I left school at 16, under the impression that I had two choices; go and earn money, or stay on at my nasty great comprehensive for another two years listening to a selection of malcontents and probable paedophiles talk bollocks.
So I joined the masses that entered the workforce of the City in the late 80s, just another clueless spotty Herbert rushing around in an ill-fitting suit from Next, sporting an analogue-digital combo wristwatch and hair slicked down and back with a resurgent Brylcreem.
I was effectively a child, wandering through a city of grey men, entirely unclear of my purpose, why I was in an office in the first place, and with certainly no idea what I was doing.
According to my payslip I was at a shipping company, employed as far as I could tell to help the people who were also at the shipping company. I had never heard of shipping companies before I took that job, and knew nothing of shipping. There were many blueprints and plans, plans of ships, and I was in charge of them. I think I was a clerk. It didn’t matter, I saw it as money and the opportunity to be a grown up and get the flip out of Essex.
Months passed, and rather than receive answers to my existential whimpers, I drew a blank. To paraphrase Yoda, work leads to boredom, boredom leads to mind wandering. And my mind didn’t wander that far.
Rather than engineer some lasting and meaningful escape, I looked around me, at my friends and brothers, and accepted my captivity.
It seemed best to lighten my time there by amusing myself. A bit like Porridge! I can spread some harmless levity. Let’s laugh at this crazy world everyone! It’s stupid. I can be the Norman Stanley Fletcher of Liverpool Street.
My first foray into this field of fun at work was a minor excursion. The secretaries at the company had to type up reams of scribbled papers that catalogued items on ships and rigs. And it was my job to collate these lists. I never knew what these items were and neither did the secretaries. Bilge pipes and the like? What are they? Who cares?! It was the epitome of a mindless task.
A few months in and I started to inject the odd misfit into the lists to see what I could get away with. I started gently with ‘Darren Nesbitt Pipe Truncheon Release Gauge’ and onwards to ‘Pope Valve (see the Catholic Church for further details)’. Inevitably it escalated and in time I was regularly handing over entire pages of gibberish (I should point out, it was for my own amusement, I did once show a friend in the office who thought I was troubled, but crucially, the secretaries never guessed). This went on for months. But competition is dangerous and I was competing with my own boredom and so I soon marched on to a different beat.
I sent our receptionist a letter from the ‘Receptionist Council of Great Britain’ telling her that she’d won the ‘Receptionist of the Year Award’ and she should collect it at a hotel just round the corner from our office.
I fully expected her to twig and confront me with an eye roll as the cheeky little scamp that I was. But no, she believed it. Despite it being written on blank paper (I was not a sophisticated prankster at 16), and looking completely like something a 16-year-old office dogsbody would do, she believed it. And on reflection, why wouldn’t she.
She told her friends in the office, who all believed it, she told her boss, who believed it. Worst of all? She told me. And I kept schtum. I was frozen in fear of being found out and fired.
The day came for the big presentation. I went to the hotel and stood across the road with my workmate to watch the car crash. All these people from the office turned up at the hotel reception, at least 10 of them. Everyone had fallen for it.
There was some kind of conversation between the receptionist and…a receptionist, that apparently went along the lines of, “I’m here to collect my award”, “What award?” and so on. It was horrible and hilarious at the same time.
I didn’t tell anyone about this at the time, and I didn’t take photos. I was amused, then shocked, then relieved that no one got upset. Apparently there was more a general confusion that lingered amongst the group. A confusion that made way and then everyone just moved on. I assume they never did find out.
It was shooting fish in a barrel though, and hardly surprising given my age. I’d like to think it would have been different if I did it now. I’d have somehow engineered the whole office to turn up and collect an award if I could.
One should not think you outgrow these things though. I have never stopped. Not really. The scale and effort might fluctuate, but not the intent.
Years later, I started putting up posters and leaflets in northwest London and then Hertfordshire, one featuring a photo of a dog with the banner ‘I AM NOT MISSING’ that pointed out what a lovely dog he was and how idyllic the family’s life was.
Another stated that a dog that was for sale because the couple had bought a new home and he ‘didn’t go’ with the soft furnishings (this actually happens by the way).
I enjoyed observing people in places like Queens Park as they’d walk past them, and from time to time double take and go back. Sometimes they’d start laughing, or take a photo. Sometimes they’d just screw up their face and tut.
But these are just further foolish jaunts into the realm of mischief. They’re missing that crucial modern ingredient: An audience. Don’t do a good deed without telling everyone, don’t experience a loss without informing your ‘friends’, and don’t have an opinion without sharing the holy hell out of it. An audience is what you need, or it’s not real. It has no value.
Don’t get me wrong; when the 10-year-old me plucked random names out of the phone book, it was made doubly fun having my mates observe, creasing up as I pretended to be Bob Monkhouse telling the person on the other end of the line they have won £10,000 IS quite funny (and all this pre-Bart Simpson!).
But ‘Pranking’ is big business now.
From Beadle’s About to Candid Camera, Game for a Laugh, to Punk’d, the TV pranksters came and mostly went, but as the Internet struggled to find its identity, it gave birth to a slew of homemade ridiculants.
YouTube pranksters are legion now and in so many cases, the tortuous preamble to the prank is as important as the actual prank. An explanation of how clever the pranker is.
In a society obsessed with documenting every carefully curated moment, it is inevitable that the fool becomes the focus.
Sure Beadle’s name was in the title, but the beardy goblin of chaos was just a brand, not the star. Always, always the star was the reaction of the befuddled victim. The shop assistant rather than the Golightlys.
The disappointing yet fabulously successful Impractical Jokers is currently on tour, a group of former improv comics who have become a safer version of Knoxville’s Jackass crew.
They are the star, you must marvel at them and not the subject, which begs the question, is the prank itself funny here? Most often, maybe not. Many seem incapable of doing anything without reward and subsequently, things without reward are barely worth doing.
Help someone when no one’s around? Nah. Treat someone with respect and decency with no chance of anyone knowing? What’s the point?
Not that the jokes and the pranks we played were merely for our own amusement, but the idea that it would be funny to someone else was an added bonus.
An ex-boss of mine would often text me about 7pm in the week, once he’d arrived home, with messages like, ‘I just found the giant hole-punch in my bag?’ or ‘My wife just plucked a drawing of a cock off my back. Thanks.’
He returned the favour of course. I remember getting home, after a good hour and a half of travelling on the tube, bus and overground, to find a post it on my back that simply said, ‘I done a toilet’.
What better thing is there in this universe than to experience something unexpectedly funny? In real life. It’s a trigger. It can jolt you out of a funk, make you feel alive, even if it’s just momentary. It has the potential to succeed where nothing else could in puncturing a point of view.
Look at Brass Eye or the dear departed Godfrey Elfwick or Titania Mcgrath. Creations that are part satire, part prank. Ultimately banned from Twitter and, like many genuine pranksters, labelled a troll, Elfwick managed to irritate the left and the right.
Then there are those 4chan dwellers. Again, labelled trolls, alt-right apostles or fascists, at least some of their work seems to be purely to make themselves laugh and alleviate boredom with outrageous gags that start online and occasionally end up in the ‘real world’.
For example, the famed Pool’s Closed prank where a bunch of them invaded a children’s game called Habbo and filled it with black characters with afros wearing suits who would close the game’s pool or coordinate themselves into the formation of a swastika. When someone put up a poster on the fence of a real pool saying ‘POOL’S CLOSED’ with a pic of the afro’ed character, one local resident thought it was a racist attack (after being interviewed by a news station, some hackers tracked her down to explain it was a gag).
They also fixed a vote so that a school for the deaf would win a contest to go to a Taylor Swift concert. Then there’s the wonderful running gag on phone in shows that starts with someone telling a story about how they were getting into trouble in their neighbourhood, only for it to turn out that it’s the entire lyrics to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme. Or the time they fixed the Time Magazine Person of the Year Award in 2012 so that Kim Jong-un won. Oh and we all remember Rickrolling.
One of their most famous pranks was when they focussed in on Shia Lebeouf. On the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Transformers actor set up a webcam outside a museum and invited members of the public to chant, ‘He will not divide us’ into it.
Cue 4chan as members appeared on the live stream to hold up pictures of Pepe the Frog, or state that Obama ‘killed more brown people than Trump could ever dream of with drones’.
It led to Lebeouf being arrested after a scuffle with one and the installation being relocated. This time Lebeouf included a webcam fixed on a flag with ‘He Will Not Divide Us’ printed on it. Despite the flag being in an unknown location, 4chan users tracked it down using the obscurest clues including cloud formations, and after triangulating its position, climbed up the flagpole and replaced the flag with a MAGA hat.
As with so many modern adjustments, pranks became something we needed to tag, to film, to LOL at, tell our friends to LOL at, to tell our friends we LOLled at it. And so on.
I used to like it when, on a the train home from work, I’d pick up the London Evening Standard that had been abandoned and open it up to find someone had drawn things on the faces of the people in the photos. Perhaps the word ‘wank’ on their forehead, large googly eyes, or of course, a rogue, oversized and incredibly detailed penis on a lady walking the red carpet.
I myself liked to fill in the crossword occasionally, spelling out things like, “Complete the mission and escape to Berlin. All is lost.’
I recently found out that my elder brother — when he was a young teenager — would ‘collect’ traffic cones and then divert all the traffic on a nearby road so it would head into the grounds of our local mental hospital. In his own way, he was helping mental health awareness before it was all the rage. Good boy.
Everyone takes themselves so serious now, even a lot of ‘comedians’. I recall constantly changing one particularly hateful, self-proclaimed edgy, clearly misogynist and now conveniently ‘woke’ comic getting upset at someone (not an admission this) repeatedly changing his Wikipedia page so it listed his influences as Jim Davidson and Little and Large.
Was it better in the old days? Of course it was. Everything was. Apart from health maybe and death in childbirth and everything. But maybe now is the best time ever to prank. If we really do all live in echo chambers with our confirmation bias, isn’t that the perfect scenario for a damn good pranking?
But the question is, if someone makes a joke or commits a prank and there’s no audience, did it happen?
And while you’re wondering that, I’ve stuck a post it on your back that says ‘I PEED MYSELF’ and emptied a hole-punch into your backpack.
Ha!
