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

Comedian/writer Al Franken tells this tale in the book “Live from New York”

He and his wife Franny had the first “SNL” baby. They were holding a party to show the child to all the SNL staff–ladies in one room, guys in the other. The couple came into the room with the ladies in it, with Al holding a doll wrapped up like a baby. He proceeded to bang the doll against the wall a few times, then throw it on the floor and jump on it. The guys later said they had never heard anything worse than the screams coming from the women who thought they saw Al just kill his own new born daughter.

Then Franny’s sister came in holding the real baby.

Found the link. The husband definitely did have some weird issues, but I can’t help empathizing with him anyway. I guess the moral of the story is, if you think jokes like that are humiliating and mean, don’t marry someone who insists on pulling them.

Reminds me of the time I spent working in a huge freezer warehouse about ten years ago. There were stories of people who pissed off the forklift drivers, were shrink-wrapped and left in one of the back aisles for several hours until they were missed. In -30 degree temperatures.

Considered the mentally unstable degenerates who were hired to work there, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it were true.

I admire this one for its simplicity. I saw it on one of the numerous “Amazing Videos” type shows that you find all over the cable dial. Apparently, Egypt had it’s own version of “Candid Camera,” and one of the stunts involved nothing more than someone nonchalantly carrying a briefcase on a crowded street corner, setting it down, then running like hell.

You’d see a couple of people notice the guy, look panic stricken, then run away from the briefcase. You can image the chain reaction this caused.

Hah hah. I remember the idiot host laughing his butt off.

The Al Franken story reminded me of one told by Jay Johnstone, formerly of the Los Angeles Dodgers, in one of his books. He mentions that in Dodgertown (the Dodgers’ spring training complex) every spring a nurse would ask the players for a urine specimen. One year, instead of urinating in his cup, he went to the cafeteria and filled it with apple juice. When he gave it to her, she commented that it looked a bit dark. “You’re right,” he said, “I’d better run it through again,” and he gulped it down. She pretty much fainted on the spot.

I just read that again–it’s a horrible story of two people who probably should never have gotten married. They both just seem so utterly miserable together.

A laugh riot!

(ugh)

Next, we’re going to yell “fire” in a theatre…

I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the Canadian TV show ‘Kenny vs. Spenny’, but it’s basically two friends who, on each episode, have some sort of bet and then some sort of humiliation for the loser. Kenny is very conniving, and sometimes goes off on tangents during the bet.

The were doing a ‘Who’s funniest?’ bet, and Spenny was preparing to do some stand up comedy or something. Kenny decided to write a fake letter from the Department of Health to Spenny saying that one of his previous partners had tested positive for HIV and that Spenny should go get tested. All very official looking.

So basically Spenny is totally thrown off his game, goes to get tested, starts trying to contact all the girls he’s slept with, etc., etc. Dude starts crying and stuff. This went on for DAYS!

So the day of the competition judging arrives and Spenny blows his routine (at a Yuk-Yuk’s, I think) and goes into a big speech about what happened to him and to practice safe sex. Then Kenny gets up there and tells everyone about this practical joke. Of course, everyone loves it, the judges love it, and Kenny wins the competition.

Probably the best (cruelest) practical joke I’ve ever seen.

Did this to a friend once- just set his alarm clock ahead an hour and a half. He couldn’t figure out why his watch, his microwave, and car stereo were all off until he got to the school parking lot and it was empty.

The load times require patience, but two of my friends tinfoiled her boss’ office.

and here’s an actual disappearing office. (And a great site all-around.)

My brother told me that he pulled this when he was a young, foolish physics student.

There was a certain restaurant that the students sometimes ate at, when they could afford no better - a real greasy spoon. The food was terrible and the service was worse.

One day, after a particularly revolting meal, my brother decided on revenge of sorts. He got a flask full of liquid nitrogen, and took it to the restaurant; he ordered a hamburger, took it back to his booth, and soaked it in the liquid nitrogen until it froze solid. Then, he took it to the front cash, complaining loudly that there was something wrong with his hamburger - and, to the amazement of the staff, shattered it. :smiley:

[Disclaimer: I didn’t actually witness this]

One thing I did witness wasn’t a deliberate practical joke … again, it involved my brother and liquid nitrogen.

One of the wierder effects of liquid nitrogen is that, if you throw it on the floor, it scoots along like a puck on an air-hockey table (like a boiling drop of water on a hot stove). For some reason, when it does this it tends to pick up the dust on the floor … thus, it looks much like a hissing, steaming, boiling and hairy ameoba shooting rapidly across the floor.

My brother was demonstrating this to kid brother (me) when we believed we were alone in the physics building one night - he tossed a bucket full of the stuff on the floor in a hall outside a lab he was working in, and we watched as it scooted down the corridor - and then it bounced off a wall and scooted down another corridor and out of sight - and we heard a horrid scream.

We ran down to that corridor and looked - to see a janitor running for his life, with “the blob” after him … it evaporated completely before he reached the next door, so when he turned around, it was gone.

The cruel part was, we were so afraid of getting in trouble, we didn’t tell him what happened - we pretended to know nothing about it. So the poor chap never learned exactly what was chasing him in the Physics building late one night.

I know it’s horrible, but I laughed at both those. I would have liked to witness both those, too.

That poor custodian–he’s probably been posting for years and years about having witnessed a genuine unexplainable paranormal event…

I’m another one who finds the Fake Winning Lottery Ticket grotesquely cruel. I’ve only ever seen it on Funniest Videos (which I only watch for the DOGS, that’s all, I swear) and it makes me cringe. Not funny.

Hey, I just remembered a practical joke that was played on ME.

The background is that my sister-in-law in the Midwest United States had asked me if I could find a Cairo-based penpal for her 13-year-old daughter. It didn’t have to be an Egyptian (especially because of the language barrier), just another teenage girl living in Cairo. She thought the international school would be a good place to look.

Well, the problem with that request is that the expat kids around here are much too worldly to think that becoming a penpal with a girl they’ve never met makes any sense at all. They go to school with children from around the world; there is no excitement just because, gasp, someone lives in another country. Chances are that by age 13, the kids themselves have lived in several countries. They’d tend to think it was dorky/stupid/immature to have an arbitrary penpal – they can just write to all their friends who have moved to new countries if that’s what they want.

But I couldn’t say that to my sister-in-law: how insulting! So I kept my mouth shut and did my best to find a penpal. Word of mouth was a total failure, so I put up signs at the school and community center, asking people to contact me (since I didn’t want to put up signs with my niece’s email address all over Cairo).

Anyway, I got one e-mail in response. It was this wonderful note:

After gasping with shock for a few minutes, I figured out that it was a girlfriend of mine who had gone so far as to set up a yahoo mail account in the name of “Walid Hosni” (not the real name she used) just to pull this prank.

After that, for some reason her real email account stopped working, so she was forced to adopt “Walid Hosni” as her primary email account.

Her nickname is “Walid” now among my circle of friends, but it is very hard to explain to newcomers exactly why.

Well I have 4 of the most horrible practical jokes 2 I pulled and think they were wonderful one I pulled and feel bad and the other is a third hand story and is pretty gross.

For my friends birthday when he turned 21 we decided to have a surprise party for him. We couldn’t think of a way to actually make it a surprise, until we came up with this; As he was walking back from class one day we jumped out of a rented van with ski masks on grabbed him and threw him in the back where we duct taped him and hooded him. We then drove around for a couple of hours until we drove to the beach where the party was. We marched him out of the van to the site of the party and put him on his knees. We then pulled the trigger on an old revolver and yelled at each other about how we were going to kill him now. One of the guy “remembered” the can of gasoline in the van and we could light him on fire. so we took a gas can filled with water, that smelled like gasoline, and dumped in all over him we then lit matches next to him head to light his birthday cake and complained how he wasn’t lighting on fire. We then pulled of the hood and every one yelled surprise after he stopped crying and beating us he laughed and had a true surprise party, we asked he was too scared to recognize our voices.

When I graduated from high school me and a couple of friends paid for a one week vacation in Hawaii, but my buddy Erik got a girl friend the night before we left. Because of this he would not go out to bars to meet women or the beach to check them out or any normal thing for three single guys on a beach in Hawaii instead he sat in hotel room talking to her on the phone. Me and my other single friend were quite upset so on the way out of the country I got a random cute girl to jump on him and stick her tongue down his throat. We took a picture of this that looked like his knew her and was having fun. After we got the photos developed we broke into her house and taped it to the mirror in her bedroom while they were having a “date” in the living room. According to Eric when they went back to her bed room she noticed the pic and started throwing things at him it took him 2 hrs to calm her down, they dated for another 3 years.

Ok now the ones that suck;

My freshman year of high school I sat next to one of my good friends girlfriends and when we were lifting weights in the morning I mentioned that it would be fun to pull an April fools joke on her. Bo agreed and so wrote out a note about how he was only using her for her body. I got to class and with the help of another kid in my lifting class proceeded to break the bad news to her complete with his note to me. Any how before we could spring the April fools on her she ran out of class and tracked Bo down. He decided to run with the joke because he though it was funny. She broke up with him because there was already a rumor going around the girls to a similar extent. They got back together later but broke up for good about a month later. funny thing her and I are best friends now and joke that the reason we’re friends is I made her cry back in the day, but I still feel like an asshole.

Ok I had no part in this joke and it makes me a little sick.

The track coaches in my conference in college get together every year for a wild party. On of the coaches passed out about 2 years ago and the other coaches decided to punish him for being so out of control. They removed his underwear and proceeded to defecate into it. They then put it back on him after wiping a little in his crack. When he woke up the next morning he was suitably embarrassed and went to clean himself he discovered corn in the feces the quote I was told when he came running out of the bathroom naked into the coaches room was “I don’t even like corn”. He the quite coaching that team the next day.

Your mileage must be varying from mine; I think all four of those are horrible. And pointless. Except to be cruel to another human being for no reason.

I agree. With friends like that, I wouldn’t need enemies.

My uncle (by marriage, eh! any common genes are also shared by rhesus monkeys!) is an ass, uh, excuse me, likes practical jokes a lot. Let’s call him Mike.

His brother “Bob” lived in the other end of the country. OK, so Spain isn’t so big, but still, the drive up is about 16 hours and that’s if you don’t run into too much of a jam in Madrid. They, as well as their siblings and families, would spend Christmas Eve with their parents.

One year the table was ready but Bob and his family hadn’t arrived yet. While he was in another room Mike got a call on his cellphone (one of the first in Spain). He went into the living room with a sad look on his face and told his parents that Bob and his family had been in an accident and had all been killed.

Turns out it wasn’t true. Uncle Mike didn’t get killed because the relief at seeing Bob and his family was greater than the anger at the stupid joke…

The kicker?

Bob and his wife died two Christmas seasons later, in a car crash on the drive up. Their children had only minor injuries. As people were muttering remembering the stupid joke “don’t call the fuckin’ devil, he already comes without calling him!”

Someone pulled that one on me. I’d still like to smack whomever it was for making the poor salesman come all the way over here! I lived in a small town where they would have been extremely unlikely to get any sales. Of course as soon as I showed him a sample of my not-girly-at-all handwriting, it was clear I hadn’t filled the form, as the handwriting was completely girly.

That’s the reaction I had, too. Disgusting, not jokey or cute or even ironic, just gross. There’s a line between playing a practical joke and cruelty.