THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 4, 1995 TAG: 9503040003
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 51 lines
Why do they call practical jokes ``practical''? Beats me. And some of them are jokes without humor, too - perhaps downright hurtful to the victim, physically or emotionally.
But the other day when somebody broached the subject, the conversation brought to mind several such pranks that I have read about or been told about and which were very much on the funny side. And largely harmless.
One I can't ever forget was described by humorist H. Allen Smith (Lost in the Horse Latitudes is a title I remember, but that may not have been the book). In this episode, two practical jokers, in full view of a policeman, picked up a park bench and started out of the park with it. When the officer triumphantly collared them, they produced a bill of sale for the bench. It was theirs, all bought and paid for.
I also recall hearing about little bits of foolery in the newspaper office in the old days, though I can't claim to have been an actual witness to any of the performances.
In one story, told to me by the perpetrator, rubber bands were stuffed, on the sly, into the bowl of a pipe smoked incessantly by a staid old copy editor. The result was a total fouling of the newsroom atmosphere. The only one who didn't notice, so I am told, was the smoker.
A similarly sedate worker in that same office found one day that his once comfortable felt hat was a couple of sizes too small. Actually the hat had risen on his head quite gradually. Over an extended period, a prankster had occasionally inserted little strips of paper under the sweatband.
Gradualism was also the genius of a scheme involving another newsman's swivel chair. The jokester in this operation turned the chair's height-adjusting knob (under the seat) just a tiny bit each day for some weeks. The turns were in the lowering direction. The story is that the chair's user didn't discover what was happening until the morning he arrived at work and found he could just barely peep over the edge of his desk.
However, about the actual success of that last and similar stratagems, I've sometimes wondered. Those jokes wouldn't have made such good telling if the targets had caught on about midway. And could anyone be so slow in the head as not to have?
Maybe I should think of some of these stories - because I believed them at first - as jokes played on me. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
by CNB