Submitted by Charlie Todd: Here’s a fun, simple prank idea inspired by this comic by Randall Munroe from xkcd.com:
Improv Everywhere Redheads
From Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere:
For our latest mission, over 50 redheads rode the subway together
and protested a Manhattan Wendy”s for their racist logo.
Go behind the scenes with our mission report, photos, and more videos on the Redheads site at Improv Everywhere.
And, New Yorkers, mark your calendars for August 18. That’s our tentative date for Mp3 Experiment Four. This one’s going to be super fun.
Undercover Busker
The Washington Post did an interesting experiment recently that was somewhat of a prank. They had Joshua Bell
Pearls Before Breakfast
Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.
By Gene Weingarten
Washington Post Staff Writer
April 8, 2007
He emerged from the Metro at the L’Enfant Plaza Station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.
It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment? …
Regarding April Fool’s Day by Charlie Todd
As a prankster, people tend to expect big things out of me on April Fool’s Day. I do absolutely love the holiday, and I always enjoy it to it’s fullest. It’s probably my favorite day of the year. Still, I can’t help but feeling that for pranksters, April Fool’s Day is amateur day. It’s the one day out of the year that EVERYONE tires to pull a prank or a hoax. Why would I invest huge amounts of time and resources into pulling something off on the one day of the year that everyone expects it?
For my site, Improv Everywhere, I’ve traditionally done a very simple email prank each year.
This year I claimed that we received a cease and desist letter from a jazz combo from the 1980’s who went by the name “Improv Everywhere” and that we would be changing our name to to Humor In Public Places, or “HIPP” for short. I figured the horrible new name would clue most people in to the joke, but I ended up getting a flood of email from people offering legal advice. Many simply wanted to write in to state that they hated the new name. Continue reading “Regarding April Fool’s Day by Charlie Todd”