A Homage to Pranksters

Do you need some inspiration for a very delayed April Fools’ prank? Read on for some fantastic ideas.

Sabrina Chen, freshman

“You know those long rainbow candies? I washed all the sugar off with water, and I dipped it in salt. Then I put it back in the package. I called my classmate, gave it to him, then ran away. I heard him gagging, so I think it worked. I also cracked an egg on my teacher’s head.”

Veronika Kowalski, junior

“In seventh grade, our art teacher assigned us a collage. It took a lot of time and patience to complete since the cutouts had to be so small and just the right shade. I figured it would be hilarious to cut out faces of old men in medication advertisements and paste them onto the bodies of women in bathing suit ads. It was hysterical. By the last face-swap, I had 30 cut-out heads at my table.

“The best way to make use of these heads, I naturally reasoned, would be to put them in an envelope and send them anonymously to a friend. I dropped the envelope with my friend's name [onto the floor] as I walked into class. Midway through the period, the teacher picked up the envelope and brought it over to his desk. He looked puzzled, then he tore it open.

“One thing led to another, and soon enough 30 heads were traveling halfway around the class. Some kid started lining them up on his table. The principal came in, followed by the assistant principal and two supervisors. The principal sat next to the kid with the heads on his desk. Thankfully, the kid was able to hide the heads before the principal sat next to him.”

Rebecca Kim, sophomore

“This was sometime before eighth grade. My uncle from my mom’s side told me to pull a ghost prank on my mom. It was 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., so my mom was already asleep and it was dark. I put jam, or something red, on the corner of my mouth so that it dripped down in a line to my chin. I had longer hair back then, so I pulled it to the front of my face so that it covered my face and I went up to my sleeping mom. She yelled [at] me a lot, and my uncle, who was outside the room, was laughing.”

Barbara Garber, Health

“My friend and I were at an electronics museum in Washington. We had a little remote, so we would turn the TVs in the museum on and off repeatedly. We were never caught.”

Corinne Pita, junior

“One time, on April Fools’ Day, my brother had the idea to tie down the sprinkler button on the kitchen sink so that when my dad went to [...] use it, right when he turned the faucet on, it would spray him in the morning. And it worked perfectly!”

Kayla Fang, junior

“I remember walking to my outside gym locker and finding a Post-it note stuck to the inside of the locker door. The note read: ‘DO NOT LEAVE YOUR LOCKER UNLOCKED!! PLEASE COME SEE ME IN MY OFFICE—Mr. Moran.’ I wholeheartedly believed it. I have never locked my locker before. Like your very average teenager, I told everyone [what] I came across. In my mind, I was already crafting excuses and intricate semi-truths to cover for myself. Then came physics class. In the middle of telling everyone there my ordeal, I noticed another Post-it note stuck to the first one. It read: ‘HAVE A NICE DAY!!—Jane and Annie.’ I did laugh, but I think I cried a bit too.”

Victor Greez, AP U.S. History, and AP Integrated Government and Economics teacher

“I had a student named Hassan. He’s at Yale right now. I have my students send me pictures when they go to museums, and, well, he sent this picture where he was modeling, so I printed [about] 15 copies and put them up on my wall, and I asked students which one they thought was the best picture even though they were identical, and we spent like 10 minutes discussing this. So that was my prank on him. He responded by printing out pictures of me, and he came in and saturated the classroom with them, but the best part is that if you go into the social studies room, there’s a picture of my kids, and he put his picture on there as if he was one of my kids, and it’s still up there.”

Sandy Tan, sophomore

“My entire family pranks spam callers with cat sounds.”

Palak Srivastava, sophomore

“One time in middle school, I put this plastic cockroach on a hexbug, and I put it in my friend’s locker. It was just moving around in there, and she opened the locker, and from all the way across the hallway, you could hear a scream. She thought it was a real cockroach. It was really funny.”

Anonymous, AP U.S. History teacher

“I sewed together the front crotch area of my older brother’s underwear. So when he had to go to the bathroom during school, he basically had to rip his underwear to use the restroom. I obviously didn’t know what underwear he was gonna wear, so I sewed all of them to be sure.”

Kevin Liu, junior

“The funniest prank that’s ever been pulled on me was when I was 10 years old. I was in the park playing tag with my brother, and I ran faster than him so he got frustrated. I was climbing the ladder to a slide when he decided to quite literally pull a prank on me by pulling my pants down.”