I’m not interested in “pranks” where someone is victimised, harmed, or upset.
Tell me the funniest harmless pranks where everyone involved can laugh and nobody feels bad.
This was one I did to a buddy years ago but he still says it’s the best prank pulled on him ever. We had each other’s apartment keys so we could walk each other’s dogs.
He had gone out drinking and playing poker with some friends. I knew he’d be coming home drunk. I got into his place and took every single light bulb out. All the lamps, all the ceiling fixtures. His fish tank. The little one in the fridge. Every single one. Then I took his futon mattress and put it in his storage shed and made up the frame like it was all ready for bed. Then I took his couch cushions too. Fed and walked his dog and went home and locked all my doors and windows and made sure to put the chain on the door.
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A recent favourite was the most simple. Someone in my office photocopied a paper clip, then put the copy back in the paper feed. My desk was beside the copier, so I got to watch them look everywhere in that machine for the paper clip.
something harmless my dad likes to do when hes walking with a group of people and is in front is walk to the side and pretent to examine something. causes a whole group of people to go walk over and look. and go nuts when they dont see anything.
There’s a similar thing you can do - if you’re in a room of people, just start chuckling to yourself about nothing. Keep doing it every so often, and all going well, the whole room will be in uproarious laughter for reasons they’re entirely unaware of!
Stick a small piece of paper under the mouse of a colleague, covering the laser sensor and watch them go crazy trying to figure why the mouse doesn’t work. Bonus point of the paper is the same colour as the mouse and it’s hard to see.
Before mice had lasers this could be done with a piece of clear tape. IT guys got real tired of the number of “broken mouse” calls from our department.
I just replied about this in another thread, but I liked plugging an extra mouse into their computer and making subtle movements with it while they were working.
Years ago I did this to my boss, and printed out the “troll” face from rage comics. Had the satisfaction of watching him move the mouse around, get confused, pick up the mouse to look at it, see his shoulders slump and shake his head.
Just the smallest, dumbest thing, but I remember it 10 years later.
When I was in high school, each department had a bunch of shared laptops that could be usedfor occasional lessons. They all had touchpads, but the school did also provide mice. They also had USB ports on the back. So of course you try to slyly plug your mouse into the laptop of whoever is sitting opposite you and just nudge their cursor astray every so often
Take a full screenshot of the desktop, then edit the image so you flip it upsidedown (180). Now, put that image as the background for the computer, and hide the taskbar, and any desktop icons. Lastly, update the monitor setting so it is upsidedown (180).
For the user, it will seem like everything is normal, but when they move the mouse, it will go in the “opposite” direction (as monitor has been flipped).
To help them solve to fix it, the easiest is to flip the mouse around upside down, and move it around like normal.
I am definitely going to do this to my boss.
Oh that’s good. I liked hooking an extra mouse into my co-worker’s computer and making very small movements with it while they were working.
I did something like that once. I noticed my sister’s wireless keyboard was still paired to her laptop, so every once in a while I’d hit the CAPS LOCK key.
I was suppressing laughter for about an hour until her temper boiled over and I had to come clean, as she was about to smash the laptop to bits!
Oh man, that’s devious.
I hide gold coins (but you could use any kind of fun token). Who doesn’t like a finding a gold coin?
It started when I used to do leprechaun cosplay. When you do that, you inevitably will get asked where your gold is hidden, so I got a bunch of cheap plastic coins to hand out when I got “caught”, or to “drop” if chased. For the heck of it I started slipping them in my friends’ bags and costumes while they were out.
Eventually this lead to hiding them in peoples homes when I visit, and reverse pickpocketing friends: pockets, purses, hoods in winter so they will fall out when they flip them up to go outside.
I think my biggest get was slipping one into a theater director’s shirt pocket while they were talking to someone else. And the biggest surprise might have been one I put in an attic hatch so that it fell out when they went to pull the ladder down months later.
Love that this has absolutely become your trademark.
Until they become a serial killer.
What I do really often:
Coming from behind, I tap someone on their shoulder, then move around the other side to say Hi.
I got my friend a job at my company. He met one of my coworkers, a guy we’ll call Frank. I told him Frank has led a very interesting life (not a lie - he has). I said before becoming an engineer, Frank was a male escort. And that he probably shouldn’t bring it up because I don’t know if that’s common knowledge in the office. I quickly forgot I even told him that.
A couple of months later he made a joke to me about it and that’s when I told him the truth: Frank was a Presbyterian minister for years. He was never a gigolo.
That you know of.
Someone was lightly victimized in this, but no one was upset and it was all in good fun.
Years ago, my buddy taped an air horn under his boss’s chair. We worked in a bullpen and the boss had a fishbowl office in the corner. He came in and sat down and of course it went off. Boss fell out of his chair, everyone stopped working, and everyone’s morale was super high the rest of the day, especially the boss.
The boss had never felt like part of the team. Most of us had worked together for years and we all played light pranks on each other. He came much later. It was the first time he really felt like one of us.
Heard of rather than seen it.
My dad started a rumor that a coworker kept jello in her desk. Just mentioned it from time to time and let it be. Time goes by…
One Monday morning he goes in early and reignites the rumor.
When the coworker arrives there’s a crowd outside her office. She’s annoyed and throws open all her desk drawers to prove her innocence… and finds her file drawer full of lime jello, one unpeeled banana in the middle.
If I recall right she laughed until she peed herself.
The drawer was large enough it took my Dad most of Saturday to fill it. And most of the space in our fridge.
My spouse got to talk to the guy that owns the company that makes the World’s Best Cat Litter (it’s corn based, and edible; much more environmentally friendly than the bentonite clay that most cat litter uses). Apparently he used to show it at animal shows; he would have a box filled with corn-based cat litter, and he would have it filled with “cat turds” that were actually chocolate. He’d be demonstrating scooping the litter box for people, and would just pop one into his mouth.
He apparently stopped playing that prank after someone witnessing it threw up.
So my wife is actually a vet tech and pulled this on her colleagues a year or so ago, with a bag of “fecal samples” she’d occasionally snack from.
Good prank. Not very good for sales though, best kept for coworkers.
Your dad sounds fun
He’s awesome. Always finding weird things to do.
He’s gotten into D&D, plays in two games with me… and started collecting tree bark on his walks, which he makes into rolled up ‘dollops’ and he’s giving them backstory for one of his D&D characters.
So damn weird to find out my dad’s spending his evenings rolling hot, moistened tree bark into tight spirals while making up lore.
These are all really great
Thank you!
I used to offer customers invisible change when they paid in full but no tip
There’s a cantankerous old git we drink with in my local and I have the PIN to his phone. Once I installed Grindr on it (didn’t create an account), so now all I have to do is let him “catch” me with his phone unlocked and he can spend days trying to figure out what I did, but as I did nothing he never finds it.
His wife and daughter annoy him as they live with him, and he gets irate at WhatsApp group chats that are too chatty. So I got his phone and created a WhatsApp group for his family, then posted “I love you” to it. He didn’t discover it until the next day and was fuming.
These are really well done for the most part. Very light-hearted, but rather devious: (Just for Laughs Gags)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyGz1AYQMhM&list=PLEB4EBCDDCF605225
Some years ago I used to play Minecraft with friends quite a bit. We used to pull out practical pranks on each other, like:
- people often use a pressure plate as doormat for their houses, to open the door automatically. I’d wire it to some piston, releasing chickens inside the house. How many chickens? 200 or so.
- block update detector + some valuable ore (typically diamond) = an ore block that changed place as you tried to mine it. (I was the victim of that one. It was amazing!)
- good old obsidian over chest, preventing you from opening it. Some people got upset. Eventually ruled out as uncreative.
- hollowing out a pillar to place a zombie, that would prevent the person from sleeping inside their base because there was a monster nearby. Good luck finding it.
- the smaller and less annoying version of the above: cats hidden into 1x1x1 holes below the floor. “meow mrwown meeeew!” nonstop.
In early game a friend asked to borrow a diamond pick because he hadn’t found enough to make one of his own. I left mine in his base, but I also blocked up his doors and windows with obsidian.
Oh yeah I remember my friend hid a whole noise machine with doors and nether portals and everything somewhere under my base and out took so much time to find it.
Door-based noise machines
Oh, those are fun. Specially with pig randomisers.
At my last job, there was this one conservative dude I really disliked. He was friendly but his views were not very friendly.
After I left the job, I got a call from him asking if I could be a reference on a job, and I said sure. Said company called saying they were offering him a position in a different state so I gave him a raging review. He called me afterwards saying he got the job and would be moving to a different state far, far away from me. Success.
Not really a prank I guess, but there were ulterior motives at least
Haha that reminds me of the time I helped my upstairs neighbors move. They were super annoying, always shouting over each other and leaving trash bags in the hot sun on their balcony, where the stink could waft into my open window.
I was very excited when I saw them packing their furniture, so I offed to help and we managed to finish it all in only one day. They didn’t catch on and just thought I was being nice! They even tried to pay me but I refused - being rid of them was payment enough
