Top Ten Worst Pranks Gone Wrong

There is a specific silence that happens about four seconds after a prank stops being a prank. Everybody hears it. The worst pranks gone wrong all reach that silence eventually, usually while somebody is still holding the camera and slowly understanding what he has done. Every one of these ended with the joke chewing on its owner.

#10: Google’s Gmail Mic Drop Button

The world’s largest email service shipped a button that fired a cartoon Minion at your boss and then muted the thread so you never heard him scream. One user said it cost him his job. Google killed the feature the same day and admitted it had pranked itself, which remains the most expensive apology ever issued on behalf of a Minion.

#9: Volkswagen’s Voltswagen Rebrand

Most of the worst pranks gone wrong cost somebody a hangover. This one moved a stock. Volkswagen’s American arm swore to reporters that the Voltswagen rebrand was real, watched its shares climb almost 5%, then admitted the whole thing was an early April Fools’ bit. Securities regulators own no sense of humor, and they opened an investigation to prove it.

#8: Boaty McBoatface

The internet was handed the naming poll for a two hundred million pound polar research ship and did what it was always going to do. Boaty McBoatface took more than 124,000 votes. The vessel was christened RRS Sir David Attenborough anyway, and the winning name got demoted to a small yellow robot submarine. The man who suggested it went public with an apology for winning.

#7: The Georgia Bigfoot In A Freezer

Two men from Georgia stuffed a rubber gorilla suit into a freezer, called a press conference, and told the planet they had Bigfoot. Then the ice melted and out came a foot you could buy in October. One of them was a serving police officer, and his chief filed the termination paperwork the moment the costume surfaced. Some pranks fire the prankster.

#6: Johnny Carson’s Toilet Paper Shortage

One monologue. A continent hoarding paper like currency. Carson repeated a stray news item about a toilet paper shortage in December 1973, and America stripped the shelves so fast that shops were rationing rolls inside a week. He went back on air to swear there was no shortage. Nobody believed the man who had just created one.

#5: TrollStation’s Fake Art Heist

Tights over the heads, alarm noises through a loudspeaker, and paintings they had already paid for hauled out of the National Portrait Gallery like loot. London sat on terror alert that summer, so the screaming came free and entirely real. Four TrollStation members were jailed for 16 to 20 weeks, filming nothing but a ceiling.

#4: Alan Abel’s Fake Obituary

Abel hired an actress to play his grieving widow, ran a fake funeral home out of a trailer, and sold his own death to the New York Times, which printed the obituary on January 2, 1980. He then walked into a press conference breathing. The paper retracted. He spent the next 38 years complaining that nobody would believe the real one.

#3: The Berners Street Hoax

Roughly 4,000 letters, every one forged in a widow’s name, every one posted to the same London door. Coal wagons, coffins, cakes and chimney sweeps arrived all day, and so did the Lord Mayor. Theodore Hook had bet a single guinea that he could make the address famous. He watched the police seal off the street from the window opposite, one coin richer.

#2: The Dreadnought Hoax

Virginia Woolf glued on a beard, joined five friends in borrowed robes, and boarded Britain’s most powerful battleship on a forged telegram. They collected a full honor guard and muttered “Bunga Bunga” at the guns. The Navy refused to prosecute, then spent months hearing that phrase yelled at its officers in the street. The men behind it were caned on the backside like schoolboys.

#1: The Balloon Boy Hoax

A homemade foil saucer wobbled across Colorado on live television while a nation held its breath for a six-year-old who was, at that exact moment, upstairs. His father collected 90 days in jail, four years of probation and a $36,000 bill for the search. A governor pardoned him eleven years later. The prank worked once, on everybody, for two hours.

Conclusion

Nobody plans the second half. The balloon comes down, the ice melts, the shelves empty, and the man holding the camera works out that he is now the content. Somewhere tonight another brilliant idea is being whispered to a friend who owns a ladder. Give it a week. It becomes somebody else’s favorite story and his own worst afternoon.