The Week in Pranks: Attention, K-Mart Shoppers, It's the Russian Reversal A comedy article
by Jen Hubley Luckwaldt 1,274 5 02/17/2012 04:17 PM 1288 views
We here at ZUG are all about honesty. Which is why we will freely admit that today's pranks are so disparate, they could not possibly be said to represent any theme at all. Except of course, the theme of laughter. Healing, wonderful laughter.
What we would like to do is to somehow combine these separate pranks into one gigantic, super prank that contains all the best parts of each. It would have the social consciousness of "Meet a Black Person," the shaving salsa of the K-Mart shoppers, and the deep, profound sense of WTF of the bear who thinks he's a woolly mammoth.
A sort of prank Voltron, if you will. We can dream.
Meet a Black Person
Aspen, Colorado has an African-American population of 0.44 percent. In fact, according to a study that we just made up, citizens of Aspen (Aspentonians? Aspercreams?) are more likely to meet an African than an African-American.
To remedy this, Improv Everywhere set up a booth in the middle of a busy shopping area, staffed by, you guessed, a real live black person.
We couldn't decide which was the best reaction: The guy from Dallas who said assured him that he "didn't mind black people" or the kid who yelled, "Mom, come here, there's a black guy over here!"
Just kidding, it was definitely the guy from Dallas. Because he was serious.
Blue Light Special: Uncle Charlie's Fun Time Party Knives
How weird do you have to get before the beleaguered staff at K-Mart blinks an eye? Well, this should give you some idea. The pranksters in this video manage to ask for the following items, without getting much more than a bemused smile from the clerks they encounter:
A two-wheeled tricycle
I Can't Believe It's Not Daddy Butter
Pre-natal vodka
A map of the world without Canada on it
Shaving salsa
These are either the most patient retail workers on the world, or they've completely lost the will to argue with people's crazy requests. Either way, go them.
In Soviet Russia, Bear Pranks You
Man, people are really desperate to believe that extinct megafauna still walk the earth. This video, which clearly shows a bear with a fish in its mouth, has over three million views and an ominous caption reading: "A BEAST lurches through icy waters in a sighting a paranormal investigator thinks could prove woolly mammoths are not extinct after all."
It also almost 6,000 comments as of this writing, most of which fall into the following categories:
People who do not think this is a woolly mammoth, but feel it is some other kind of elephant-like creature, and think all the other commenters are stupid for thinking anything else.
People who feel that this is almost definitely a bear with a fish in its mouth, and also, everyone else on this comment thread is stupid.
People who came here to see a video about Whitney Houston.
And then there was our favorite, sadly deleted since this writing:
"hey guys check out my little sister! she is a 3 year old art prodigy! let me kno what you think please."
We're assuming his sister is the bear, and that she made the fish out of papier mache.
I went to Aspen once and found the people there insufferable. Therefore, I vote we call them Aspenises. (In all fairness, I went there 23 years ago, so it's possible they've changed in the meantime.)
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