Humor 4

I know it’s a while past April 1^st but I successfully executed the best prank I can ever remember completing and I have to brag about it. Although this started off as something small and over a text message it turned out to be a pretty darn good joke with larger implications than I had foreseen.

Friday night I went to a birthday dinner with a group of good girl friends. We were all eating and talking and being plain old girly so, naturally, we got onto the topic of wedding rings and styles. One of my best friends always wears her grandma’s old ring on her right hand and so we started looking closely at her ring and examining the style. I’m not quite sure what turns the conversation took but all of a sudden she was wearing the ring on her left hand and joking about being engaged. The whole table was in play mode and giggling right along with her. 

Now, before I go on you should know a little more about this friend. I think every friend group has that one motherly figure that watches out for the group. That’s Julia. She is the one who likes cats, staying in, routine and anything that eschews adventure or unpredictability. This being said, she definitely isn’t out on the social scene. This implies that she also doesn’t know very many people, especially guys.

So, back to the glorious prank, I was also in play mode as this was going on and had what I would now like to label as a brilliant idea. I was texting a friend of mine who also knows Julia pretty well and we decided to send them a picture of the ring on her hand just to elicit a response. This is a harmless prank right? I mean who would believe that this girl, the girl who barely knows any guys at TCU, is randomly engaged?

Not the text recipient. Ironically, we also have another good friend named Julia who just so happened to also be at dinner that night. The text recipient knows a little less about that Julia than Grandma Julia and sent a response that reads, “Julia Peterson? Congrats! How exciting!” When I read this to the table they busted into hysterics. I think that the play mode of the table as well as the irony of the situation are what made the responses so intense. A simple joke we thought would be quickly shot down and seen through turned out to be even trickier than we anticipated.

So, what was going to be an innocent one-text joke soon to be forgotten turned into an elaborate prank via text message. We thought that this claim would be quickly dismissed but since our expectations were violated by the response we laughed, and then we decided the joke must go on. We made up a whole story about Julia’s high school sweetheart surprising her and proposing at the restaurant, the whole 9 yards. Then, on Saturday morning I went to breakfast with the victim of this prank and the topic was brought up again. I played it off like a champ.

Having forgotten about the whole situation, I was sitting at lunch with Grandma Julia in the BLUU today and cramming for a test. I looked and checked my phone and had a text from Julia Peterson and from the victim of the texts. Julia’s text reads “I am sorry” and the victim’s text read, “Just talked to Julia, you are so mean.” Again Julia and I burst out laughing. This time it was not the play mode that made us laugh but the sheer surprise that these messages presented.

This prank got to an unforeseen level of joking. I don’t normally assume the trickster role as our friend Juha does, but I have to admit watching this small seed of a prank bloom into something way bigger was gratifying. Apparently these friends encountered each other casually and the victim of the prank congratulated Julia on her engagement. Julia felt so awful (and was taken so off-guard) that she told the victim it was all a joke. I think that this is so funny partially because of the relief theory, I wasn’t the one who had to break it to the victim of the texts and I avoided their awkward confrontation.

There were definitely a lot of comic devices at play as this whole prank panned out over the course of four days. From the play mode initiating it to the element of surprise to end it, there are many reasons that one might laugh at this situation. I think that the drawn out course of the prank and nature of the different environments that it occurred in contribute to the humor diversity present in this joke, especially since text messages aren’t somewhere you would expect to be pranked. I know that some may feel pity for the victim of this prank, especially when I tell you that they had told some of their friends that happened to be at the same restaurant Friday about the engagement, but the victim took the joke gracefully overall. I should probably watch my back for some sort of revenge though just to be safe because the magnitude of embarrassment…in multiple friend groups. Needless to say I’m still laughing.