There was a story in the news back when I was in highschool about a kid “streaking” across the football field during halftime except instead of being naked he was wearing a banana suit. Naturally, he got suspended because his school’s admin were joyless bastards. Also he was a black kid in redneck country (I would know being a redneck myself) but that’s not what this is about.
This is about me watching people scare each other and mess with each other’s food and create giant messes for the other person to clean up and calling those pranks when they’re really just abuse.
Some of my classic pranks are:
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making someone’s bed with the pillows under the fitted sheet then tucking the whole thing under the quilt so you can’t tell.
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Filling my coworkers pockets with paperclips by gently dropping them in one at a time when she fell asleep at work.
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Shuffling another card players hand while they’re taking a bathroom break (obviously never during a game with stakes and you can do it without looking).
All of these aren’t anything more than minor inconveniences, they never put anyone in danger or frighten them. They just make the world slightly more interesting and break up some of the monotony. I also don’t do things like this all that often and would be terrible at using them to gaslight someone considering I start giggling immediately.
We need to teach people how to execute a GOOD prank. Good pranks take ingenuity, fast thinking, and good judgement as to your audience and whether they’ll find it funny, and whether or not they’re in the mood. Most pranks also take more effort from you than from the prankee, and you never leave someone else to clean up a mess you made.
TLDR; pranking is a natural part of human behavior (and actually a lot of similarly social animals like crows have been observed engaging in pranks), but we need to teach people that scare, gross-out, and mess making pranks aren’t where it’s at (and if that’s all you can imagine, your brain ain’t where it’s at either). Don’t punish the banana suit (or similar) kid(s)! That was a beatiful prank he deserves acclaim for! And being more lenient on the good pranks helps them understand what a real prank should look like.
Oh God, don’t get me started on Youtube “prank” videos. Festering pustules of wannabe human beings that lot are!
For a subtle prank I went into my boss’ office once and rotated everything 90° while he was out on a business trip. (By “I” here I meant “I led a team of coworkers”.) By a freak of layout his office was an almost perfect square with the door arranged in a way that you could do that and everything would fit, so it was like someone went in, lifted up the walls, rotated the floor 90°, then lowered the walls again. (In reality it was a WHOLE LOT MORE WORK, let me tell you!)
And it’s such an insane thing to do that when he walked into his office he knew something was VERY wrong but it took him a long time to figure out what. About an hour later he came to me and asked “… Did you guys change my office somehow?” I think he got his answer when everybody broke out laughing.
In university we filled someone’s room with computer paper: just took a box of fanfold paper and tore off one sheet at a time, crumpling it into a ball and throwing it into their room. Until it was filled from floor to ceiling with paper balls.
The keys to making these pranks funny (for everybody) were:
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No mean-spiritedness. We didn’t do this because we hated someone and wanted to “get” them. We did it because we liked them and wanted to play with them.
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We knew each other well enough to know what would or wouldn’t go down well.
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We didn’t do anything that permanently harmed anybody, their possessions, or their status in the group.
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We cleaned up after ourselves after we had our laugh. That work to rotate the room? Yeah, we did it twice. That room full of computer paper? Yeah, we emptied it.
I think a few people on Youtube need to learn some of this.
At university we put all the furniture of a student out on the lawn and installed grass sod and two sheep in his room.
We did help him clean up afterwards.
Helping with the cleanup goes a LONG way toward turning an “ARGH!” into a “HA HA!” doesn’t it
Funny. But how the hell did college students have the money for grass sod? That’s something I consider expensive even as an adult with plenty of disposable income. (Please tell me it was “appropriated” from some stock the university had on hand)
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- Photocopy a paperclip 10 times
- Put photocopied paper with image of paperclip on it back in the feed tray
- Watch people try to figure out where the phantom paperclip is in the machine
I’m going to visit my sister next month, I’m bringing a box of googly eyes to put on all of her stuff. :)
I always have googly eyes with me. You never know when you’re gonna need them.
Tins in the cupboard are an amazing target. They open the cupboard to find everything watching them. At the same time, it doesn’t effect them negatively in the slightest. All the contents is intact, and easy to identify still.
It also tends to linger. It took a year for my wife to find the last items watching her.
That is a great game to play
Another one to do is wrap everything they have in tinfoil. Individually. That takes dedication and shows you care!
Arrange all the tins into “soup”, “savoury” and “dessert” and then take off the labels.
Whoa there satan. Imagine having to frantically open 10 cans of corn while your pregnant wife is sobbing on the floor for her midnight chili.
Does dog food go in savoury? 🤔
(It’s a joke, removing can labels is evil)
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I secretly moved a bank of high school lockers about 1ft per day, every school day, for a whole year.
They were pretty light - those steel “backpack only” sized lockers in a about a 3x4 arrangement. Some days I’d just lean on the end of them to nudge them over, but skipping doorways and around corners meant extra planning and often meant I had to come in to school early.
The janitor caught me one morning. He agreed it was a funny prank and offered to help when we got to the staircase.
By the end of the year the lockers had migrated up one floor and over to a separate building.
I kept the secret for decades and only recently started telling the story.
I’m curretly raising my coworkers table ~3mm daily after they leave. I have never seen them adjust the table, so it’s exciting to see how high I can go. Now is day 8.
The rule of pranks is simple, the victim should agree that it was funny/interesting/fair. End of.
It’s entirely on the prank doer to balance this. There is not such think as an unreasonable reaction from the recipient.
The catch is, this line varies from person to person, and even from time to time. The prankster needs to judge this, and should alway err on the side of caution.
I think the “Super Troopers” rule always applies to pranks (aka Shennanigans). Talking about Farva’s pranks: “Our shennanigans are cheeky and fun. His shennanigans are cruel and tragic.” Moral of the story is, when you playing pranks on someone, don’t be fucking Farva. Nobody likes Farva because he thinks he’s funny but in reality he’s just a dick.
Well hello Shirley.
A good one is to tape a bag of ping pong balls / jellybeans / whatever over the window into someone’s office so they think its been entirely filled with it, only to have them confused when they open the door and everything’s normal inside
When I worked in a call centre we would hear a beep right before the call went live. Some magnificent bastard set a guy’s windows minimise noise to that sound. Every time he minimises a window he thought a call came though, we got a good days fun out of that one.
That is MEAN!
Reminds me of a little electronic device I made using a tiny MCU dev board and a speaker on the DAC pins. This little device, stuck under the couch, would at random intervals that cycled in frequency up and down, make a sound that mimicked her phone’s message notification causing her to run to her phone to check for message only, naturally, for there not to be any.
Also, there should always be a way for the person being pranked to back out of the prank before realising it is a prank.
I disagree with this one. My favorite is surreptitiously reparking the car in a slightly more convenient place and clearly visible from its original spot. There’s really no way to prevent it from inside a building, and the confusion is usually followed by relief at the surprise shade or shorter walk. Surprise upgrades are always hilarious.
Can you clarify what you mean with an example? Sounds like you want the pranker to tell the prankee what is happening before it happens? Which in most cases kills the concept?
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Ah, that’s reasonable I guess
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We used to zip tie people’s chairs to the ceiling if they went on vacation.
That or a little tape over the mouse laser.
Best mouse prank I’ve heard of was from the time mice had balls, used PS/2 connection and drivers had to be installed manually. While the prankee was out for lunch, the prankster:
- Uninstalled the drivers
- Unplugged the mouse cable
- Jammed the ball so it couldn’t roll
- Put a post-it note under the mouse
The prankee comes back from lunch, moves the mouse to wake up the computer. Nothing.
Looks under the mouse, removes the post-it, curses whoever did this. Nothing.
Checks the cable, curses louder, replugs. Nothing.
Wakes up the PC with keyboard, goes to device manager, sees that mouse does not show up, swears like a sailor, reinstalls drivers, restarts. Nothing.
Does a close inspection of the mouse, removes the ball and sees the paper that jammed it, all while cursing the prankster to hell and worse. Finally gets the mouse working.
Next day while the same prankee is out for lunch, the prankster does nothing more elaborate than puts a post-it note under the mouse, so that the edge of the neon yellow paper is just visible…
I hope that is not an unpopular opinion. I seem very “straight” at work so have been able to do so much without anyone ever suspecting me.
Rearranging the letters on the after hours sign to say “After 5 pm, please dance”
Leaving toy dinosaur in unexpected places.
Upside down monitors, changing keyboard language or wallpaper if someone leaves their computer unlocked.
Gentle funny things are pranks. Mean things are not pranks.
A dear friend used to put marbles in harmless places around my home. I never actually caught them in the act, but I don’t have many friends who walk around with pockets full of marbles.
It’s been decades and several full house moves, and I still sometimes find random marbles somewhere strange but harmless.
I send a thank you text each time.
I would LOVE to see a lot of these pranks people are mentioning happen. I’m not really a prankster myself and I would love to be able to see actual pranks instead of the horrible things people on YouTube do that they label “pranks”.
Actually a really good take thanks x
