Pranks! When I was in high school in rural Ohio, pranks were the noblest of all creative endeavors. The best of them—like when a kid made a whistler tip in shop class and installed it on a friend’s car—lived in legend alongside the most vile, which may have involved pee, Sierra Mist, and a middle-school dance. We watched way too much CKY.
For three months, the Kenyon College dining hall displayed a portrait of a swarthy bullfighter among its gray-haired, pale-skinned college founders. I may or may not have had something to do with this.
Click through for pranks that, of course, make Johnny Knoxville (and me) look like a simpleton. As if that were tough. —Cooper Fleishman
Wikipedia
8. Tricking Sarah Palin into thinking you’re the President of France
I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous here: that Sarah Palin’s staff didn’t know who Nicolas Sarkozy was or the way they ended the call with the Masked Avengers, a Canadian comedy duo.
Once she realized she was being pranked, Palin handed the phone off to an assistant, who said, “I’m sorry. I have to let you go. Thank you.”
That is not how you end a call after you’ve been pranked. You either try to trick the other person into thinking that they were the one being pranked, or you make a farting noise with your mouth and hang up. —Ryan O’Hanlon
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Wikipedia
7. Convincing Brits that spaghetti grows on trees
Leave it to our colonial oppressors to both fall for and pull off the greatest news hoax of all time.
From Wikipedia:
The report was produced as an April Fools’ Day joke in 1957, showing a family in the canton of Ticino in southern Switzerland as they gathered a bumper spaghetti harvest after a mild winter and “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil.”
Yes, you see, spaghetti hangs from the branches like the willow tree, and when you stab the bark that’s where the tomato sauce comes from.
Oh, and have you seen our cow that can be milked for dollar bills? —ROH
The Roald Dahl book Esio Trot was based on a real prank.
In the early 20th century, Waldo Peirce, an American artist, gave a Parisian woman a turtle as a gift. He then kept replacing it with bigger turtles so the woman thought it was growing.
Then he started replacing the turtles with smaller ones, and the woman freaked out, thinking her turtle was shrinking.
This could only happen in France with a guy named Waldo, right? —ROH
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5. Introducing a “left-handed” hamburger—and selling it
Is it weird that my hands started to smell like pickles when I wrote this?
From Burger King’s U.K. press release:
The U.K.’s most preferred hamburger will still consist of lettuce, onions, pickles, mayonnaise, ketchup and four-ounce flame-grilled hamburger patty, but the sandwich has been re-designed to fit more comfortably in the left hand. This will result in fewer condiment ‘spills’ for left-handed hamburger lovers.
The new Left-Handed Whopper will have all the condiments rotated 180 degrees, thereby redistributing the weight of the sandwich so that the bulk of them skew to the left.
“We have always been proud of the fact that we offered 1,024 ways to order our flagship Whopper sandwich, now we are offering 1,025 ways! It’s the ultimate ‘Have It Your Way’ for our left-handed customers,” says Lorraine Thomson, Marketing Director for Burger King U.K.
Burger King just gained a lot of respect in my eyes. Lefties are still weird. You guys should all, like, move to Mars together or something. —ROH
London, 1809: Theodore Hook, an English author, makes a bet with his friend Samuel Beazley that he can turn any address into the most talked-about spot in all of London. He then spends the next week writing letters requesting various goods and services from a Ms. Tottenham on 54 Berners Street.
From Wikipedia:
On 27 November, at five o’clock in the morning, a sweep arrived to sweep the chimneys of Mrs Tottenham’s house. The maid who answered the door informed him that no sweep had been requested, and that his services were not required. A few moments later another sweep presented himself, then another, and another, 12 in all. After the last of the sweeps had been sent away, a fleet of carts carrying large deliveries of coal began to arrive, followed by a series of cakemakers delivering large wedding cakes, then doctors, lawyers, vicars and priests summoned to minister to someone in the house they had been told was dying. Fishmongers, shoemakers, and over a dozen pianos were among the next to appear, along with “six stout men bearing an organ.” Dignitaries, including the Governor of the Bank of England, the Duke of York, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Lord Mayor of the City of London, also arrived. The narrow streets soon became severely congested with tradesmen and onlookers. Deliveries and visits continued until the early evening, bringing a large part of London to a standstill.
Hook stationed himself in the house directly opposite 54 Berners Street, where he and his friend spent the day watching the chaos unfold.
See, I don’t really get this one. It’s great because that old lady was probably going insane, and it would’ve been funny as hell to be the guys watching from across the street. But how is this clever? The guy wrote a thousand letters. That’s not that hard. Well, maybe if he did it with a quill it would be impressive. Can anyone verify what kind of writing instrument was used here? It’s vitally important. —CF/ROH
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via Harvard Crimson online
3. Having birds attack your rival football team
As legend tells, decades ago, an MIT student student, always wearing a black-and-white striped uniform, would visit the Harvard football stadium during lunch, blow a whistle, and spread bird seed on the field. On opening day when the Harvard football team took the field, the story goes, as soon as the ref blew the whistle to start the game, a flock of birds suddenly swooped down and bombarded the players.
If this epic classical-conditioning hack is true, MIT pranks have gotten way tamer over the years. Putting random crap on the Great Dome is getting old. —CF
via Dallasobserver.com
2. Getting your teachers high
We really can’t condone this at all.
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via Amazingdata.com
1. Convincing America you’re a cannibal
ManBeef.com. Remember this? The site that offered tips and recipes for preparing “everything from sausages and soup bones to bouillon and stock … made with the highest-quality human meats”? Traffic on the site, no doubt spurred on by the campaigns and petitions demanding the site be shut down, netted 500,000 hits a day.
A FDA investigation declared the site was in the clear—they weren’t actually selling meat, just merchandise.
In 2001, its creators revealed it was a hoax, simply meant to offend “sensitive viewers.”
The lesson here, as always: we are all heartless, bloodsucking cannibals who salivate at the thought of another human’s meat. —CF/ROH
—Main image kidgrifter/Flickr