Get your prank on, fool

Editor’s Note: April Fools’ Day is tomorrow, and it’s bound to be filled with joy, dread or mild annoyance. Either way, if you are looking to avoid being the butt of a joke, or do an awesome one yourself, check out these pranks for tips.

In 1987, Lynn Hudson played a prank on an Easter church camp with the classic plastic-wrap-on-the-toilet gag.

Hudson and friends planned to do it for a while, and they started setting up in the girls’ bathrooms at 3 a.m. They waited in a thicket of trees until the girls headed to the bathrooms.

“Soon after, there were a whole lot of loud screaming coming from the girls’ toilets as they let their bladders loose right on top of a layer of plastic wrap and back up at them instead of in,” he said.

The tricksters went a step further and rigged the showers, where they expected the girls to flee to after using the toilets.

“The water came out, busting right through the layer of tissue and carrying a very non-diluted Kool-Aid-colored hair dye. And of course the girls had their eyes closed when they turned the water on and didn’t notice for a few seconds, just long enough to thoroughly change their hair and skin color.”

Camp counselors suspected the boys were the culprits, but Hudson and his friends never got caught.
However sadistic, Pat Corr decided to toy with his father’s emotions one April Fools’ Day. He said he tricked him into believing the family’s cat, Taco, died.

“We got a stuffed animal and put it in the distance and said, ‘What the shit? Is that Taco out there? Oh, he must just be tuckered out from exploring that night.’”

Two hours later, his father looked out the window and saw that the Taco look-alike wasn’t moving. That’s when Corr gave him the bad news.
“I said, ‘Dad, I think we lost Taco,’” he said. “He looked out the window with a distraught face, a tear on the brink. Two seconds later, the real Taco walks out and meows.”
~Alexandra Swanberg

UNM junior Andy Swords undertook a simple prank in high school. He looked to toilet-paper his pastor’s son’s car. Swords’ TP-ing work was done before youth group, but he had a feeling something was wrong.
“Little did I know, he was watching me through the front door the whole time,” he said. “I got a lot of crap for it for the longest time after that.”
Student Brianne Peterson remembered one April Fools’ Day not being quite as light-hearted.
“One time this guy called me and made his voice sound like he got in a really bad car accident, like he was dying,” she said. “That made me call the cops and drive out there to get him.”
When she arrived at the scene of the “crash,” Peterson received quite the shock.
“I’m in tears and he says ‘April Fools,’” she said. “It was awesome, so much fun.”
~Antonio Sanchez

It wasn’t April Fools’ Day, but “Jeremy” decided that it would be funny to spike his Boy Scout troop’s drinks with Ex-Lax during a 50-mile hiking trip.
Slightly miffed, Jeremy’s troop mates decided that when April Fools’ Day came around, Jeremy would regret the “bowel assault.”
Jeremy has an immense fear of bugs. So much so that even as a nature-inclined Boy Scout, he sprayed the perimeter of his tent with bug repellant. He also slept on a raised cot.
That night Troop 85 laced Jeremy’s Kool-Aid with a sleeping pill, so he went to bed early. His troop mates then duct-taped him inside his sleeping bag to his cot and dragged Jeremy outside of his tent.
They propped him against a tree, but he hardly noticed that he was being duct-taped to the tree, with a strip placed across his forehead.
Jeremy woke up to find he was in the middle of nature, with spiders laying eggs in his hair.

~Juanita Martinez