I’m not interested in “pranks” where someone is victimised, harmed, or upset.
Tell me the funniest harmless pranks where everyone involved can laugh and nobody feels bad.
Next time you have some friends over and one of them leaves their phone unattended, take a picture of it.
A little bit after they leave, send them a picture informing them they left their phone at your house.
This is so dumb funny. I am definitely trying it
Extra points, send it to their spouse/partner, soon enough after they leave that you know they are together.
Heard of rather than seen it.
My dad started a rumor that a coworker kept jello in her desk. Just mentioned it from time to time and let it be. Time goes by…
One Monday morning he goes in early and reignites the rumor.
When the coworker arrives there’s a crowd outside her office. She’s annoyed and throws open all her desk drawers to prove her innocence… and finds her file drawer full of lime jello, one unpeeled banana in the middle.
If I recall right she laughed until she peed herself.
The drawer was large enough it took my Dad most of Saturday to fill it. And most of the space in our fridge.
Edit: There was also a time my dad and I rented a small trailer and took some stuff to the dump.
I always loved this as we would look around and see if there was anything worth scavenging and bringing home.
But no, nothing interesting.
On the way home I turn to my Dad and say “Let’s tell mom and sis we found a moose head.”
They believed us, we go out to the trailer and I’m opening it slowly to reveal that it’s empty… and a prior renter had spilled some red paint in the bottom.
My sister screams “IT’S STILL BLEEDING” and runs inside.
I could’ve never predicted it would go that well. I’d of course meant a mounted moose head. And this was in Florida, where I’m fairly sure there are no ‘fresh’ moose.
Edit 2:
Thought of one more.
My sister and I are at karate class and my parents pick us up. They got donuts while waiting for us.
When we get home, the dog had taken a crap out on the patio. My dad goes to clean it up and yells “he got into his eye medication! It’s all slimy.”
We go and look and sure enough it’s covered in whitish crud.
My dad picks it up.
“Looks like dog shit.”
sniff
“Smells like dog shit.”
takes a bite
“Tastes like dog shit.”
My sister and I screamed and ran to our rooms as my dad ate his glazed chocolate doughnut, laughing his ass off.
All these pranks were within a year of each others.
Your dad sounds fun
He’s awesome. Always finding weird things to do.
He’s gotten into D&D, plays in two games with me… and started collecting tree bark on his walks, which he makes into rolled up ‘dollops’ and he’s giving them backstory for one of his D&D characters.
So damn weird to find out my dad’s spending his evenings rolling hot, moistened tree bark into tight spirals while making up lore.
My spouse got to talk to the guy that owns the company that makes the World’s Best Cat Litter (it’s corn based, and edible; much more environmentally friendly than the bentonite clay that most cat litter uses). Apparently he used to show it at animal shows; he would have a box filled with corn-based cat litter, and he would have it filled with “cat turds” that were actually chocolate. He’d be demonstrating scooping the litter box for people, and would just pop one into his mouth.
He apparently stopped playing that prank after someone witnessing it threw up.
So my wife is actually a vet tech and pulled this on her colleagues a year or so ago, with a bag of “fecal samples” she’d occasionally snack from.
Good prank. Not very good for sales though, best kept for coworkers.
These are all really great
A recent favourite was the most simple. Someone in my office photocopied a paper clip, then put the copy back in the paper feed. My desk was beside the copier, so I got to watch them look everywhere in that machine for the paper clip.
something harmless my dad likes to do when hes walking with a group of people and is in front is walk to the side and pretent to examine something. causes a whole group of people to go walk over and look. and go nuts when they dont see anything.
There’s a similar thing you can do - if you’re in a room of people, just start chuckling to yourself about nothing. Keep doing it every so often, and all going well, the whole room will be in uproarious laughter for reasons they’re entirely unaware of!
Stick a small piece of paper under the mouse of a colleague, covering the laser sensor and watch them go crazy trying to figure why the mouse doesn’t work. Bonus point of the paper is the same colour as the mouse and it’s hard to see.
When I was in high school, each department had a bunch of shared laptops that could be usedfor occasional lessons. They all had touchpads, but the school did also provide mice. They also had USB ports on the back. So of course you try to slyly plug your mouse into the laptop of whoever is sitting opposite you and just nudge their cursor astray every so often
I just replied about this in another thread, but I liked plugging an extra mouse into their computer and making subtle movements with it while they were working.
Before mice had lasers this could be done with a piece of clear tape. IT guys got real tired of the number of “broken mouse” calls from our department.
Years ago I did this to my boss, and printed out the “troll” face from rage comics. Had the satisfaction of watching him move the mouse around, get confused, pick up the mouse to look at it, see his shoulders slump and shake his head.
Just the smallest, dumbest thing, but I remember it 10 years later.
At our last office, the accounts receivable department decorated for Halloween and put a stuffed dummy in a chair in the hall. Then ON Halloween, put their chubby intern in the chair in the outfit instead. Scared the heck out of most of upper management. Very good day at work.
At the job before that, on April fools day, I got each of the ladies working in my department (including me) to go separately into the boss’s office and tell him we were pregnant, giving the same month as when we were due. He didn’t figure it out until #4.
If any of you actually were pregnant, that would’ve been gold.
Especially if it was #5.
I oppose human reproduction. Even if it would be funny.
I was eating pistachio nuts on a bus in London and carefully put all the shells in the hood of my friends coat without her noticing. We went to a restaurant and I forgot all about it. At the end when we got up to leave she pulled her coat off the back of the chair and dozens of pistachio shells went flying all over the floor.
A few years later me and the friend got together. That was almost 10 years ago, so happy ending :)
I have a similar story! My family was having a reunion at a restaurant but some people didn’t know how to get to the restaurant (before GPS or mapquest), so my dad told them to follow him in their cars. My dad was driving in the first car and there were like 3 other cars behind us with family. As were driving on the highway my dad dumps a bag of pistachio shells out the window (idk where he got the bag from) and pelts all my family’s cars. It was so funny when we got to the restaurant and all the cars behind us were super confused about the pistachio shells.
Someone was lightly victimized in this, but no one was upset and it was all in good fun.
Years ago, my buddy taped an air horn under his boss’s chair. We worked in a bullpen and the boss had a fishbowl office in the corner. He came in and sat down and of course it went off. Boss fell out of his chair, everyone stopped working, and everyone’s morale was super high the rest of the day, especially the boss.
The boss had never felt like part of the team. Most of us had worked together for years and we all played light pranks on each other. He came much later. It was the first time he really felt like one of us.
You can get a bag of hundreds of tiny plastic babies on Amazon. I got a couple hundred of them and hid them everywhere in our office over the weekend when nobody was there (including in my own office).
It’s been a couple years, people are still finding them, and nobody knows where they came from. A few people blamed one of the HR ladies and a co-worker who’s addicted to buying tchotchkes on Temu. Hopefully none of my co-workers are on Lemmy, because I hope to refresh the baby population soon.
At my previous job I tied strings to a couple packages’ worth of Dove individual chocolates and hung them from the ceiling of a co-worker’s office when she was on holiday. She is short and loves chocolate, so they were tantalisingly out of reach. She liked how they looked and kept them there for a while, but eventually started pulling them down as she had chocolate cravings.
I got away with so many things like this at my previous job because nobody dreamed I would do it so never, ever was I suspected (older white lady and in a comedy routine I would be the straight person). Accounting often works late though. So I’d move a tyrannosaur toy around, change the after hours sign to say things like “after 5 please dance”, put funny things on the printer glass. Others were always suspected. I never even blinked and they never knew who.
haha this is too cool
It’s great being the one nobody suspects! A few people thought I might have done the baby thing but I was also “finding” babies in my work area and was decent enough faking confusion and offering up more plausible co-workers as suspects. I like your idea of getting creative with the hours sign!
I forgot - I also did a squished spider prank. I drew a “crushed” spider in a random spot on a sheet of copy paper - two sloppy body segments and broken stick legs in the general squished spider arrangement. I used just a black felt-tipped pen and even added a tiny drop of water to the body to bleed the ink and make it look juicy. Once it dried, I slipped the paper face-down in the paper feed tray (so the print would be on the spider side) under two clean sheets of paper.
When my supervisor printed a spreadsheet, there it was on page 3. Sadly, she didn’t have a huge reaction to that one, but I was still proud of myself.
Whenever my colleague at the neighbouring desk left her laptop unlocked, I would go in, and create a new Word document saying ALWAYS LOCK YOUR LAPTOP in huge red font. She vowed she would eventually get back at me.
I once took a screenshot of some random text in a Word document with “CONFIDENTIAL” as the background watermark and then I used that screenshot as my lock screen wallpaper. When I locked my laptop and left my desk, she clocked the content of my screen and thought it was finally her moment to get back at me, but… it wasn’t.
hahahah the bait
We had an office with a backdoor out into a tiny parking lot (~5-6 vehicles). There were guys with weed whackers. The sound kept going forever and ever and ever. Turned out that my coworker had subtly tuned the stereo (hooked up to a computer for streaming) to a YouTube video that was four hours of weed whacker noise. It took like 45m for someone to complain and he just started laughing uncontrollably and was found out. He’s a good friend and I’m still mad at him for that when I remember it. Ace job pranking us, though. The workers had been long gone.
We were getting called in to HR one by one for unclear reasons. Turns out we were getting our annual raises, but my boss and his boss were both handing them out that day. I and a coworker go in first; on the way out, they ask us to send a third coworker in first.
We look at each other and instantly know.
We both walk up to her desk, stony-faced, and tell her “You need to go down to HR. [boss] and [big boss] need to see you.” She is nervous, but we insist she just needs to go, now.
Ten minutes later she comes back and chews us out, but is laughing all the way.
I hide gold coins (but you could use any kind of fun token). Who doesn’t like a finding a gold coin?
It started when I used to do leprechaun cosplay. When you do that, you inevitably will get asked where your gold is hidden, so I got a bunch of cheap plastic coins to hand out when I got “caught”, or to “drop” if chased. For the heck of it I started slipping them in my friends’ bags and costumes while they were out.
Eventually this lead to hiding them in peoples homes when I visit, and reverse pickpocketing friends: pockets, purses, hoods in winter so they will fall out when they flip them up to go outside.
I think my biggest get was slipping one into a theater director’s shirt pocket while they were talking to someone else. And the biggest surprise might have been one I put in an attic hatch so that it fell out when they went to pull the ladder down months later.
Love that this has absolutely become your trademark.
Until they become a serial killer.
Got my buddy with one I saw on Vine (RIP):
Walking near a construction site, got behind him, picked up a traffic cone, and barked like a dog into it with it pointed near his feet. Sound is amplified and originates low to the ground. I think he ran about 30 feet before he turned around and saw me on the ground laughing!
This was one I did to a buddy years ago but he still says it’s the best prank pulled on him ever. We had each other’s apartment keys so we could walk each other’s dogs.
He had gone out drinking and playing poker with some friends. I knew he’d be coming home drunk. I got into his place and took every single light bulb out. All the lamps, all the ceiling fixtures. His fish tank. The little one in the fridge. Every single one. Then I took his futon mattress and put it in his storage shed and made up the frame like it was all ready for bed. Then I took his couch cushions too. Fed and walked his dog and went home and locked all my doors and windows and made sure to put the chain on the door.
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