April Fools Day is a popular holiday and according to wonderopolis.org, “the first association between April 1 and playing tricks can be found in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales from 1392.” Since then, April Fools Day has always been that day people will look forward to playing a small joke on their favorite person or the person they hate most. It’s a popular day that pretty much anyone has participated in at least once. Regardless, jokes and hoaxes are fun to pull yet, there are some cases in which people get physically hurt by them.
A great example of people being able to pull a long prank is the show, “Impractical Jokers”. A group of five men have played several jokes and pranks on unsuspecting people, but none of these tricks actually harm the victims of their pranks. The victims of these pranks either get a good laugh out or are just confused until it is revealed that they are on a prank show. Situations like these are great examples of good pranks because the only people getting hurt in these pranks are typically the ones pulling them. Versus the more recent set of “pranks” people on the internet are doing which are causing the victims of their pranks to be the butt of their jokes.
In some cases where a prank can cause more harm than laughs can be damaging to the prankee’s way of interacting with others. All they are doing is harming or making their victims’ lives a little more difficult to open up to others. Oftentimes, the only people who would be laughing about these types of pranks are the people who were pulling them. You can mostly see these types of pranks on Tiktok or YouTube, you can mainly see these types of prank videos on people at stores like Walmart, where the TikTokers will be filming pranks on employees, or random passersby for online clout. While the Impractical Jokers also post and put their pranks on media and streaming services, they genuinely have fun with their pranks on each other, and again the only real “victims” are each other, not the people who didn’t know they were being recorded at that moment.
Cambridge Dictionary defines a prank as “a trick that is intended to be funny but not to cause harm or damage,” which is the exact opposite of the “pranks” that people will do on social media for clout or views. The entry is not to hurt people but to give them something to laugh about when they realize that they’ve been pranked. Which is why it’s frustrating to see people making pranks about making some other life harder. Other creators will do harmless pranks that are way better than the pranks being pulled on employees or passersby who could have wanted no part in a prank video.
While big elaborate pranks can be fun, they shouldn’t involve hurting innocent bystanders. Instead, they should cause the prankee to be confused or burst out with laughter after realizing they’ve been played. Otherwise, you’ll just be causing people pain or discomfort for your own self-pleasure.
