by Andy Simmons
“Why, yes, I am.”
“Get in! Help me get this up to thirty-five.”
We can also learn from other countries. In China, people used to pull their compatriots through the streets in little cart-like chariots called rickshaws. When I suggest the rickshaw as a means of transportation here, people look at me as if I am crazy.
“Jim!” they say. “Where are we going to find Americans to run through the streets pulling other Americans?”
Simple…joggers!
How many times has a person come up to you and said, “I jogged nine miles today!” Good. Pull somebody with you.
My brother Gary has run twenty-four Boston Marathons. Why can’t he pull our mother to the supermarket? He could drop her off, run ten miles, come back, and pull her home. He could build lower- and upper-body strength while spending quality time with the family.
My friends, what I’m trying to say is, the solution to all our energy needs lies in tapping into America’s historic can-do spirit with creativity, innovation, and optimism—even in the midst of disaster.
Eight days after the Gulf of Mexico sprang a leak, the federal government gave its approval to build a wind farm off Cape Cod. The bad news: It took nine years to get that approval.
Nine years to get approval to build a wind farm? This is America; there are many windy places. Why can’t we put some of the windmills in the breakdown lane on the highway? Look at all that untapped wind!
Think about it: using wind, created by cars running on foreign oil, to engage windmills, to generate electricity, to reduce our dependency on foreign oil!
And that’s not all.
I suggest that every traffic light in America be equipped with a little windmill to generate the power to run the traffic lights.
Of course, the naysayers attack my idea. “But Jim, what happens if one day the wind doesn’t blow?”
Easy. You don’t stop!
Do you know how much gasoline we waste waiting for the lights to change?
“But Jim, shouldn’t we encourage people to take mass transportation?”
Sure, but there’s one huge drawback to public transportation: Cars are more comfortable than subways. If the average American had his choice of going anywhere, do you think he would choose driving a car or standing in a moving cylinder chugging through the pitch-blackness of a tunnel built in 1901, while holding on to a metal pipe that one million people grabbed that morning, as he tries to balance himself between a homeless person, a bicycle, a baby carriage, and a folksinger? People banging into him, asking for money, crying for a bottle, singing a ballad…Of course, the average person will choose the car.
Therefore, we need to start building trains that are as private and as comfortable as our automobiles. We have to start building trains…of automobiles.
Detroit has seven million cars lying around not doing anything. I say string those babies together.
Imagine it: You go down into a subway station and a train of automobiles pulls up—nine hundred automobiles all attached bumper to bumper. Americans could have the privacy of an automobile in the realm of public transportation.
You could sit there on your way to work and listen to the radio, talk on a cell phone, drink a cup of coffee, read the paper, put on your makeup, and text your friends all at the same time…just like driving.
See? Saving energy is easy, and it won’t affect our lifestyle one bit.
The Mad Men of Pranks Inc.!
BY LANCE CONTRUCCI
Walk into Jerry Stepani’s office and you’ll see vestiges of the practical jokes of yore. There’s a whoopee cushion on the couch, a dollar tied to a string on the floor, even fake vomit on his desk.
But Stepani, president of Pranks Inc., a subsidiary of Bloomberg, isn’t looking back. The golden age of pranks is here. “There are big bucks in yucks,” he says as he jolts me with a joy buzzer.
Stepani and company are busy establishing the U.S. Prank Exchange, which lets investors buy and sell shares in hoaxes. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “blue-chip pranks, like those involving whoopee cushions, are expected to have moderate growth, whereas tech and online pranks are expected to be highly volatile but…”
Okay, we’re lying. There is no Pranks Inc., no Prank Exchange, no Wall Street Journal article, not even a Jerry Stepani, as far as we know. Too bad—we could make a mint, what with all the pranks being perpetrated on an unsuspecting public. Just last year, the world was introduced to bottled organic air (courtesy of Whole Foods Market), animal gyms (Virgin), and a new breed of sheep-sporting tartan-patterned wool (the Daily Mail), to name but a few. Bears may have decimated the stock and housing markets, but there’s still a lot of bull in the bull business. Here, four of the best pranksters tell us what makes them trick.
Gag Reflex
Forty-two-year-old comedian Tom Mabe was a prank prodigy, having executed his first when he was only eight. He had just made a snowman on the front lawn of his Louisville, Kentucky, home when he watched helplessly as teenagers in a car ran over it. He made another, with the same result. The third snowman he built was on a fire hydrant. “There I was with their wrecked car and water gushing out everywhere, and I acted like, “Gee, I didn’t think anyone would hit it with his car,” he says. “I had to do something. I was just a little guy. So I came up with this kind of cowardly way of getting revenge.”
Mabe grew up to be six feet four inches tall, but he never lost the little-guy attitude. His specialty is torturing telemarketers. He once checked into a Washington, DC, hotel that was hosting a telemarketing convention and spent the night making phony phone calls, trying to sell the sellers insomnia medicine at three o’clock in the morning. The front desk manager finally begged him to stop because one of the guests was so outraged. Mabe promised to fix the situation. He phoned the guest and identified himself as the manager. “Sir, I’m sorry about your losing sleep,” he said. “I believe we can make it up to you.”
“Thank God,” the man said.
“Here it is…Rock-a-bye, baby, in the treetop…”
Why do you pull pranks? “Revenge and fun. If some salesman is going to call my house, it’s game on.”
Best gag you’ve pulled off: “One time there were a couple of homeless guys in front of a McDonald’s. I called the restaurant impersonating a policeman and pretended that the men were actually undercover cops. I persuaded the manager to bring them burgers and coffee.”
Best gag someone else pulled off: “My buddy Jim Clark took his family to the zoo, and upon exiting, he and his family ran past the people entering screaming, ‘Run, run! It’s right behind us!’ People were taking cover, jumping up on picnic tables!”
Any pranks you regret pulling? “I once saw a dead deer by the side of the road. I ran back to my house, put on a Santa suit, and then I lay down beside the deer—just in time for a school bus to drive by. Freaked the kids right out.”
Pearls of wisdom: “If you’re a revenge prankster like me, remember: Not everyone is evil, not even telemarketers. Every year around Christmas, when one of them calls, I’ll always say something like, ‘Hmmm, that transmission insurance policy sounds like something I could really use, but it’s kind of expensive, and it is Christmas. Hmmm…Do you think if I put my kid on the phone, you could pretend to be Santa Claus and tell him you’re not coming this year?’ So far, no one has taken me up on this. Score one for humanity.”
Sir Pranksalot
Sir John Hargrave got into the pranks business honestly: He was born on April 1. With that head start, he founded one of the premier prankster sites on the web, zug.com, which stands for “zug is utterly great.” The forty-one-year-old embarked on world hoax domination some years ago when, posing as a ten-year-old, he wrote to every U.S. senator asking them to send him a joke as part of a homework assignment. Many senators responded, including Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski, who contributed this: “Why didn’t the skeleton cross the road? Because he didn’t have any guts!”
&
nbsp; By the way, don’t let Hargrave’s lofty title fool you. He’s from Boston. He added “sir” to his legal name when Buckingham Palace refused to knight him for “honourable pranking.”
Why do you pull pranks? “It’s a sport for thrill seekers. The moment before you pull off something, it’s pure adrenaline.”
Best gag you’ve pulled off: “I once filled out my tax forms using Roman numerals. The IRS was not amused.”
Best gag someone else pulled off: “Mat Benote, a graffiti artist, hung one of his paintings at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. It took two days before they realized it didn’t belong.”
Any pranks you regret pulling? “No, but I do regret having been punked myself. Before my book Mischief Maker’s Manual was published, I solicited celebrity blurbs on my website. I got an e-mail from a kid who said Eric Idle of Monty Python was his uncle. So the next thing I know, I was e-mailing with Eric Idle, and having conversations with his assistant. A year later, I saw this article, ‘How I Pranked John Hargrave.’ It was the kid—he played all the parts in the prank: Eric Idle, the assistant, everyone.”
A gag anyone can pull off: “Stick someone’s toothbrush in a Dixie cup of water, and put it in the freezer overnight. Put it back in its normal place in the morning.”
Pearls of wisdom: “Pranks and practical jokes should never be confused. A practical joke is something you pull on coworkers, like the guys in Utah who transformed their vacationing colleague’s cubicle into a small cottage, complete with a working doorbell, mailbox, and ceiling fan. A prank goes after the man. For example, there’s a video where Tom Cruise is being interviewed. The interviewer is holding a trick microphone and squirts water in Cruise’s face. Cruise starts chewing him out, and we crack up because, well, Tom Cruise is the man.”
Getting Schooled
Tension fills the halls of collegehumor.com. Two of the humor site’s writers are at war, a prank war to be precise. The small-scale gags that Streeter Seidell and Amir Blumenfeld first pulled on each other have ballooned into elaborate productions.
In one, Blumenfeld arranged for Seidell and his girlfriend to go to a Yankees game. Unbeknownst to Seidell, Blumenfeld also arranged for the scoreboard to display a bogus wedding proposal. A hidden camera recorded the couple’s reaction. It’s painful to watch. Seidell’s girlfriend is understandably startled. Seidell is even more startled when she accepts. “I did not put that up!” he exclaims. “I don’t want to marry you.” She slaps him and leaves. For good. Seidell, age twenty-seven, says his friendly war with Amir has only escalated since then.
Why do you pull pranks? “It began as a fun way to kill boredom. Now I’m just trying to top the one before.”
Best gag you’ve pulled off: “I arranged for Amir to be selected to take a halftime half-court shot for a half million dollars at a college basketball game. While Amir was led to a secluded office ‘to sign forms,’ I let the crowd in on the gag and requested their help. When Amir came back, we blindfolded him, and he took his shot…missing by at least twenty feet. But on cue, the crowd went crazy, as if he sank the shot. Amir did a victory lap around the court, yelling and punching the air. It lasted right up to the presentation of the fake check…which was presented by me. That’s when he realized he’d been had.”
Best gag someone else pulled off: “The lottery ticket prank. It’s done a lot, and for good reason. Videotape a lottery drawing. The next day, buy a ticket, asking for the same numbers that won the day before. Give that ticket to a friend and watch the ‘live’ drawing together. When he ‘wins,’ he will leap for joy like Amir did…until you turn off the tape.”
A gag anyone can pull off: “Bet someone that you can make it so they cannot lift a glass of beer off the table with their thumbs. When they’ve agreed to the bet, have them place their thumbs on the table next to each other. Now balance the full glass of beer on their thumbs. Unless they want to take a beer bath, they’re stuck.”
Pearls of wisdom: “You need a bit of meanness to be funny, but too much and you make people uncomfortable.” Like what Amir did to your ex-girlfriend? “Yeah.”
Prank You Very Much
On a freezing January morning, New York City commuters boarded subways from various lines and braced themselves for the day. They could not have expected this: Fellow passengers—businesspeople and college kids alike—removed their pants and skirts and nonchalantly rode to their destination, Union Square, in their underwear. Riders gawked, leered, and laughed their heads off. The 11th annual No Pants Subway Ride was another successful gag perpetrated by Charlie Todd and his New York prank collective, Improv Everywhere.
Todd has a curiously upbeat mission for a guy trying to pull a fast one on the populace: “Cause scenes of chaos and joy in public places.” They stage such scenes about ten times a year. There was the impromptu wedding reception for an unsuspecting couple getting married at City Hall and Frozen Grand Central, in which two hundred “agents” (the preferred term for participants) milled about Grand Central Terminal’s Main Concourse before unexpectedly freezing in place during rush hour.
Todd, age thirty-one, grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, and moved to New York City in 2001. It was there, in an East Village bar, that something changed his life for good—he pretended to be the alternative rock singer Ben Folds. “People were posing for photographs with me, the bartender gave me free drinks, a girl gave me her number,” he says. “But what I liked about it was that it was a positive experience for everybody, even though they were being fooled. When it was over, I didn’t smirk ‘ha-ha, you’ve been pranked.’ I just thanked everyone and left. It gave them something they could tell their friends. Even if they googled Ben Folds and found out he’s, like, ten years older than me, they’d still have a wonderful story: ‘This guy, for some reason, pretended to be Ben Folds!’”
Why do you pull pranks? “I get excited about pulling pranks that make people smile.”
Best gag you’ve pulled off: “The fake U2 concert in 2005. We assembled a group of musicians—with me dressed as Bono—and played a rooftop concert in New York. It was a crazy twenty minutes for the crowd watching…especially when the police arrested us for unreasonable noise.”
Best gag someone else pulled off: “Rob Cockerham posted a fake T.G.I. Friday’s menu page on his website cockeyed.com and encouraged people to insert it inside a real T.G.I. Friday menu. It parodied the Atkins Diet and had really disgusting stuff, like Bacon Churner with Faux-tatoes: two whole sticks of fresh Dutch dairy butter on a bed of crisp bacon.”
A gag anyone can pull off: “Here’s one my college roommates pulled on me: They covered every object and surface in my bedroom with tin foil. All the windows and light bulbs were blacked out. I needed a flashlight to even figure out what was going on.”
Pearls of wisdom: “Anyone can pull pranks. Look at Frozen Grand Central. All you have to do is freeze in place.”
What Does a Movie Producer Do?
BY MATTY SIMMONS
What does a producer do?
The screenwriter, obviously, writes the screenplay. The actors, of course, act in that screenplay. And the director, without question, directs the whole thing.
But what does the producer do?
I will attempt to explain.
A film producer is the guy who, when a writer tells him about a good idea he’s got for a screenplay, says, “That was done in 1938 by William Wyler. It costarred Fredric March and Loretta Young, with Claude Rains playing the black hat. But you know what? I think we could update it, if instead of making the leading lady a nun, we have her working in a casino in Nevada. We put George Clooney in the Fredric March role, and we make him an undercover agent for the CIA who has tracked a Russian agent to Las Vegas. Angelina Jolie would be great for the girl.
“They meet and fall in love, but he discovers that she’s pregnant by the Russian agent. George has been licensed to kill this guy, who, incidentally, will be played by Jack Black, but Angelina begs George not to kill the father of her
unborn child. In a tearstained scene at the Las Vegas airport, Angelina says good-bye to George and walks to the plane to join Jack Black for the trip back to Moscow. Our big ballad here. Maybe we get Elton John.
“George stops at the airport and pulls out a quarter she gave him. He drops it in a slot machine. The place goes nuts—bells ringing and all that stuff. George has hit the $1 million jackpot! He collects his money in a single large suitcase. It’s all in ones, to make it more visual—this is a visual medium.
“He goes back to his hotel. He’s still sick about losing Angelina. He takes the $1 million down to the hotel casino and puts the whole thing on number twenty-seven, which was their number. We see the ball rolling around and around and around endlessly, while the theme music, sung by Christina Aguilera, soars until every butt in every seat is up in the air. The ball drops into number twenty-nine, then hiccups slightly and pops into twenty-eight, then, as Christina reaches a pitch so high that every dog within a mile of any movie house in America is howling with pain, the ball goes blip—and drops into twenty-seven.”
By now, the writer, who is on the edge of his seat listening to the producer, is ecstatic. “And Angelina returns to him!” he screams.
“No,” says the producer. “That’s what would have happened in 1938. Instead we go for total realism. George meets two bimbos, played by Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian, buys champagne for everybody in Las Vegas, and sends a telegram to Angelina, which she gets as she and Jack Black land in Moscow. It reads simply ‘#*%! you!’ in Russian.
“As we go out on a big rock number by Bon Jovi, George is buying a bra with diamond studs on it for Kim, and Lindsay gets the last big laugh of the movie by falling up a down escalator.”
“I love it!” says the writer, leaping from his seat. He drives like a maniac back home and writes a first draft overnight, and the producer takes it to one of the studios.