I Hate Pranks, Part Eleventy-Sixteen

[Content Note: Bullying; betrayal.]

Last night, Iain and I caught a piece of some garbage show that featured THE BEST PRANKS!!!1! on the internet. (Television shows that are nothing more than terrible compilations of internet videos for broadcast are a whole other post.) The prank that was airing when we turned on the TV was played on a guy who was obsessed with the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. If you're not familiar with the PCH, it's basically people exchanging their personal information to a marketing company in the hope of winning one of their lotteries, which are delivered on-camera to winners' front doors by a balloon-wielding dude in a cheap suit.

So, this guy's friends decided to prank him by staging a fake PCH win. They hired a camera crew and an actor to deliver the giant check, complete with balloons. And they sent them to their friend's front door, to tell him he'd won $5,000 a week for the rest of his life. Naturally, he was pretty excited! He kept asking, "Is this real?" and he was assured it was. He called his friend—the jackass playing the prank—to share the good news.

Watching this, Iain and I were writhing in discomfort. "This isn't funny; it's so cruel!" Iain exclaimed. "FUCK PRANKS!" I shouted. "I HATE PRANKS!" We fixed our gazes on the screen, as if somehow we could will this out of existence, as if our concentrated hatred of what was happening might tear a hole in the space-time continuum and Eternal Sunshine this terrible experience out of this poor guy's head.

Eventually, the man is asked to recreate his moment of surprise for the cameras. When he opens the door the second time, it's his stupid mean friend, laughing at him. The man is crushed. He punches a mirror. He says, "This was the happiest day of life." It is an accusation.

We turn it off. I say to Iain, "And not only did they do this to him; they posted it online."

Pranks are fucking terrible. Pranksters are bullies.

And, like every other iteration of someone arguing against cruelty, the merry pranksters and their vicariously sadistic fans have always at the ready a rhetorical arsenal full of "humorless!" ready to be unleashed at anyone who dares to suggest that pranks are selfish, manipulative, potentially harmful garbage.

Never mind that many targets of "pranking" are not so much objecting as they are expressing the pain of being triggered or betrayed or exploited for someone else's amusement. Shock humor can be an absolute nightmare for many veterans and other survivors of trauma, for some people who are neuro-atypical, for people with anxiety disorders, among others—well beyond the common "I hate being pranked" reaction that a lot of people without additional considerations have.

And part of the reason prank-hating nofunnerjerks like me point this out over and over and over is because lots of pranks go terribly wrong, in ways sometimes far worse than a ruined friendship, which is itself pretty awful.

When things do wrong, the merry pranksters always insist that "no one could have predicted" it. Except here I am, predicting it! Your prank could go terribly wrong! It is a very real possibility, no matter how much you envision an outcome in which the pranked-upon person is laughing at their own fright or betrayal or humiliation.

You see, there are a lot of people in the world who—by virtue of a whole host of reasons spanning natural dispositions as well as the fucked-up things that humans do to each other—don't have the capacity, every day or any day, to safely and easily process being "pranked." And, the thing is, if you're the sort of dirtbag who gets off on pranking your friend for your own amusement, there's a good chance you're also the kind of person to whom your friends don't expose their vulnerabilities.

The last person anyone's going to tell about, say, a history of abuse is someone who they suspect might use it against them; someone who hears "I got bullied in high school and shoved in a locker by bigger kids" and thinks, "Oh man, how AWESOME would it be to shove you in a locker and see what happens?!"

Which means that the friends and family and colleagues of pranksters might project a seemingly less-than-average vulnerability, as a strategy of self-protection.

And then the pranksters claim "I never knew that about hir!" and "Who could've predicted?" after it's too late. But there are people who could've predicted. There are people who are predicting. It's a damnable lie that no one can conceive of harm caused by pranks.

It's a damnable lie told by shameless heapshits who want to pretend that their individual antipathy is universal ignorance.

It isn't.

Enough with the pranks, pranksters. You are hurting people. Just stop.