Hoax Museum Blog: Pranks

Posted: Fri May 02, 2014.   Comments (1)

Abu Sharmouta and the Gag Name Prank — The classic example of the "gag name" prank is to tell a reporter your name is "Haywood Jablome" — and hope the reporter doesn't think too long about what phrase that name sounds like.


Haywood Jablome digging out a snowdrift. Fargo Forum - Dec 27, 2009

An older example: back in 1930, students at Cornell made headlines by getting politicians to praise the legacy of one "Hugo N. Frye" (you go and fry), supposed founder of the Republican party in New York state.

A more recent version of the prank occurred earlier this year when San Francisco station KTVU reported that the pilots of the crashed Asiana Airlines Flight 214 were "Captain Sum Ting Wong," "Wi Tu Lo," "Ho Lee Fuk," and "Bang Ding Ow." The station had apparently been told those names by an NTSB intern who was subsequently let go.

And the gag name prank has now again been in the news — but this time with an Arabic twist.

Following an armed robbery at the University of Houston, a TV correspondent for KTRK news interviewed a student who claimed to have been a witness. He told the reporter his name was "Abu Sharmouta."


Footage of this interview has become an "internet sensation" in the Middle East, because "Abu Sharmouta" was not the interviewee's real name. The phrase means "father of a whore" in Arabic. (I'm guessing it's the Arabic equivalent of "S.O.B.")

Not only did the interviewee give a false name, he also lied about having witnessed the crime. He was a U of H student who later explained he pulled the prank on the spur of the moment as a way to blow off steam during finals. [albawaba.com]

I'm giving this prank the thumbs down. It seems to me that the gag name prank becomes meaningless if you use foreign phrases that a reporter can't reasonably be expected to know. Though evidently it was humorous to Arabic speakers to hear this bogus name repeated on the news.
Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2013.   Comments (2)

Santa in Kinky Boots — Macy's decision to include the cast of the broadway musical Kinky Boots in its Thanksgiving Day parade was criticized by some conservative groups — since Kinky Boots features drag queens, and (so the conservatives argued) this made it inappropriate for the children watching the parade.

But instead of being repentant, Macy's seemed to be doubling-down on its support of Kinky Boots when a flyer started to circulate online announcing that Macy's would be having an event in its kids department hosted by a Santa in kinky boots: "Bring your whole family to see Santa wearing a glittery addition to his traditional outfit!"


Both Harvey Fierstein (who stars in Kinky Boots) and a Broadway news site believed the flyer was real and reposted it, but subsequently deleted their posts when they realized the flyer was a fake. [pagesix.com]
Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2013.   Comments (0)

Spaceman First-Class Bob Percy — In February 1959, Bob Percy, rush chairman of the Psi Omega professional dental fraternity at the University of Southern California, was kidnapped by his own pledges and dressed in a "space helmet, toe-less tennis shoes, sweat pants and shirt with chained hands and feet." He was then taken to the airport and put on a plane, with no idea of where he was going and no money.

The picture below was taken as he was boarding the plane.


Halfway through the flight he figured out he was en route to Las Vegas, by overhearing a passenger.

Once in Vegas, he called the Las Vegas Sun, told them his story, and they put him in touch with the publicity agent at the El Rancho Vegas hotel, who gave him some money for his return trip. The airline made out his ticket to "Spaceman First-Class Bob Percy."

The pledges who did all this to Percy were said to be in store for "some sort of punishment." But I haven't been able to find out what that punishment was.

I was never a member of a fraternity, but I always thought it was the pledges who went through hazing rituals like this, not the rush chairman.


Daily Trojan - Feb 25, 1959

Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2013.   Comments (1)


Telekinetic Coffee Prank — The video of the "Telekinetic Coffee Shop Prank" has gotten over 30 millions views on YouTube in 4 days. So it's definitely served its purpose, which is to promote the upcoming release of the Carrie remake.

A lot of people have questioned whether the customers in the coffee shop were real or actors. But according to Andrea Morales, the actress who played the telekinetic coffee woman, the customers definitely were real. She says in an interview with the NY Daily News, "We got some awesome reactions. Some people got really into it. A constructor worker actually came toward me to calm me down, saying everything was going to be okay." 


Posted: Fri Oct 11, 2013.   Comments (1)

Invasion of the Housekeepers, 1909 — The Cowichan Valley Citizen has dug into its archives for a story about a 1909 hoax that caused a small army of housekeepers to descend upon Victoria, British Columbia, in response to a want ad that turned out to be a prank:

'Hoax' goes too far: Victoria's invasion of the housekeepers
Cowichan Valley Citizen

First to become aware of the invasion of foreign domestic help was V.C. Maddock, a city realtor. For days, he'd had to explain to job applicants, some of them very insistent, some of them in tears, all of them frustrated and mystified, that he wasn't the "H. Maddock" who'd placed an ad in the Seattle Times. A steady stream of women to his office, all seeking the position so glowingly advertised, had finally driven him to distraction - and the police.

Posted: Fri Oct 11, 2013.   Comments (0)

Cow Tipping Debunked Once Again — Cow tipping has been thoroughly debunked before, but Modern Farmer's recent article on the subject is interesting nevertheless. It emphasizes that cows are not easy animals to tip over because they've got a lot of mass, they're very stable on their feet, and they're difficult to sneak up on.

To underscore how difficult it is to tip a cow, the author, Jake Swearingen, notes that farm vets often need to get a cow down on its side to perform a medical exam, and it's not easy to do. The process is called "cow casting." The vets use ropes and teams of highly-trained individuals, and often things still go badly wrong, as the video below shows.


Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2013.   Comments (0)

The Bunny Ears Prank Revisited — Rugby player Manu Tuilagi recently apologized for making bunny ears behind David Cameron's head during a photo shoot outside of 10 Downing Street. Cameron replied, "No need to apologise, I know it was just a bit of fun." [espn scrum]


This got me thinking again about the history of the Bunny Ears prank, a topic I last posted about back in 2006. How old is the Bunny Ears prank? Does it predate photography? Nobody knows.

After a bit of searching online, the oldest example of making bunny ears that I could find is this 1944 World War II photo in which a French woman (apparently a prostitute) is jokingly making bunny ears behind the head of an American soldier. Her hand isn't fully in the frame of the photo, but it's clear what she's doing.


However, I'd be surprised if there aren't earlier "bunny ear" photos. They're just hard to find. Like looking for a needle in a haystack. But I'm sure they must be out there somewhere, hidden away in family photo collections.

As for the history of the gesture, I would guess that it's very old and that it does predate photography, because the idea of giving someone ears seems to me to be a reference to the ass-eared hats traditionally worn by fools (the "fool's cap").


"Fool's Cap Map of the World," ca. 1580.

So even though we call the gesture "bunny ears," my theory is that the prankster is actually symbolically giving their victim the ears of an ass, and thereby making them look like a fool.

Fools and jesters have been wearing ass-eared hats for a long time. Here are some pictures of fools in the middle ages wearing the ass-eared hat.


The association between ass ears and fools goes back to antiquity. An image found on an ancient terracotta vase shows a Roman jester wearing an ass-eared hat. And in mythology, there's the story of King Midas whose ears were transformed into those of an ass by Apollo, after Midas said he preferred the music of Pan to that of Apollo.


Roman jester wearing a hat with ears

So potentially the behind-the-head ear gesture could date back to antiquity. Though I've never seen references to it from before the 20th century. But then again, I haven't spent much time looking.

The corollary to my theory is that I don't think the bunny ears gesture has anything to do with the cuckold's horn gesture, even though the two are similar. And even though some people assume that bunny ears must be a form of cuckold's horns. For instance, this 2009 BBC News article makes that assumption:

the link between horns and infidelity remains deep-rooted... In Britain, the word "cuckold" is old-fashioned. But youngsters still love to stick their fingers up behind their friends' heads in photographs, to make them look silly.

But ears are not horns. They're different symbols. The bunny ears gesture doesn't have the sexual connotations that the horn gesture has. Which is why making bunny ears is dismissed as playful joking around, whereas making the horn symbol behind someone's head (as Silvio Berlusconi did behind the head of the Spanish foreign minister in 2002) is viewed as extremely insulting.


Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013.   Comments (1)

The Royalton’s Special Tea Blend —

George Jean Nathan
Orson Welles was fond of telling the following story about drama critic George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) — a story which is repeated in the recently published My Lunches with Orson, Peter Biskind (ed.). [via the Legends & Rumors Blog]

Orson Welles: Let me tell you a story about George Jean Nathan, America's greatest drama critic. George Jean Nathan was the tightest man who ever lived, even tighter than Charles Chaplin. And he lived for forty years in the Hotel Royalton, which is across from the Algonquin. […] He never tipped anybody in the Royalton, not even when they brought the breakfast, and not at Christmastime. After about ten years of never getting tipped, the room-service waiter peed slightly in his tea. Everybody in New York knew it but him. The waiters hurried across the street and told the waiters at the Algonquin, who were waiting to see when it would finally dawn on him what he was drinking! And as the years went by, there got to be more and more urine and less and less tea. And it was a great pleasure for us in the theater to look at a leading critic and know that he was full of piss. And I, with my own ears, heard him at the 21 [Club] complaining to a waiter, saying, "Why can't I get tea here as good as it is at The Royalton?" That's when I fell on the floor, you know.

Of course, it's impossible to verify a story like this, and I wouldn't put it past Welles to have made it up. However, a 1962 article by Charles Angoff in The Atlantic did report that Nathan switched from tea to coffee toward the end of his life, supposedly for health reasons, but maybe because he had finally realized what was in the tea!

A few months before he died, I had tea with Nathan at the Algonquin; he was (as far as I knew him) more a tea drinker than a coffee drinker, though toward the end of his life he took to frequent coffee drinking on the ground that his doctor had told him that coffee was better for the circulation than was tea.

Posted: Tue Sep 17, 2013.   Comments (0)

Mystery Letterbox — A red letterbox has appeared on the side of a bridge crossing the Thames in the village of Sonning-on-Thames. It's accessible only from the river. The Royal Mail says it's "a mystery to us."

What makes this story doubly strange is that spoon-bender Uri Geller happens to live in this town and was interviewed about it by the BBC. He speculates that "the ghost of a mischievous little girl" might have put the letterbox there.

Uri Geller mystified by letterbox on Thames Sonning Bridge
BBC News

Entertainer Uri Geller and other villagers say they are mystified by the appearance of a red letterbox in the middle of a bridge. The box has been placed on a buttress on the downstream side of the bridge, which crosses the River Thames.

Posted: Wed Sep 11, 2013.   Comments (3)

Bricked-in Car Prank, 1964 — October 1964: The work of pranksters. A car boxed in by brick walls on a foot bridge of the North Branch of the Chicago River in the 5000 block of North Spaulding. Source: Chicago Daily News.


Posted: Thu Aug 29, 2013.   Comments (2)

The Girl Scout Cookie Order Hoax —
This is all over the news. [oregonlive, csmonitor] Some girl scouts in Portland, Oregon thought they had landed a massive sale of cookies when they received an order via email for 6000 boxes — a $24,000 order.

Whoever was handling the order (a scout's mother, I assume) exchanged some emails with the buyer, and everything seemed legitimate. The buyer was even an acquaintance of the troop. So the girl scouts went ahead and processed the order, committing themselves to receiving 6000 boxes.

And then they discovered the mega-order was a fake. The buyer was actually a young girl using her mother's email address. The girl was apparently young enough that she didn't fully understand the signficance of what she was doing. She just thought it was a funny joke. The Portland troop can't return the cookies, so it's now holding a special sale to try to unload all 6000 boxes. So far, half have been sold. (Which, already, is way more than the troop usually sells.)

My first thought, when I heard this story, was, "Wouldn't it be clever if the hoax order was itself a hoax... a ploy to drum up sales." But my next thought was, "No, I seriously doubt a bunch of girl scouts would be cynical enough, or brazen enough, to pull off a stunt like that." So I'm going to accept that everything here happened exactly the way it's being reported.
Posted: Mon Mar 18, 2013.   Comments (1)

Do not push this button! — Here's a prank that's also an interesting experiment in social psychology. In the middle of a busy public square, a big sign over a red button says, "DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON." Of course, random people walking by inevitably do push the button. At which point, everyone in the square appears to drop dead. So what does the person who pushed the button do? Does he/she try to help the people? No. Every single person who pushed the button runs away, as if trying to escape being found out.

The prank was filmed in a square in Rio de Janeiro. The TV presenter Silvio Santos provides a narration (in portuguese). More info at forbes.com.



Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2013.   Comments (4)

The Proposal Rejection Prank — The Proposal Rejection Prank is a perennial favorite. Back in 2005 I posted about how a couple had developed a routine they were performing at basketball game halftime shows, in which the guy would propose to the girl in front of the entire crowd. But instead of saying yes, the girl would break into tears and run away. It never failed to get a reaction from the crowds.

The PrankvsPrank duo recently performed the identical stunt at various locations outdoors. Their resulting youtube video currently has over 4 million views.


Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2013.   Comments (0)

The Frank Zappa Frieze Prank, 1975 — Bridges Auditorium stands on the campus of Pomona College in Southern California. A frieze on the front of the building displays the names of five great composers: Wagner, Chopin, Beethoven, Bach, and Schubert. But for a few days in April 1975, Chopin's name disappeared and was replaced by that of another iconic, but more modern composer — Frank Zappa.




For years, no one knew who put Zappa's name up there. But in 2012, the pranksters finally revealed themselves, submitting a dossier about their prank to Pomona College Magazine, which published the details in its Nov. 2012 issue.

The pranksters were Pomona math majors John Irvine and Greg Johnson (both class of 1976). Although neither of them were Frank Zappa fans, when they learned that Zappa would be performing at Bridges on April 11, 1975, they decided his name should be on the building. And they elected to have him take the spot of Chopin, since Chopin was their least-favorite composer among the five on the building.

To pull off the stunt the pair created a 15x5-foot frieze out of Styrofoam with an aluminum frame, weighing 70 lbs. The frieze displayed Zappa's name, bookended by a bust of him on one end, and a marijuana leaf on the other.


Fellow conspirators in the math department helped them to learn that between 2 and 3 in the morning was the time when campus security was least likely to walk by the auditorium. So this is when they installed their frieze.


Irvine working on the Zappa bust (left); accessing the roof (right)

They gained access to the roof of the auditorium by extending a ladder from an adjacent building. They managed to position the frieze in place, wedged it into the recessed space of the Chopin frieze, and then secured it with heavy fishing line.


Hauling the frieze into place

The next morning the campus woke to find their handiwork.

Unfortunately, the pair hadn't managed to pull off the prank in time for Zappa's concert. They were a week late. But still, what they did is remembered as Pomona's greatest student prank.

The Zappa frieze remained in place for several days before being taken down by campus officials. The pranksters decided to keep their identity a secret in order to maintain a sense of "mystique" about the prank.
Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2013.   Comments (3)

Dead Bodies Rising — Viewers of The Steve Wilkos Show on CBS affiliate KRTV in Great Falls had the program interrupted on Monday by an emergency alert that delivered this warning:

Civil authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living. Follow the messages on screen that will be updated as information becomes available. Do not attempt to approach or apprehend these bodies as they are extremely dangerous.


Seems that someone had hacked into the station's emergency alert system. The police (who are looking into the matter) report that four people called them to check if the alert was true. [greatfallstribune]
Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2013.   Comments (3)

USC Glamour Queen Hoax, 1944 — In April 1944, the University of Southern California held its annual Campus Queens beauty contest. Each dormitory and sorority was allowed to put forward one candidate. Several "non-org" (or non-affiliated candidates) were allowed to enter the contest as well. This made for a total of 20 contestants vying for the title. Six winners would be selected by an all-university vote. Their prize was that their full-length portrait would appear in the university yearbook. (Not much of a prize, but I suppose it's something they could show their grandkids later in life.)

However, that year an imposter appeared among the candidates. Can you spot who it was?


The odd-woman-out, or odd-man-out as it were, was Sylvia Jones. She was actually a he — Cal Nixon, a male USC student who had dressed up as a woman as a prank in order to enter the contest.


What made this slightly more than just your average campus prank was the involvement of Max Factor, the famous makeup artist for the Hollywood stars. Factor had agreed to do Nixon's make-up, decking him out in a "gossamer-gold wig" and half-inch eyelashes. He also supplied a professional glamour photographer to take the picture used for the contest.

Unfortunately, Jones/Nixon never got a chance to see if he/she could win the title of Campus Queen, because a co-conspirator told the administration about the prank before the final vote could take place, and the Dean of the University, Francis Bacon, promptly declared that a male Queen wouldn't be allowed. So all the votes for Sylvia Jones were thrown out.

The prank, once it was revealed, made national news, thanks to a wire story that appeared in hundreds of papers.


Today what Cal Nixon did may not seem like a particularly noteworthy or shocking prank, but it was different times. Though, of course, we're still dealing with gender issues in beauty contests, such as that flap last year about whether Jenna Talackova, who was born a man but became a woman, could compete in the Miss Universe Canada pageant [Daily Mail]. Talackova looks a lot more like a woman than Jones did!


Jenna Talackova

For what it's worth, the final winners of the USC Campus Queens contest were Mary Blake, Jean Glover, Muriel Gotthold, Colleen Phipps, Lynn Walker, and Virginia Zerman.


Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2013.   Comments (1)

S?it Yourself —

This image that recently appeared on the May 4 cover of the Living section in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is all over the blogosphere. Does the heading say "Suit Yourself" or "Shit Yourself"?

The real question is whether this was an innocent accident, or an artist's prank. Kind of like the penis on the Little Mermaid video cover. The artist swore he didn't put it there intentionally, but that was kind of hard to believe. After all, how could he miss it?


Posted: Wed May 09, 2012.   Comments (6)

Poop Dollaring — Scatology has always provided fertile ground for pranks and humor. In fact, I've read scientific speculation that farts and feces probably provided the inspiration for the very first jokes told (or staged) by our early hominid ancestors. Witness how modern-day chimpanzees find it endlessly amusing to fling their feces.

This might provide us with some context for the prank called Poop Dollaring. (Though it's probably more analysis than the prank deserves.) Its method is simple: smear feces on a dollar bill and then place it so as to "tantalize the gullible".

Back when people used pay-phones, a variant of the prank involved stuffing dog poop into the coin return box. Unfortunately I remember falling victim to this once as a teenager. It was disgusting.

Knowing about poop dollaring might, if nothing else, spare you from too readily picking up some money you see lying on the ground.

Of course, youtube provides us with quite a few examples of innocent victims getting poop dollared.


Posted: Wed May 09, 2012.   Comments (3)

Get Goated — Imagine you're going about your day, minding your own business, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there's a goat! That's the premise of the goat prank that's become a tradition in Spokane, Washington. The link includes a video of a Spokane anchorwoman who keeps repeating excitedly, "I've been goated! I've been goated!":

Surprise! You Have Just Been 'Goated!'
khq.com

Spokane community members have the opportunity to play a great practical joke by having a real baby goat delivered to offices or meetings. A $50 donation to Wishing Star will send a goat to an unsuspecting friend or co-worker on the day of choice. The recipient will be asked to make a donation to Wishing Star to pay for the removal of the goat. Last year Wishing Star was able to raise over $20,000 through 'goating,' with five to six goats traveling to offices throughout Spokane each day.

Posted: Fri May 04, 2012.   Comments (1)

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