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:
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.
We knew each other well enough to know what would or wouldn’t go down well.
We didn’t do anything that permanently harmed anybody, their possessions, or their status in the group.
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)