My theories on April Fools' jokes, and pranks and hacks in general

[xiphias]

Originally, I was planning on having this post be full of rickrolls (links to the music video of Rick Astley's 1987 hit single "Never Gonna Give You Up" that are pretending to be links to other things), but I'm too lazy.

Because, to me, "rickrolling" is an example of "acceptable pranking". Um, mostly. Right now, it's so overdone that it starts to lose something, but, in general, it fits my rules for what's okay in a prank.

Here are some of my rules:

• The prank may not cause any damage to anything.
  
• The prank must be easily undone and it must be easy to get things back to normal.
  
• The prank must be designed to avoid negative feelings, with the possible exception of a limited amount of initial confusion.
  

That last one is really important. If a prank causes embarrassment, humiliation, shock, fear, worry, disappointment . . . it's a bad prank.

Pranks should be designed to engender amusement, wonder, surprise . . .

I think that a lot of what "Improv Everywhere" does counts as "good pranks". Having a random musical in a mall food court? That's a GOOD prank.

When Lis and I design pranks, that's what we go for -- trying to make people's lives just a bit more PLEASANTLY surreal.

Comments

[jenett]

It is traditional for seniors at this school to do some kind of prank on their last day of classes (there's a 3 week senior project block, so this is in earlyish May)

My all time favorite - because it was non-destructive, easily undone, and *clever* was to plant cheap alarm clocks (set to the same time, during a free study period). We got the hint when the entire senior class showed up in the library, and then we started hearing the clocks go off.

They were *very* clever - they'd obviously gotten someone to let them in later in the evening or very early in the morning, and had had access to a ladder, because they'd gotten a few in the removeable ceiling tiles, one on top of the hanging artwork goose (flat back: they'd gotten it just between the wings) plus a whole bunch of more obvious places - desk drawers, under the library step stools, behind and on top of bookshelves, etc.

We kept finding them for about a month (every day, something'd go off, and we'd track down the closest ones we could isolate), but there were several that never went off, and I still find occasionally.