Pranks For Your Help.

Hello. Welcome to the famed Weekend Gene Pool, which has just been elected an honorary member of The World Pool & Billiard Association, the international governing body for pool. Here, as always, we seek your input in return for entertainment.

First, the entertainment. It’s what’s above, which is a routine by a pretty young John Mulaney. It is about the day that he and a friend, both 11, played a hilarious practical joke on a diner full of people. It’s short. You should watch it.

That’s the subject I’d like you to address. Send in your thoughts and observations and anecdotes about pranks / practical jokes played by you or by people you know or people you’ve heard about — or conceivably, even better, invent a practical joke that maybe never happened but should. See below. Anything you want to say on the subject is fair game. Send them here, please:

I will tell you about one prank of which I have direct knowledge.

This one happened: When I was a reporter at The Miami Herald, there was a marvelous humor columnist named John Keasler who worked for the competing Miami News. In that newsroom, there was an editor who had a somewhat obnoxious routine every morning when he arrived at work: He would flop down in his chair, reach into his pants pocket, and loudly fling his keys onto to desk, where they would remain for the day. Out there, on the desk. Vulnerable.

It was a pretty big key ring, with a pretty big set of keys on it already. And it was about to get bigger. Every day, Keasler would add a single key to the ring. By the end of two weeks or so, the thing was the size of a softball, but the man hadn’t noticed because he was the proverbial frog in the slowly boiling water. Eventually, one day, the guy came into work, worked the bolus of keys out of his pocket, threw it on the desk, took a look, and bellowed “WHAT THE F—-?”

After the prank was revealed, the guy told Keasler that half his pants pockets now had holes in them.

Also, let us not forget that the prankster’s name was “Keas”ler, a detail that was not wasted on me, even back then.

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This one never happened, but probably should have:

I once wrote a screenplay that had a mischievous kid go to confession in his church and spend a long time in the confessional cubicle telling the bored priest all sorts of lame, pedestrian adolescent “sins” he had committed. Finally, mercifully, he left. The priest soon discovered that while the kid was talking, the kid had screwed a toilet paper roll onto the wall.

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This one happened, though some contend it may be partially exaggerated:

I will end with one of the most brilliant practical jokes of all time, by famous hoaxer Hugh Troy, as chronicled by H. Allen Smith in his splendid 1953 book, “The Compleat Practical Joker.” The book is mostly forgotten, but I have it in my library, of course.

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“On a night when a couple of inches of snow had fallen, Hugh and one of his friends went out on the Cornell campus with a rhinoceros-foot waste-paper basket. They had filled it with scrap metal to give it weight, and they had attached a length of clothesline to either side of it. Now they moved across the campus, each holding an end of the clothesline at a distance of perhaps thirty feet from the rhinoceros foot. Carefully they raised it and lowered it to make rhino tracks at the proper intervals in the snow.

“When the campus awoke the next morning, the strange tracks were found. Zoology professors who were summoned inspected the tracks and exclaimed over them: “Gad, Whitley! .. It’s a rhinoceros!”

“The trail of the rhinoceros was followed. It led across the campus and down to the shore of Beebe Lake, from which the University gets its water supply. The lake was frozen over, and the rhinoceros tracks led out across the ice to a point about fifty feet from shore and ended in a large, gaping hole.

“There wasn’t much to be done about it. The local newspapers trumpeted the story, and almost at once half the population of Cornell quit drinking tapwater. Those who continued to drink it swore that they could taste rhinoceros.'“

Okay, that’s it. Please send your observations / anecdotes here.

Also, if you are of a mind to, we are in need of your puny financial support. It is a mere $4.15 a month and for that you get ridiculous, worthless piffle like this, 12 times a month. Please consider it.