A personal plea from my humble self to your hopefully humble self.
In 2000, a political campaign was launched at the Republican National Convention to ban Breastfeeding. These ‘Citizen’s against Breastfeeding’ stated, and I quote “This primitive ritual has and continues to be a violation of babies' civil rights. It's an incestuous relationship with mothers leading to moral decay. Women enjoy an erotic experience that imposes oral gratification on innocent infants after birth. Their reprehensible behavior teaches children illicit sex, subsequently manifesting addiction to promiscuity.”
This quite literally caused a few riots at the convention. Person after person lost their temper and flew in a rage at the protestors, failing to realize that the whole campaign was, in fact, a joke. It was created by a man called Alan Abel to poke fun at the extreme moral views found in American society, and also, to have a little fun.
Alan Abel is an American hoaxster, mockumentary filmmaker and a jazz percussionist whom Life Magazine called the 20th century’s greatest prankster. He kicked off his 60-year and counting career with SINA, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. Formed to spoof the serious moral campaigns of the 1950s, it won over people everywhere with its motto of “a nude horse is a rude horse.” Abel’s goal has always been “to kick people in the intellect,” and prank after prank has proven the gullibility of the American public.
Pranks often get a bad rap due to their frequent failure. The jailtime, felonies and public ridicule incurred by their perpetrators live in infamy. Miscalculated joke after joke has resulted in damage to property, communities and reputations. At Gustavus Adolphus college some years back a few pranksters walked a cow up to the third floor of a building to surprise the faculty. However, little did they know there would be no way to get the cow back down. Cows can only go up stairs, not down them. Because there was no way to get the cow down, the cow was shot and the responsible students were punished. Something that should have been clever and fun became an unintended disaster.
But on to the prank that is on the minds of the class of 2011 nationwide. The Senior Prank: funny, well played, clever, harmless? Not so in the past. Many previous senior pranks at Blake have meant that our custodians, some of the hardest working members of our community, bear the burden of cleaning up serious damages to property. Such carelessness is offensive to the school that has devoted four plus years to our education and advancement. All that energy could get channeled into something more effective, and frankly funnier.
Pranks are not all bad. To the contrary, they can be educational, non-offensive and hilarious. I agree that many of the pranks of pupils past have been in poor taste. My hypothesis is that the tastelessness stems from a lack of purpose. Every year seniors across the country have a chance to publicly poke fun at the unbelievable hypocrisy, bigotry, and just plain bizarreness of our CEO’s, politicians, Ponzi schemers, religious figures, you name it. Yet students in the past have wasted their time rearranging furniture and causing thousands of dollars in water damage. Breaking things isn’t a prank, it is just breaking things.
I asked around to some of the teachers, and even emailed the aforementioned Mr. Abel to get his opinion on how to successfully pull a fast one. From all these conversations, I’ve realized that to pull off a successful prank, the goals should be to amuse, to educate, and most importantly, be mindful of the outcome.
So, for my first move as a prankster with a cause, I’ve founded a group to combat one of the greatest issues Blake faces. Grade Inflation. I’ve created SAGPAI, the Society Against Grade Point Average Inflation. We need people to know how hard we don’t work and the grades we really deserve for the work we turn in. We ask for Caring Candidness, and more Cs. Our motto is, “don’t inflate, just underrate!” Because it’s better to get a lower than reality GPA and exceed expectations than disappoint everyone.
Another idea could be to wage a war on censorship. Everyone could send letters of protest to various dictators around the world, --with the important parts edited out. Taste of their own medicine. Another approach could be to come to school with bandages over our mouths saying censored by _____. A few examples could be Mubarak, Gadafi, or North Korea. By taking a very real and destructive issue and making fun of the people who perpetuate it, we get our point across (that censorship is bad) using humor, one of the most effective communications tools we have in our repertoire.
One thing I find lacking oftentimes at the Blake School of Excellence is a sense of humor. We take our selves very seriously, but can verge on the painfully uptight, which is sad because we are clever and can do better. As Mr. Abel said in the documentary Abel Raises Cain, “You can poke holes in the ozone layer, but god forbid you poke fun at people’s psyche. That’s a no-no.”
I personally think that for our senior class gift, we should list 511 Kenwood Parkway as “for sale” on Craig’s List, highlighting its “spacious kitchen facilities, home theater and giant pendulum.” It would make my day if the Blake School Wikipedia page was changeable again and the world knew just how well the Lumberjack Club placed at the World Lumberjack Olympics. We could change Blake’s name and have a “Remember the Ladies Day” where we all went to Northrup School of Excellence instead. (Sorry dudes) Another harmless prank could be to hard boil a couple hundred eggs and place them in the faculties desk drawers, purses and briefcases… No writing or message left… just eggs.
It is high time we started taking “funny” seriously. A month from today is April Fools Day. I invite you to make a statement about censorship, homelessness, poverty, grade inflation, income inequality, death panels, the environment or eggs.. As for myself, I am excited to make a fool of people and ideas that destroy what our country truly stands for… freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. I invite you all to join my personal brand of civil disobedience, by irreverently refusing to take oneself too seriously. So I say, “the joke’s on you. What ideals will you defend with your mischief?”
