The World's Greatest Pranks

Pranks People Worldwide Can Appreciate

It only takes a thought, action or activity created as prank that can change the thoughts and ideas of people of every walk of life.
A simple or elaborate plan that gives an illusion of truth but is deceptive and outlandish in presentation.

Over the years, many people have been part of or on the receiving end of pranks.  The following examples of pranks from all over the world, have a common thread.  Read them and learn how to present an idea in the most extraordinary form of tomfoolery.

PRANK #1

H.G. Wells’s War of the World's

Most of us have heard of the 1938 Halloween Eve radio broadcast by Orson Welles of an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds that many took to be an announcement that Earth had been invaded by Martians. Announcements that the story was fiction were made four times during the broadcast. Welles ended the show by announcing that the broadcast was a “holiday offering”: “the Mercury Theater’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and shouting boo.” The disclaimers did little to prevent many people from believing we’d been invaded by Martians. It’s been called the hoax of the century, but it wasn’t even a hoax. It wasn’t a prank, either. It wasn’t intended to fool people but to entertain them. Yet it fooled many people for several reasons. 

1.  It was presented realistically and authoritatively.
2.  The story itself was credible at the time. There were flying machines, and the possibility of interplanetary travel was   easily conceivable. It was not farfetched that some other race of beings might be more technologically advanced than we were.
3. Radio would have been the medium used to announce such an invasion.


PRANK #2

The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

Considered the greatest April Fools' prank ever. In April 1957, BBC television broadcast this story and got hundreds of calls and letters on how people could start their own.