Humiliation sucks! I know we've all "agreed" that a prank is not a a terrible thing and we should laugh at ourselves but I've always felt bullied by them. Being singled out and all. I just feel used for someone's amusement.

Also, I have an aunt who just loves pranks. But sometimes they seem very mean-spirited. Like the time she threw things around her apartment and then called my grandmother, sobbing, and told her she'd been robbed. My grandmother rushed over and it was a while before my aunt confessed. She's always doing things like that.

And then sometimes she'll get my mom involved. A couple years ago, during a holiday or maybe at one the annual "sisters' get-away" the three of them take, but she convinced my mom it'd be funny to dress up like burglers with props like flashlights and sneak into their older sister's room and scare her. Which they did. I told my mom that "I don't think you should hang-out with this Jennifer person. She's a bad influence."

On the other hand, this trait is part of the same general personality that did the whole, very elaborate "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" themed birthday party for me last November. (She's Samantha's mom; I didn't really get any good pictures of her.) And one year about twenty years ago, she did a fantastic job organizing a surprise birthday party for me. And of course she relished deceiving me. It involved this whole supposed confusion about meeting my grandmother at the restaurant, etc. (She's kinda like my big sister, she's only 6 years older than me.)

What I really, really can't stand are things like when radio DJs do prank calls. That's supposed to be hilarious, but I cringe if I can even listen at all, which generally I can't and don't.

APRIL FOOLS!

I'm with you on the DJ call thing, kmellis. I remember being acutely embarrassed when Howard Stern, back when he and Robin Quivers did morning talk on DC101, called the Air Florida reservations desk the morning after Flight 90 crashed and asked for a one-way ticket to the Fourteenth Street bridge.

I've always giggled when embarrassed. So when pranks embarrass me, I giggle, and it gives the impression that I'm laughing at the prank, which embarrasses me further, until I feel really ashamed.

But I'm constantly making myself the but of jokes, "pranking" myself, and I probably trick others more than I really mean. It's funny. Not funny haha, but funny funny.

I'm a hypocrite, but I knew that already. If only all the other hypocrites were as self-assured in their hypocrisy as I am, the world would be... the world would be... ther world would be... exactly the same.

I don't much like pranks, whether on me or on others, but I don't take them very personally when I'm the subject or one of the subjects. However, it does mess with my sense of trust/ability to believe the person and I'm on guard with them thereafter.

It's as though something in my prereptilian brain re-assigns the person to a less intimate or safe category. It's not punitive or angry and I certainly don't like the person any less. It is reactive, but it's also protective; a response to a lesson learned, in a sense. I simply prefer to maintain a clear distance from target range in anticipation of the next time the pranking urge strikes them.

If a prank is well-crafted and isn't designed to shame, okay by me. Even if the joke is on me. Those radio phone pranks go too far, imho.

If the prank is clumsily conceived and I can smell it coming, you can bet the gloves are off and I'm cooking up a counteroffensive of my own.

I hate to see others pranked. It always bothers me and it does ruin my ability to trust the prank player and unlike dear Fris it can alter how much I like a person if the prank is mean enough.

kmellis, your aunt's prank on your grandmother is the sort of something that would make it uncomfortable for me to be around the prankster again.

I should probably also specify that the pranks I'm referring to aren't the "Hahaha, I put salt in the sugar container" kind. I'm talking about the ones that are designed to elicit a distinct and visceral emotional or psychological response. Those are the pranks that make me wary of a person.

On preview: arse, my brain is quite smart, but my heart is notoriously stupid. My brain has an unending, thankless task in that regard.

Thats better than being jaded Fris.

arse_hat, I love my aunt, but I don't like that side of her personality.

All is fair game as long as it's actually funny. If the laugh at the end is bigger than the trauma, it's cool. If not, you're just a dick.

As you might guess, I come from a family of pranksters.

My immediate family and I (my parents, married for 43 years, and my older brother) don't spend much time together now that I've moved to CA. We typically spend a day and a half together around Christmas, and that's it. We thoroughly enjoy each other's company, though, and there's always much laughter involved. And pranks. Lots of pranks. All of which are done lovingly, and all of which are accepted with good humor by the subject.

Let me tell you about some of them.

One of my dad's favorite jokes is to put price tags (you know, the adhesive kind) on people's backs -- especially my mom's. It's extra funny to him if it's a size tag instead of a price tag. (My mom is not a large woman, so a Large tag on her back is super-funny to my dad.) This past thanksgiving, at one point my dad had 4 tags on his back. It was great.

My dad also likes putting ice cubes down people's shirts. He never gets tired of that joke.

During the preparation of holiday meals, my dad makes rolls from scratch and I make pie dough. This means there is lots of flour laying around. Not a holiday passes without someone wearing a big floury hand print on the back of their shirt. You get extra points for giving my dad one, because he's always on the lookout for them.

On my dad's 50th birthday, my mom taped a large sign to the back of his truck that said "Honk at me, I'm 50 today." You have to understand that my dad is an angry driver, and every unwarranted honk directed at him sends him into a swearing fit. (He subjects us all to it when we ride with him, so the idea of subjecting him to it during his solitary 45-minute commute to work was really hilarious.) Unfortunately, the morning of his 50th birthday was also trash day, so my dad saw the sign before getting into his truck. So he taped it onto my mom's car. She got lots of honks on her commute. Plus, everyone thought she was turning 50 that day. It was great. The perfect revenge.

My favorite joke happened the year before last at Christmas. My dad, brother and I always procrastinate when it comes to wrapping Xmas presents, so at varying times during the afternoon of Christmas Eve, each of us retires to a bedroom to wrap gifts. We all hate wrapping -- and sometimes my dad even tries to bribe me into wrapping his (but now that I'm an adult, his price is never high enough). My dad has started to take the easy way out, and he puts all of his presents in gift bags and staples them shut. My brother and I harbor a grudge toward this practice -- if we have to wrap, he should have to also. So, two years ago, while I was hidden away in a bedroom wrapping my own presents, I collected all the gift bags in the house. I put them in a box, wrapped them, and put them under the tree for my dad. I didn't tell my mom or my brother because I knew my dad would ask them where the bags were.

An hour or so later, my dad sulked off to do his wrapping. Sure enough, two minutes later, he comes in and asks my mom where the bags are. She tells him where they're supposed to be (the closet I stole them from), he goes back to look again, returns to complain that they aren't there. There ensued a 15 minute search for gift bags, whereupon my dad got more and more frantic at the prospect of actually having to wrap his presents . [Meanwhile, my mom and brother and I were sitting around chatting in the living room. By this time I told them that I'd hidden the bags. From other parts of the house, we could hear a bedroom door slam, then open, then we heard footsteps, then we heard rustling in the closet, another door slamming, footsteps, bedroom door slamming. We here laughing hysterically, trying to be quiet, because we could hear my dad's frustration travel around the house.]

My dad finally, reluctantly, resignedly commenced to wrapping his presents.

But unbeknownst to the rest of us, my brother had already hidden all of the tape in the house. My dad appeared several minutes later to ask my mom where the tape was. His journey around the house, slamming doors and hunting for tape, continued. Holy shit, we were trying so hard to swallow laughter it hurt

The next morning my dad unwrapped the box with all of the gift bags. We all had another good laugh, and hiding the gift bags is now a family tradition.

My point is, this may seem mean-spirited to y'all, and in some families I suppose it would be. We all get as good as we give, though, and our jokes on one another are a true expression of love in a family that otherwise doesn't display affection.

If this "Do you like pranks" post was initially a response to the post I made below, and if any of you had negative reactions to my little joke, I apologize. Take from this, though, that I consider you all family, and that in my family, there is no greater show of affection than pulling one over on someone. Yeah, I know it doesn't translate to all families. But that's where I was coming from.

I don't like pranks that genuinely play on someone's fears or whatever (like your aunt being burgled, kmellis). They are just mean.

Pup's one was perfect: good enough to get me worried and sad, but just silly enough to make me realise by the end that it was a prank.

If this "Do you like pranks" post was initially a response to the post I made below, and if any of you had negative reactions to my little joke, I apologize.

Not at all! Yours was harmless. :)

Your comment that pranks are how your family shows affection reminded me that making gentle fun of someone, or perhaps better described as "needling" someone, is an affectionate thing in my family. There's a lot of sarcasm in my family, too.

However, to my closest friend, Darien, this is very alien. It took me a long time to realize that any kind of mocking hurt his feelings. And although I have some trouble grokking that pranks are affectionate in your family, mudpuppie, I can sorta understand because gentle mocking really and truly is affectionate in mine. I only mock, or otherwise give a hard time to, people I really care about. And to me it genuinely feels like a display of affection.

But Darien's reaction made me think a bit more critically about it. I long ago realized that the sarcasm in my family was a sort of sublimated aggression and, frankly, I think the mocking is as well. I suspect this is true about prankery.

That doesn't mean that it's not affectionate! But I think that in families where this kind of stuff is the norm, we grow up getting the two things all mixed up together. I'm inclined to think that this isn't that healthy, but I don't really know and I don't worry about it other than that I'm now very aware of how other people feel about it and, as in the case of Darien, regulate my behavior with them as necessary.

Every New Years and St Patricks is intolerable to me because all the amateur drinkers turn up in my favorite pubs and make life intolerable.

Aprils Fools tends to be similar: all those humourless bastards who never crack a smile all year but think I should be amused by their poor, annual attempts at humour. Those people can fuck right off.

pranks are fine. humiliation is not. the two do not have to go together.