I’ve written about Kembrew McLeod before. Here’s his prank to replace the college mascot with a pig wearing antlers. Hilarious. He writes:
In a wonderfully surreal display of ridiculousness, during that year?s homecoming game the marching band spelled out “We Love the Duke Dog” in their tubas and wore plastic dog bones around their necks in a sign of solidarity. During the game someone threw into the stands an effigy of a 3-eyed pig with antlers and the crowd ripped it to shreds. Other students showed their support of the Dog by sending letters to the student paper, and I later found out from the paper?s faculty advisor that he had never seen as many letters concerning a single topic as this one generated–and this was only months after the Gulf War!
I did a few practical jokes in my day, although nothing like this. While a sophomore at college, I had a chance to witness a prank so subtle it conned a lot of people. Someone paid to put up signs around campus about the new zip code on campus. The posters looked official and serious, and students dutifully noted the change in all their outgoing letters.
Two weeks later, the campus post office sent everyone a letter, saying, we never heard of this zip code change, and hey, it’s not supposed to be that way. A good prank need to be somewhat plausible to succeed. (See Alan Abel’s Society for the Indecency to Naked Animals). For more about brilliant practical jokes, see Abel’s Superbowl Joke where the true brilliance lay in staging the arrest for the joke.