“Oh no! Look, mum –
the dog done a poo poo on the carpet!”
“Why that little…
I’ll have to clean it up. What the…? This is a plastic doggie poo! Ha ha
ha! I feel like a proper Charlie!”
“Yes! Ha ha ha ha! Hey,
everyone – mum cleaned up a dog poo thinking it was a real poo, but it was
a plastic poo! Ha ha ha!”
“Ha ha ha ha ha! And we
don’t even have a dog!”
Except,
of course, it didn’t happen like that. For the most part shop-bought
practical jokes never worked as you imagined. Or, frankly, were too poorly
realised to ever be “practical”. Rubber fake pencils for instance; what
were they about? “Here – borrow my pencil.” “Thanks, but… what’s
going on? It feels as if the pencil is made of rubber! Someone must have
spiked my lemonade with LSD! Oh man, I’m losing my mind!” But it just
never happened that way. Give someone a rubber pencil and within
milliseconds of you handing it over they’d have identified it as fake. Or,
most likely because the novelty item was so poorly made they would have
sussed your ruse before you even got a chance to hand it over.
Whoopee
cushions; another crap idea. Firstly, they don’t even look like cushions.
Maybe you can hide them beneath a real cushion, but your “victim” will
suspect something the minute you invite them to sit down on the real cushion
that is by now mysteriously raised several inches off the chair. Even if you
do succeed in getting them to sit on it, most likely you’ll have under
inflated the thing, and it won’t make a sound, or you’ll over inflate it
and it’ll burst. So much for a “real Bronx cheer”.
Black face soap. Is the
black dye magically concealed within the pigments of the bar of soap? No. It
is hidden within a compartment beneath a paper seal. The seal will
inevitably come away revealing the ruse, and spoiling your attempts to
transform father into Al Jolson. Fake cigarettes which are filled with
powder that give the illusion of real cigarette smoke when you blow through
them – they actually worked so well we got hit round the head.
Incredibly, they’re
still making fake soot – either that or the packet we saw for sale in the
newsagents recently has been there unsold since 1957. Fake soot was
indistinguishable from real soot, except that it came in tiny packets. The
idea behind the joke was to sprinkle the “fake” soot onto the carpet,
thereby fooling people into thinking there was real soot on the carpet, and
theoretically eliciting screams of horror. Unfortunately, the time we tried
the ruse a) We didn’t have a coal fire, and b) Mother hoovered the stuff
up within seconds.
Fake bullet holes. Do
they look like bullet holes? No, they look like round grey stickers. “What
bugger stuck little round grey stickers on the car,” was the most probably
reaction, and not the intended “Sweet Jesus somebody wants to kill me”.
X-Ray specs, though not a practical joke as such, were perhaps the
biggest con of all. The youthful brain would imagine scenarios where you’d
wander the streets in glasses indistinguishable from the real thing, peering
through girls’ dresses. Or boys’ pants. Either way, the reality was that
the x-ray specs gave the illusion of seeing through something by virtue of a
red feather sandwiched between two bits of cardboard, within a cheap plastic
frame. Mind you, as much as we complained at time of the lack of visible
nipples, the joke was on us when we got cancer of the eyes. Ha ha!
Fart powder that you put
in drinks never seemed to work. Blue mouth chewing gum almost did, were it
not for the fact that the gum was bright blue, and the brand name was always
something obvious like “Bluemouth Gum Company Chewing Gum”.
Not
every practical joke was rubbish of course. The fake chewing gum that
contained a mousetrap-style snapper was astoundingly brilliant, but they
were so vicious they might as well have just sold razor blades to kids.
Inevitably they’re no longer in production. Likewise itching powder, which
was little more than strands of fibre glass, and would typically just cut a
young man’s back to ribbons. You can hardly go wrong with stink bombs,
though we never quite understood the pupose of “perfume bombs”. Where
was the point of them? “Crikey, what’s that smell? Has a new romantic
fop entered the vicinity? Golly!”
By all accounts one of
the simplest and most effective of all novelties was fake blood. Unlike
blood capsules, which merely made it looked like you’d been sucking a red
sweet, and were trying to spit it back up, fake blood looked exactly like
the real thing. You could pour it on your face, your hands, and coupled to
the appropriate wailing would result in an immediate trip to the hospital.
Alas, our love of fake
blood backfired a few years ago when, searching for our watch on the bedside
table in the middle of the night, our hand stumbled across a small vial. In
that half-asleep condition, we couldn’t recall its origin, and for reasons
known only to the sleeping subconscious, we opened the vial and sniffed the
contents. Unfortunately, in our prone condition the contents spilled out
over our mouth, chest and sheets. The light was switched on, and by all
accounts the scene resembled the final moments of Nancy Spungen. Fake blood
over us, over our teeth, face and neck, fake blood over the pillow and
sheets… the few seconds of horrified confusion which followed were among
the most terrifying of our life. Worse still, the blood stained in a major
way. It took five baths to remove it, and we spent the best part of a week
looking as if we had one of those unsightly giant birthmarks stretching from
just under our nose, to just above our nipples.
Even so,
the fact remains that the best jokes are the classics; namely, the ones you
don’t buy in a shop. The ones which involve you hiding behind curtains and
jumping out at people, or creeping up behind someone and grabbing their
sides while simultaneously shrieking in their ears, or the ones where you
get a stick and wipe it in dog mess and rub it on someone’s back, or whack
them on the back of the head with a blackboard wiper, or use a pencil to
draw round the edge of a coin, and them bet them that they can’t run it
down the length of their face, and then they end up getting pencil on their
face, or the one where you spread a rumour around school that they got an
erection in the shower after games. No way money can buy you laughs like
that, man.