April Fool’s
I love a good prank. When someone puts thought into executing a really clever prank, and it works, it’s one of the funniest things in the world, even when it’s happening to me. That being said, I can’t stand April Fool’s Day. It takes all of the mystery and skill out of pranking someone and turns it into a generic day of nonsense jump scares, mean jokes, and lazy fake pregnancy announcements on Facebook.
The first thing about a good prank for me is that it doesn’t actually hurt anyone. Charlie Hester is a tremendously talented musical comedian based out of the Midwest, and you should all book her for your shows after quarantine ends. But separate from how funny she is, she also posted something very wise about April Fool’s Day pranks. She doesn’t want to see people making jokes about COVID-19 being cured and it suddenly being safe to go outside, because there are people who will believe it, and that will put more people at risk and potentially draw out this public health crisis. People will get hurt, and good pranks shouldn’t do that. Your prank should be funny even to the person being pranked, or it’s not in good fun, you’re just picking on someone.
The second thing about a prank should be the element of surprise. That’s why I don’t do anything on April Fool’s Day. I treat it like demons treat Halloween on Buffy The Vampire Slayer. That was a nerdy way of saying “I take the day off.” I didn’t need to add the nerdy reference, but I did that for you. You’re welcome. A good prank should be a surprise, and doing it on April Fool’s Day automatically weakens any surprise. I do this with all my surprises, I time them out for maximum effect. I threw my friend Tirumari a surprise birthday party three months before his birthday. He was completely unprepared, and it was a great time. That’s how a good prank should be. You don’t do it on the day everyone is doing their terrible “I’m going to rehab . . . April Fool’s!” nonsense. You do it on a random Tuesday morning.
My favorite prank I ever pulled involved buying a bag of plastic spiders and hiding them around my office. I put them in patient charts, in the cash register, attached one by fishing line to someone’s computer mouse . . . I had these things everywhere. It took about a week for people to find them all, so for days there were screams of “damn it, Dan!” It was like music.
The other great one involved a co-worker who was cartoonishly scared of Michael Myers (from the Halloween movie franchise, not Austin Powers. He wasn’t scary till The Love Guru). She hates Michael Myers so much that even seeing his picture would make her scream, so I spent several months randomly planting pictures of him in places she’d find them. The best three were: changing her desktop picture to him, taping one in her locker so it fluttered down at her when she opened it, and taping one over the light over her head so she had to look up to see if a bulb was out. These were great times, and the theme is that nobody actually got hurt. They were a surprise, and innocent enough to not actually hurt anyone, so they were acceptable.
Have fun with your time gang, and come up with some fun pranks for when social distancing ends. Lazy Facebook statuses are boring, and you shouldn’t be pranking the people stuck in your home with you right now, it will only cause tension. Be well, and have fun.
My online store is now live! Click the link at the top of the page to check it out. You can currently purchase one of my shirts (“If You Don’t Drink, The Terrorists Win”), where $3.00 of every shirt goes to benefit a veteran support organization including Wounded Warrior Project or Swords To Plowshares, or you can order the presale of my live comedy album, recorded at The Drop Comedy Club in South Bend. The album goes live Saturday, April 25th, can’t wait!