Pranks

Pranks:

Don't miss this story from the Economist (of all places). The writing is as stiff as you'd imagine, but it's worth clicking on it just for the picture.

None of you will be surprised to learn that I have had a hand in a prank or two myself. I take great pleasure in that kind of humor, which performs the absolutely necessary function of upending the social order so everyone can laugh at it for a moment. Not that I'm an enemy of social order -- just the opposite. Still, like everything, you have to know how to laugh at it. A certain amount of order frees us to live without fear. Too much becomes a prison, or a justification for evil and oppression. Laughter is often the thing that lets you break it off at just the right point.

On one occasion a companion and I "liberated" a desk from the school, and spirited it away for six months or so until the day before Spring Break. Then -- having painted the desk with the famous "Kilroy was Here!" symbol along with our class designation -- we returned it to the campus by hanging it thirty feet in the air from the branches of a giant tree. Getting it back down again proved a logistical challenge for the administration.

What we had not known, but what made the prank perfect, was that the park in which the tree was located was to enjoy its 100th anniversary that next morning. It had been designed by Frederick Law Olmstead. The occasion was one in which every dignitary in Atlanta came by to see it, up to and including the mayor himself. The challenge of removing the offending desk was too difficult to be accomplished before the ceremony, so...

That was a pretty good school prank, though it doesn't compare to the story from over the holidays about the Fire Department ghosts. Surely some of the rest of you have good stories as well.