THE NECESSITY OF PRANKS

God Save Fun

Since everyone got so fucking sensitive, there is a dearth of mirth in the world. It seems to have been forgotten that humor that is slightly cruel is some of the funniest material there is.

My father, who was an art professor, told me about another guy in his department who sawed the penis off of a corpse they had ironically been using in a life drawing class. He then unzipped his pants and hung the dead penis out of his fly and walked around campus with it. When finally a colleague brought it to his attention, he said, “What? Oh, this?” And he grabbed the corpse penis and threw it into a bush.

His friend nearly died of fright.

This man was secretly one of my heroes.

There is something magical for me, in certain pranks, but they can’t just be vengeful, like hiding a dead raccoon in your ex-landlord’s floorboards. Two good popular examples are in the show “The Office,” when Jim encases Dwight’s stapler in Jell-o, and in the show “Jackass,” wherein they beat someone with huge bags of flour, rendering them white and dusty and therefore “antiqued.”

I’m not sure why I find these things so particularly pleasing. It might go back to when I was in 5th grade, and an 8th grade boy named Ned used to link my arm with his and then tell me that we were going to “make passionate love in the tanbark.”

It was horrifying but also made me laugh until I couldn’t breathe, because my mother had pulled me out of sex ed class, which made all the eighth graders delight in tormenting me mercilessly with graphic sexual talk.

“I’m so sorry,” grimaced by best friend. “I accidentally spilled some live sperm on your desk today.”

This kind of taunting would probably result in some kind of grisly lawsuit today, but it made me grow strong, and realize that incredibly rude things were often quite hilarious.

In seventh grade, when walking home from school, my friend Erin and I used to play “Dead in the Road. ” We’d steal ketchup packets, smear them on our faces, and select a small bend in the road where, once laying down in poses of accident or murder, cars would stop. The drivers would be shocked into good citizenship and get out of their cars screaming “ARE YOU OK??” …at which point we’d stand up, do a stupid dance and run away.

This provided hours of entertainment. One of our classmates broke his leg, and Erin and I talked him into giving us one of his crutches. After that, we played “Beat the Cripple.” Erin would pretend to hobble alongside the road on one crutch with a white sock pulled over her pants, like a cast. Then I would run up from behind screaming epithets at her. I’d grab her crutch, she’d fall down and we’d go into our fight choreography of me beating her with the crutch while she reacted with Pro Wrestling-worthy squirms and cries of agony. Cars would stop and yell “HEY!!” at me, then Erin and I would do another silly dance and run away.

One time, Erin and I discovered an X-rated book in my mother’s bookcase called “The Sensuous Woman by J” which was essentially an instruction manual on how to give specialty blowjobs. Erin and I were so outraged, we tore all the pages out of the book and carefully placed especially lurid sections in mailboxes all around the neighborhood.

I got worse in high school when I was so riddled with ADHD I couldn’t stop myself from doing anything. I was writhing with combustive, unfocused spaz energies and had the impulse control of a hyena.

Mostly this manifested in my little sister and me following my mother around the Safeway pretending to have cerebral palsy, to mortify her. It worked.

Before I knew anything about the Merry Pranksters or the Situationists, I tried to found a “creative vandalism” club in high school called Club Ho-Ho.

My goal was to make giant papier-maché HoHo snack cakes with chicken wire frames and sneak them into inconvenient places around the campus. I wanted them to just appear, wrongly and incongruously somewhere they’d be a pain in the ass to deal with, like the nurse’s office. There were no takers for membership in Club HoHo. I was crestfallen at the time; now I think everyone who shot me down secretly regrets it deeply.

High school was also when I became a punk rocker, where I did things like put blue cream soda in a Windex bottle and drink out of it at punk shows.

I got into a small vandalism war with my Trigonometry partner, which resulted in his locker being tiled with Velveeta slices. Later, I painted his locker entirely pink and taped a dead fish to it.

I needed a fake ID badly, so I found my great grandmother’s driver’s license. Her photo was fantastic - she was about 81, and the license was from the 1960’s. “Wait a minute,” the doormen said, looking at the birthdate. “This says you are only 2 years old.”

“NO,” I’d yell like they were idiots. “I’m 102 years old.”

“This isn’t going to work,” they’d say, handing it back to me, which is when I pulled out my “real” ID, which was the driver’s license of a black guy named Devon.

At that point, they were usually so amused they’d let me in.

I sought out this kind of behavior in others, and cherished stories about it.

A hairdresser friend of mine told me that the favorite haircut he’d ever performed was on a long-haired 19-year-old boy, who asked the hairdresser to cut his hair short around the sides, and shave the top completely bald except for one long stringy section at the top of one side, so he could have a “combover.”

Nowadays, he’d probably get into deep shit for insensitivity to the bald.

I asked my friend Eugene what his favorite prank was, and he texted back immediately “Getting a safe deposit box and putting nothing in it but a fish.”

My friend Alex used to go to his friend’s apartment in a high rise after school and drop bags of garbage and flour out the window to see the streaks it made on the outer building. This is a fact that never fails to bring me deep spiritual joy.

I secretly adore vandalism, and would do it every day if I didn’t have a superego. I’ve tried to impart this transgressive joy to my young cousins. Together we invented “St. Vandalalia’s Eve Eve,” which is the eve before any “Eve” holiday, like Christmas Eve. The eve of any official eve, when we’re together, we dress like dance kids from “Fame” and “take it to the streets,” doing pirouettes and vandalizing to our hearts content. It usually involves stencils.

This kind of happiness belongs to everyone. If you’re having trouble getting started, here’s a couple of baby steps to kick off your inner prankster:

When you have a tailgater, slow down to an infuriating speed, and wave happily.

If anyone ever asks you to help fold a sheet, throw it over your head and say, “It is the judgement day, and I am a terrifying apparition. REPENT!”

I am praying to see a lot of Teslas covered with garbage, spray painted with the word “dick” on them this year.

It takes a village.

NEED AN EDITOR OR A WRITING COACH? contact me: Cintraw@gmail.com

Theme song: Jack Black

Artwork: “The Loch Ness Robot,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2020

(currently this painting is FOR SALE. Inquire within.)

CINTRA IS CURRENTLY ACCEPTING PAINTING COMMISSIONS.

Contact: Cintraw@gmail.com

SHOULD YOU WISH to donate or gift a one time “tip” to Cintra Wilson, she is on Venmo: @cintra-wilson (And she appreciates every damned dime.)