Are you scared? Well, you shouldn't be.

[constance]

Today one of my coworkers introduced me to the delights of Scare Tactics, a punk'd-style reality show where everyone is conspiring to scare the bejeezus out of you. She thought it was can't-catch-your-breath hi-larious, and I thought it was funny in places, but mostly I was thinking two things:

(1) Man, the acting in this show is lame. But I guess all horror is bad melodrama, right, until you're in the middle of it, and then you're freaked out enough that you don't notice that the blood doesn't look quite real or the crazy guy is acting crazy in a really weird and stilted way.

(2) There are almost no girls on the show. It seems to be mostly a guy thing, to set your bestest friends up to pee in their pants because they're thinking they're about to be shot by mobsters or dismembered by an angry gorilla.

I've played pranks on people, but they involved things like live crickets in lockers, or names spelled out in squished Oreos on the front walk. Things like that, not oh-my-god-am-I-about-to-die scenarios. And I can't help thinking, as I did when I watched David Fincher's The Game, that if someone I loved were ever to set me up in a life-or-death situation that was never really life-or-death at all, I would not only not love that person any more, I would also probably spend my days planning to kill them in the most elaborate and ghastly ways possible.

But that's just me, and I have arrived at my question du jour: do you play pranks on people? And if you do, how elaborate or infuriating were they?

Comments

[laurelwood.livejournal.com]

I never play mean, embarrassing or scary pranks; I'm usually just trying to be funny or silly. My favorites to date:

1) When I was a teenager, I made a dummy of myself with a styrofoam wig head, a wig, and a stuffed sweatsuit. I positioned it facedown on the floor of the entry hall and put a sign next to it saying, "Life- who needs it?" along with an empty bottle of (stool softener) prescription drugs. It was pretty lifelike, and when my mom and her date came home, I heard mild chuckling and then, "Okay, Laurel, get up." Then, when the body didn't move, she nudged the dummy with her foot and the styrofoam head detached and rolled down the stairs.

2) I once removed this dickie thingie from a dress I'd worn to work and took my bra off (in the car) so that I had what was left with the dress and some serious plunging cleavage, then waltzed inside and fooled Dennis for a whole minute that I'd gone to work like that.

3) This one isn't mine, but a woman I worked with once convinced the whole deli department at the natural food store that the health department was on their way and that she hadn't had time to get them hairnets to satisfy a new regulation, so they had to quickly choose and put on some onion netting baggie thingies from the produce to wear as hairnets until the health department had done their inspection and left. The employees not only believed her, but some actually squabbled over who got purple, who got red, and so on. They were all wearing them when she announced over the intercom that she was just joking.

[tofty.livejournal.com]

Ahahahahaha, these are great! And fun -- as I was saying to Amelia, I think that's why the pranks on Scare Tactics bewildered me, that they just seemed so calculated to humiliate as well as terrify, and so weren't as much fun for me to watch as it would have been to witness yours and your friend's.