Funny practical jokes can be fun for everyone. These types of jokes are light-hearted and are quite different from a written or verbal joke. Pranks, as practical jokes are sometimes called, involve someone doing something to someone else.
An example would be college students using a crane to lift a professor’s car onto the roof of the university. After the tow truck leaves, the teacher walks out of class and can’t find his car. He at first thinks it’s stolen, but then notices other students looking up at the top of the building and laughing. He then looks up to find out where his car is. Then, of course, he goes through the thought process of wondering how on earth the car got up there and how he’s going to get it down (this actually happened at Oxford University).
This was a pretty complex prank. When everyone laughed, the students responsible for the joke returned the tow truck and gently placed the car in the parking lot.
Funny practical jokes can also be very simple. A young man once fell asleep on the sofa at a friend’s house and had his fingernails and toenails painted pink while he slept. He didn’t realize it until he got to work the next day and he was shocked! He must have been half asleep not to notice. That was a harmless joke and everyone had a good laugh, at his expense of course.
Another simple prank is to jump up and scare a friend when they least expect it. A nine-year-old girl regularly hides in the house when she sees her father arrive. She will wait and wait and wait, like a tiger waiting for her prey and then pounce when he comes around the corner. She scares him every time. And then they laugh together.
That same girl at age five, snuck into her father’s office when he was busy on the computer one day. Silently, she tied one of her father’s legs to the chair he was sitting in with a silk scarf. She was so careful and quiet that he never felt a thing. After tying her scarf, she hid behind another chair so she could see what was going to happen. She waited patiently as a few minutes passed. Finally, her dad got up from the meat and when she took her first step, the meat came with him. She couldn’t believe her eyes when she looked down to see her daughter’s silk scarf tied around her ankle to her flesh. He laughed and she jumped up and squealed with delight. She got it again!
April Fools’ Day is the big practical joke day of the year. Some people think about jokes and the people they want to play on for weeks and sometimes even months ahead of time. And then, on April 1, they put their plan into action. What are you going to do next April Fools’ Day?
