The internet creates the possibility of organizing amusing mass pranks. Improv everywhere (who have done some funny things in the past) came up with a clever idea employing twins and subway cars.
Both of my brothers did improv of the more conventional on-the-stage variety. These sorts of surreal social experiments don’t require creative skill on the part of the performers, though they do produce entertaining bafflement among passers-by.
Author: Milan
In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford.
Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.
View all posts by Milan
It would be far more surreal for the people watching if there weren’t people standing around filming it.
Of course, that would deny pleasure to The Internet.
Belgium’s much-reviled phone company Mobistar was elaborately pranked by a program on VRT Belgium; the pranksters hid themselves in a steel container, which they had dropped directly in front of the gates of a large Mobistar office at 5AM. The container had a prominent customer service number printed on the side of it — a number which rang the pranksters inside the container — that was promptly called by a series of Mobistar employees who wanted to get the container moved off before 2,000 Mobistar employees reported for work and found the parking lot blocked off.
The pranksters proceed to put the Mobistar employees through a high-art comedic phone hell, disconnecting them, subjecting them to terrible hold music (performed live from within the container on a little synthesizer), gradually ratcheting the misery up in a Dante-worthy re-enactment of every terrible, awful mobile phone company experience.