want him to suffer too terribly, so we filled in false phone numbers so that he would not receive any pestering phone calls.
A few weeks later, my BF told me that some pathetic young salesman had come to his door in order to try to close the sale (because when he tried to call, the phone number didn’t work). My boyfriend had to tell him “sorry, it was just a practical joke.”
The poor salesman smiled sadly and said “that’s okay, it happens all the time.”
So I ended up feeling a little sorry for my BF, but really, really, really sorry for the poor guy trying to close the sale. Just in case he hadn’t figured out he had a loser job, he had people like me to help remind him of it.
That was 25 or 30 years ago and I still feel bad about it.
Okay, I think we have one that beats the lottery story. WAY beyond the lottery story.
I imagine you would go to jail for a decent amount of time for that “joke” if you were caught. Maybe later they can go toss pumpkins off the overpass or cut some brak cables for laughs?
Although what WOULD be a funny joke is if the guy made the host THINK he laced everyone’s glasses with LSD.
Some jokes are just stupid. My boss had a barbeque one time. One of our coworkers who is married to a cop in the same jurisdiction had some cop buddies come over and pretend to bust his party. The joke was totally lame because a) it’s a party for adults, not some college kegger, b) there punchline is essentially “oh we’re soandso’s friends…gotya” and c) I just don’t like cops.
What would have been funny would have been to have someone totally escalate the situation by pretending they had some drugs or whatever.
To be funny, practical joke must play off the victims character flaws and there can’t be a potential for someone to actually be injured or otherwise harmed. Otherwise it isn’t a ‘practical joke’, it’s called being a ‘malicious prick’. Most of all, it has to be CLEVER.
One clever joke my roomates pulled was tricking me into thinking it was two hours earlier than it really was. They changed all the clocks in the appartment and even put some flashlights outside the window. So I get up at 6am for my am class, shower, and can’t figure out for 20 minutes why all the morning TV shows are out of wack. Basically, the only harm was that I now had time for breakfast before class.
We played a joke on one of our roomates by hiding some women’s panties in his bed when his girlfriend came up to visit. She stormed out of the appartment and they almost broke up. Normally this would be considered mean, but I couldn’t stand that fucking asshole and his cunt-sack of a girlfriend.
:rolleyes:
I heard that one over 50 years ago as a FOAF story about a guy with a new VW bug who bragged about his gas mileage.
I never did think much of that guy and that story didn’t change my opinion. He actually did spend some time in jail a few years later but that’s another story.
This isn’t so much a practical joke as - well, a really nasty hazing - but one of my friends when I was at school had a p/t job in a supermarket, stacking shelves. Out the back there was a box crusher machine - basically a giant hydraulic press, you shoe the boxes in, turn it on and the press would come down slowly and turn them all into flat cardboard.
So you can all probably see what’s coming here - yes, they all ganged up on this one kid none of them liked, put him in the box crusher and turned it on. Of course they turned it off again after about two seconds, but just thinking about what might have happened if there’d been a sudden fault and the off button didn’t work, frankly gave me the cold shivers, and still does (and this was a kid I’d never even met, I just heard the story)