Keep the Prank Alive

I wanted to be sure that graduation wouldn't spell the end of our Pranking careers. So I decided to join a local "chapter" of Improv Everywhere based out of Baltimore. (That's right... it's not a secret.) As long as you're accompanied by other agents, I don't think joining an anonymous prank ring is too sketchy. But watch out for your selves!

From their website and forum, you can join a local group or watch some hilarious NYC improvising.

The Jungle

The title comes from here.

Supplies: Raw meat, preferably nast already so you’re not wasting fresh stuff. Ideally, you’d be able to hit a supermarket deli around 7 p.m. and talk about whether they throw out their meat or not. I would be giving this same tip if this blog was ‘I love feeding hungry people’. Masking tape or duct tape if you feel comfortable about it not taking the wall with it.

Execution: After you’ve fed some people who need it with the tons of unnecessarily discarded food [grr America], save a pound of meat for your victim. Tape half a pound of meat in semi-obvious places, using strips about the length of your hand. Two lengths of tape crosswise should hold them. Then go for difficult spots – the ceiling in the closet, under a laundry basket, to the underside of dresser drawers, lampshades. Hopefully, they won’t be completely thorough in their search and forced to find some by smell, as I believe Double Cee was.

The above painting is titled 'Rotting Meat', and it's by Cindy Wright.

Difficulty: Rather low. It’s about stretching resources. Ten minutes for the semi-obvy meat chunks, twenty for the hard-to-check places. Not much damage to your calendar or wallet, and it can be pretty annoying for the prankee.

NOTE: Make sure your victim and your meat match; you don’t want to be mushing pulled pork against an Orthodox Jew’s wall.

Pranking Paralytics: The Prank Within

Double Cee has been just running me lately, with an assist from everything else in my life. But that’s no excuse. ILBP is fun, and I’ll update more. Especially with some fun ones forthcoming.

One of the oldest [and most rural] high school pranks is to let 3 good-sized animals [pigs or cows, traditionally] into the school building, labeling them 1, 2, and 4. There you have the essence of what can make pranks ingenious: the stretching of resources to extend the prank.

It’s why, for the first time ever, I was actually a little disappointed in Double Cee’s execution in the glitter prank. In the five[!] hours I spent cleaning my room, I would expect to find glitter in certain places, and then would be crestfallen when there wasn’t any in, say, my retainer case, or my pillows. Admittedly, it was still quite the prank, and I probably had that reaction only because I’m a prank-weary veteran.

Sigh.

There’s a passage in the prank-based young adult book Matilda about how the antagonist principal Ms. Trunchbull gets away with her excessive abuse of students. Paraphrased: “the key is to go whole hog, to do something so ridiculous that no one would ever believe it if you told them.” While we’re not trying to destroy lives here, more than a few acquaintances are surprised when we mention the time, effort, and dead animals that have gone into this thing.

And once you know your rival -and establish some ground rules- push the pre-pranked envelope.

See the above post for an example of a low-material, low-expense prank within a prank.

Pranking Paralytics: Resources

Is it possible to be a good pranker and a thrifty one? I think our US consumerist mindset has corroded that great frugal value of “resourcefulness” into “able to buy resources.” I for example, in my quest to wreck Tyler Jimmy’s room, got all the way to the shipping supply aisle of a local office goods store. I was sorely tempted to buy the 24-dollar bag of Styrofoam packing peanuts (“biodegradable!”) because the are clingy and annoying, and even better, they are known for being clingy and annoying!

If that instance had been the first time I’d dealt with such trials, I may have caved. And in fact, I have on several occasions in the past. For example I bought duck tape and a tablecloth, with grand schemes in mind… and I still haven’t used them! Though on the other hand, I did buy the trash bags used in the “Bags and Pipes” prank. However, the best part of that prank was free (using Tyler Jimmy’s own stereo and a borrowed CD against him…. For several hours…. At full volume.)

So then, here are a few things to keep in mind when gathering your prank materials:

• Be resourceful: Use what you already have. Especially because there is a special kind of humor in a prank made from things everyone has. Like left-over holiday candy.
• Borrow: people want to be involved in pranking, even if they don’t prank themselves.
• Do site-based pranks: like removing things from the room, or bringing things from outside in.
• Reuse garbage: For example, during my internship I filled my supervisor’s desk drawers with paper scraps from recycling: Sustainable Pranking!

Pranking Paralytics: Morality

I like to blame “the man” for a lot of things. For example, I blame the paternalistic socialization I underwent as a child (where good girls don’t do gross, annoying, or overly rambunctious things) for my heightened sense of pranker’s guilt. Once I dumped a bag of Chex Mix in Tyler Jimmy’s bed (or under the carpet, can’t remember which – this was during the early days of the War!) and remember thinking about the bugs. Oh, the bugs were going to infest his room, and bother his poor roommate who had nothing to do with the pranking, and then these bugs would eat through his furniture and eventually bring the ceiling down because they’d turned their voracious appetite towards the Sondheim House infrastructure.

It didn’t really get that far. But you may have experienced similar, less paranoid feelings when pranking. In fact, such sentiments may have prevented you from pulling off a couple-o-good-ones. That’s why I call Morality a pranking paralytic.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for values and have a great many of them myself. But I believe that the world of pranking, like the worlds of fiction writing, professional wrestling and university, is a world where you must suspend your normal judgments in exchange for a new subjective set.

I encourage you to communicate with your pranking partner: What don’t you like? What makes you uncomfortable? What is too far? (This analogy has gone too far!) Set up boundaries. For example, off limit zones are: hair, underwear, musical instruments, electronics. And if it’s not off limits, go there! Screw it, I say -- you’re already pranking. And pranking is not nice!

Pranking Paralytics: Time Constraints

I have always been anxious about time: getting there on time, having enough time, not wasting time. Case in point: I loved Zelda as a child. But when they came out with the Mask of Majora, I flipping peed my pants. It’s completely time-based! It is possible to run out of it – waste it – not have enough of it (of course you won’t know until you’re twenty pages into a cheat book that you had to buy because you can’t the handle the pressure! And you’re not even in high school yet!)

Enough of that.

Yes – I do feel the pressure to do quick pranks because I’m worried Tyler Jimmy is going to walk in on them (which I did to him anyways, so half the pressure is gone.) But! If you’re like me, here’re a few things you can do.

• One is to communicate your schedules (“I will be out of the room every Tuesday from 10:30am to 4:15pm.”) It’s gross, and can lead to pranking that is so overly scheduled it kills the spontaneity. Ten cuidado, prankitantes.
  
• Secondly, use helpers. I remember a prank where I was especially worried about time. I wanted to put fliers under all of Tyler Jimmy’s floormates’ doors asking them to help him move his stuff out in exchange for pizza. If I got caught, clearly, the ruse would be up! So I got some underclassmen to help me out. And it was great bonding!
• Third, ignore your overly conditioned sense of urgency!! You are not going to miss the school bus! Class will not begin without you! Do the prank – and if they show up while you’re working, you’ll have had more finished than if you cut out before really developing the piece!