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:

• making someone’s bed with the pillows under the fitted sheet then tucking the whole thing under the quilt so you can’t tell.

• Filling my coworkers pockets with paperclips by gently dropping them in one at a time when she fell asleep at work.

• 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.