When a prank goes too far . . .

A FUTILE action that seems like a good idea at the time. It’s not the one in the dictionary, but it is a pretty good definition of a prank. Strong drink, which dulls the mental faculties while increasing bravado and lowering inhibition – add in a smartphone and you have the 21st-century big night out.

Take Rhys Jones and Keri Mules. They had been to a beach party and put away a litre and a half of vodka with a friend when they decided to break into Sea World, a marine park on Australia’s Gold Coast. After a dip in the dolphin pool they let off a fire extinguisher in the shark enclosure before scooping up a nine-year-old fairy penguin called Dirk and heading home. Naturally they filmed their exploits, including waking up the next morning to find the bedraggled creature in their apartment, and put it on Facebook.

In the cold light of day they realised they were not in a real-life version of The Hangover, a movie in which a bunch of reprobates on a stag trip to Vegas wake to find a tiger in the bathroom and a baby in the wardrobe. When it dawned that they could not look after themselves, never mind a penguin, Jones and Mules gave Dirk a shower and released him into a nearby canal. There, after being chased out of the water by a shark, then chased back in by a dog, the traumatised bird was spotted by some sober, responsible adults. Dirk is now safely back at Sea World, which is reviewing its security arrangements.

Jones and Mules happened to pick up an unfortunate penguin. It could just as easily have been a set of temporary traffic lights or a life-sized cardboard Shrek. After a cider promotion at the student union, it seems that break dancing on the bus shelter, paddling in the municipal fountain then taking home a traffic cone, street sign or garden gnome becomes somehow irresistible. Glasgow City Council has given up removing the cone from the statue of the Duke of Wellington outside the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow’s Queen Street. Should one of the gnome-wranglers then fall into a deeply drunken sleep, they might awake to find themselves wrapped in clingfilm, covered with shaving foam or taped to the ceiling.

For young men – middle aged women do not tend to shave their friends’ heads after too many Montepulcianos – personal pranks bond, test the limits of friendships and allow for a bit of controlled aggression and mild humiliation. Sociologist Erving Goffman calls the moustache-drawing school of practical jokes “degradation ceremonies”. Psychologists compare them to the play-fighting seen in young animals.

Facebook and Twitter have changed the way we prank. Jones and Mules’ night with Dirk was on the internet before they had got over their sore heads. Social media expert Andrew Burnett observes: “When I was a youngster, we did daft stuff just for the sake of it. Now, instead of just being a prank, the motive has become to put it on social media. That’s the whole point of it. People say let’s do something daft and put it on YouTube.”

And social networking sites themselves are alive with practical joke opportunities: for example, stealing someone’s log-in then messing with their relationship status and posting an update from the STD clinic. As Vodafone discovered in 2010, this can go disastrously wrong. A colleague, passing a friend’s desk, saw Twitter running on his computer screen and composed an obscene message on it. What he hadn’t realised was that his friend had access Vodafone’s official account. The objectionable Tweet went out to the company’s 8,000-odd followers. Vodafone did not find this funny in the slightest.

Pranks can have a serious purpose. Artists have been poking fun to make a point since the beginning of the last century when Duchamp put a moustache on the Mona Lisa and submitted an upside down urinal to an art exhibition. The Guerrilla Girls, a group of New York-based feminists, use humour and gorilla masks to point out the absence of women’s work in the world’s art collections.

Guerrilla Girl Rosalba Carriera said: “We send secret letters to egregious offenders, often honouring them with bogus awards. We gave John Russell of The New York Times an award for The Most Patronizing Art Review of 1986, when he reviewed Dorothy Dehner’s show and called her “Mrs David Smith”, referring to her famous sculptor husband (they had been divorced for years).” Alice Neel added: “The Norman Mailer Award for Sensitivity to Issues of Gender Equality went to painter Frank Stella when he said he liked the “muscular” work of “girl” artists like Helen Frankenthaler.

But women are very much in the minority and most pranksters are guys who will, hopefully, grow out of it. Blokey TV shows such as Jackass and Punk’d have made the heavily set-up stunt feel a bit overcooked. Burnett says: “The funniest pranks are generally the old school ones that have not been thought out that much. The first shows like You’ve Been Framed and Candid Camera, with clips of your granny falling off a chair, were hilarious because they were accidental. When people started orchestrating them, they were so much less funny.”

To prove that the old ones are still the best, consider Bart Simpson’s campaign of telephone persecution against crabby barman Moe Szyslak. Thanks to his insistent prank calls, Moe yells out to the crowded tavern in search of Al Coholic, Oliver Klozoff, I.P. Freely, Jacques Strap, Seymour Butt, Mike Rotch, Hugh Jass, Bea O’Problem and Amanda Hugginkiss. Childish, certainly. Funny as well. And nothing harmed but a curmudgeonly yellow cartoon character’s dignity. «