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13 POCKET MONEY PRACTICAL JOKES THAT HARDLY EVER WORKED

28/9/2015

19 Comments

 
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Any kid who grew up in the UK was sold a lie by the Beano. Practical jokes - of the sort wielded by Dennis the Menace in his relentless bullying of the sensitive Walter - rarely worked as they did in print.

Black-eye telescopes, wind-up false teeth, rubber spiders... their use hinged entirely upon the skills of the prankster, and the gullibility of the victim. Rarely was there ever a perfect storm of practical jokery, and typically most pranks fell flat. We speak from bitter experience. Here are 13 classic practical jokes that you'll possibly remember failing with.

13. SNAKE-IN-A-PEANUT CAN
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This never really worked because of the lack of nut rattle (you should see a doctor about that etc...), and the fact that the leap-o-snake always came in an unconvincing, generic can. Most male youths of our acquaintance would remove the snake and either pretend it was an Alien chestburster, or some manner of pneumatic phallus. These days you'd get locked up for that. Or be sent for "counselling". And rightly so.
12. HAND BUZZER
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In our head this delivered a powerful electric shock - resulting in the victim losing control of his or her legs and bowels. In reality it gave a light buzzing that was the result of a wind-up motor... but rarely when shaking hands with someone. Such was the design of the mechanism that it would generally only be triggered by forcing your hand down on a tabletop or dog's scalp.
11. BLACK FACE SOAP
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This would've worked had the blackface-creating element - some sort of black dye powder - been hidden within the soap (and generally revealed as the soap washed away), and not behind a paper sticker of the sort never seen on a bar of soap. Also, the soap bar was always tiny - like a hotel bathroom soap. Kids don't go to hotels, unless they're posh kids, and posh kids can probably afford gold-face soap anyway. Or just ask their butler to beat people up for their shits and giggles.
10. WHOOPEE CUSHION
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The inflated nature of the whoopee cushion meant it was impossible to conceal beneath a real sofa cushion without it either being obvious or obstructing the nozzle - which meant that the "REAL Bronx cheer" was either more of a muffled whine, or removed from its hiding place before your maiden aunt could sit on it. Incidentally, has anyone ever looked at the picture on a whoopee cushion, and wondered who drew it? Why is it always the same picture? We'll tell you why: Illuminati reasons.
9. ITCHING POWDER
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To be fair, itching powder did work. If anything, it worked a little too well. Mr Biffo took some on a school trip to Wales, and ended up shredding a classmate's back with the stuff, and consequently got into terrible trouble. For itching powder - at least back them - was made from fibreglass. We're assuming that these days they've changed the 'recipe'. Now it's probably just some fluff. It's political correctness gone mad.
8. DOCTOR CRAP-A-LOT'S TEABAG
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This appears to be a peculiar thing for doctor to have invented, and "completely harmless" seems to be an equally strange way to sell a product which, it is implied, will make its victims suffer explosive diarrhoea. Talk about mixed messages. However, the few times we used a Doctor Crap-a-Lot Teabag all it ever did was raise suspicion, as we never, generally, made tea for our parents. Except on April Fool's Day, when we'd usually top it up with washing-up liquid. Also: on the one time anybody drunk from one of our cups of Crap-a-Lot's tea, there was no "brew-ha-ha" whatsoever. Doctor Crap-A-Lot should be struck off.
7. FAKE VOMIT
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Speaking as connoisseurs, fake vomit used to be far more realistic than it is these days. Now it's all dayglo colours, with chunks of plastic and foam. In the 70s and 80s, the fake vomiteer could arm himself with a convincing-looking puddle that had been produced with care by artisans.
6. FAKE DOG POO
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Similarly, fake dog poo isn't what it once was. We don't know what joke manufacturers are feeding their fake dogs these days, but the resultant excreta doesn't really convince. Modern yoots, with their iPads and iWhatsits and their jibber and their jabber, don't know what they're missing. Plus, they probably all illegally download their fake dog poo.
5. FAKE CIGARETTES
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Fake cigarettes have never really worked. At the most basic level the fake fag would have some red foil at the tip which, if caught in the correct light, might've looked to an idiot like it was glowing. At the higher end of the market you could get fake cigarettes which emitted a cloud of talc as you puffed upon them. You know: just like real cigarettes don't.
4. NAIL THROUGH FINGER
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Yeah, well... how is any kid going to end up doing that? And then bandage it? The only guaranteed way of convincing your mother of a medical emergency was with fake blood - which always worked. Far be it for us to complain, once again,  that things were better in the old days, but you can't get proper runny fake blood anymore. It's all this blood gel stuff, which has the consistence of late-stage cold snot, and doesn't drip convincingly. How are you supposed to convince mama that you've got a nose bleed if it isn't running onto your best shirt?
3. SQUIRT RING
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"Look at this lovely gold signet ring I've just bought with my pocket money - look at it closer, more closely... look right at it. No - RIGHT AT IT UP CLOSE!" <SQUIRT> "Oh it missed. That's rubbish."
2. SNAPPY GUM
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This suffered the same problem as the Snake-in-a-Can in that it never came in realistic packaging. It might've resembled a packet of Wrigley's from a distance, but up close it was pretty apparent - from the way the snapping-stick stuck out, to the name of the brand (always something like "Snappo's Gum" or "Fingerbreakley's Gum", or something) - that accepting the offer was only going to result in the worst sort of pain: finger pain.
1. FLY IN ICECUBE
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Y'know what's better than getting a plastic ice cube with a plastic fly in it? Get a real fly, and freeze it in an ice cube. It's not difficult or expensive, and it's infinitely funnier. Plus, if your friend or relation gets a bad bowel disease from the fly, the joke could last for months.
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19 Comments
The best flatmate ever
28/9/2015 05:28:42 pm

I had some of these as a small child, but once I'd reached adulthood, I came up with numerous great ideas for practical jokes, all of which worked using real items:

* Take one of those silver foil strips which set off shop alarms, and make sure it has not been deactivated. Take your flatemate's trainer/shoe and slip it inside, under the sole. Larks - whose a thief!?

* If your flatemate wears glasses, take one of those Boots Opticians bottles of glasses cleaner spray, replace the contents with the liquid butter from a bottle of sprayable liquid butter (Lurpak's will do). Leave the Boots bottle next to a box of tissues in plain sight. Egads - my lenses!

* Hide a Senokot teabag inside your flatemate's big box of teabags. About 12 hours after drinking a cup of Senokot tea you'll usually have the explosive runs, given that it's a standard treatment for constipation. (You can also do this with the office supply of teabags!)

* Given that Senokot tea has no real flavour, attend a house party with your flatmate, and for alcoholic beverages, bring with you a big bowl/jug of punch, made from cooled Senokot tea (extra strong), and any mix of fruit flavouring syrup and booze (must be tasty!). Allow guests to enjoy it at their leisure. Make sure you don't drink any, and leave before the party is over. The next morning, the 6 to 8 flatmates who slept over that night will all have the explosive runs... But only one toilet!

* Get hold of a nugget of waxy brown "resin" as the kids call it. Just before your flatmate is about to leave to fly on holiday somewhere, take the nugget and gently rub it all over his suitcase. Be forceful to leave a light residue, but not strong enough to be overtly visible. Now when your flatmate is sitting at the airport, the sniffer dogs will be immediately drawn to it, and he'll be searched on suspicion of carrying said nuggets inside the case.

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Former flatmate of The best flatmate ever
28/9/2015 06:12:18 pm

You utter bastard...

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Matty
28/9/2015 06:09:35 pm

"At the higher end of the market you could get fake cigarettes which emitted a cloud of talc as you puffed upon them. You know: just like real cigarettes don't."

Wasn't it also necessary to blow into the cigarette to make the talc come out, because that's what smokers do - they stand there with their cheeks puffed out blowing down the fag.

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Chris link
28/9/2015 08:54:03 pm

This has just reminded me of those candy cigarettes you used to be able to get.

I imagine they're banned now.

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Mr Biffo
28/9/2015 08:58:53 pm

You could certainly still get them until relatively recently. They're "candy sticks" now, though.

Kelvin Green link
28/9/2015 09:13:31 pm

"a paper sticker of the sort never seen on a bar of soap"

Well, someone never had an aunt who thought she was posh and so only ever bought Imperial Leather. Obviously.

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Edward Gibbon
29/9/2015 11:41:46 am

When we were at primary school my brother put on of the fake dog poos in the swimming pool, and the next week in assembly they announced the pool was to be closed until further notice because they had found what was assumed to be a an infant's excreta floating majestically therein.

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Granthon L
29/9/2015 04:05:52 pm

The itching powder of my youth was ground rosehip seeds, which cause a right old "fidget in the gusset." And so easy to make your own!

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Mr Biffo
29/9/2015 05:37:51 pm

More practical joke-related anecdotage, please!

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Cthulhu Steev
29/9/2015 07:55:53 pm

I find rolled-out Soreen malt loaves make the best fake poo, and they are borderline unflushable, so you can catch loads of 'victims' at work in the old folk's home.

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Stay
29/9/2015 08:31:24 pm

Last year the wife and kids were in the hallway and I could feel the churn of something unholy in my bowels so I crashed down at the bottom of the stairs moaning "it hurts it hurts". The wife and kids all ran over to me and gave me a hug. Suckers. Then I unleashed a very impressive guff that topped the charts on volume, reverb, vibration, duration and smell. They were not happy.

I remembering seeing fart spray in a joke shop in Teignmouth when I was 9 or 10 during a holiday. I was very disappointed when it didn't make other people fart.

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Timothy Clay-Pole
29/9/2015 10:42:29 pm

As a youth, I learned the value of "work" in the local branch of a now defunct national retail chain, working Saturdays and some evenings after school.

Our workplace energies were largely directed towards japery, advanced stealth idleness, and devising ways to stitch each other up in the attention of our "Mr Mackay"-esque boss (Porridge, not South Park).

My happy tenure coincided with the technological arrival of those anti-theft UFO tags - the ones that helpfully permanently deform any item of clothing lighter than a pair of robust denims.

A couple of weeks after our beeping gates were installed, working a particularly entertaining 9:00 - 15:30 Saturday shift, I finished tagging up a large pile of items and was duly free to clock off. As I shoved the large crate of tags back into its shelf, I lifted a single UFO, almost as an afterthought, and trotted upstairs to the staff room, chuckling.

Collecting my own coat from the rack, I slipped the sizeable tag deep into the spacious pocket of its neighbour; a coat which I recognised as belonging to a very pleasant girl who'd actually started on the same day as me. She wasn't one of the black belt practical jokers, and this was hardly an imaginative prank, but I thought it would be moderately amusing - by the time they all finished work at 5:30 I'd be long gone. So the shrill beeping and consequent grumblings of Mackay, as I briefly but harmlessly delayed the close-up/go-home process that evening, seemed to at least have some "long fuse" artistry. "Ho ho!", I chuckled to myself as I skipped downstairs, before bidding my colleagues farewell and then forgetting about it all completely.

Next Saturday, I turned up for my 11:30 start, and from the moment I stepped in the shop I could feel that something was wrong. The atmosphere, usually ebullient, was strangely sombre. At the first opportunity, I asked a fellow junior drone what was going on. "Shit, didn't you hear what happened last week?" he whispered, glancing around furtively.

It turned out that post-close, as the late-shift staff had lined up for the cursory but routine "bag search" before leaving the shop, the alarm had indeed been triggered by the hidden UFO. Confusion had then ensued as our supervisor tried to determine the cause; the repeated group bag searchings and milling around near the detectors had triggered the alarm repeatedly, but unpredictably. Mackay, suspecting a genuine crime attempt, became increasingly irate, and refused to let anyone leave the shop until the thief was identified. Some considerable time later, after further fruitless bag searches, accusations, and angry shouted counter-arguments over "this ridiculous, clearly unreliable new system", they finally found the rogue disc in my colleague's pocket.

Surprisingly, after all the excitement, my colleague (and everyone else present) didn't particularly see any funny side to the now-wildly-misjudged event. In fact, not only was she unamused, she was positively upset - believing (perhaps not unreasonably) that someone had tried to frame her for theft, for some malicious, inexplicable and definitely undeserved reason. She therefore burst into tears, and had to be comforted by some of my more sensible, and emotionally wiser, slightly older colleagues.

As a result, my fellow drone explained, "she hasn't come into work today". And a couple of weeks after that, she telephoned in to say that she wouldn't be coming back at all, as she'd got a new Saturday job elsewhere - the unspoken implication being that it was somewhere where she wouldn't be framed, or wrongly accused of theft in front of everyone (it was better paid too, it turned out, thank God).

Obviously, I was utterly mortified as this story unfolded, and could only bring myself to stammer "Oh god... shit, that's awful", before running off, consumed with guilt, to hide in a darkened stock room for the rest of the day.

On the whole, I don't particularly recommend trying this one.


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Stay
29/9/2015 11:40:35 pm

On the plus side you did cause he to get a new job with better pay.

That reminds me some years ago when a mate in work spelt out "Mark Rocks" in the work kitchen in Blue Tac. Out of boredom waiting for the kettle to boil I changed it to "Mark Cocks". From my desk I overheard the bollocking he got from his manager for it but quite why she thought he would write that I cannot guess.

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(not) The best flatmate ever
30/9/2015 08:18:24 am

Epic. Though I had been hoping this story somehow ended up with: "And so we got married, and now have a regular chuckle about the time I hid the UFO in her pocket."

One which I had considered, but never carried out, is buying one of those rubber Freddy Kruger masks, and leaving it inside the toilet when I go to bed, so my flatmate gets a scary surprise during the 4am urination procedure. He mentioned being terrified of the films as a small child, and so my hope was to bring back those memories.

Unfortunately the masks are too pricey for that kind of "use once and dispose of" type jokes.

Crikey. We're a right bunch of sickos in this comments thread.

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'Hilarious' Dan
21/6/2016 11:20:31 am

Many years ago I used to manage a gift shop which sold, amongst reams of tat, many of these 'jokes' listed here.

How I used to laugh as a child came back to complain that his 50p prank had utterly failed. Then I'd sell him another.

However the one that truly worked were stink bombs. And more often than not the moment we'd sold some one would be hurled back into the shop gassing us out. Not that I'd complain, as it would be an excuse to stand outside having a fag.

On a side note we also sold 'bath bombs' those awful fizzy bath soap things. Many a cheeky lad would mistake them for sweets and steal them. Huge laughs on our part when they'd run back into the shop with soap foaming out their mouths.

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Monkey Head
25/10/2016 07:27:43 pm

A trick we had a lot of success with in work involved carefully cutting open a stink bomb and then pouring the contents into the shower gel that someone had left in the men's showers and which everyone seemed to use. When a certain boss who took himself very seriously indeed used it the smell was horrendous. What made it more funny was that everyone knew but no one said a thing and when he came straight up for a meeting with the whole workforce just sat there sniffing occasionally. Even years later the people who were there still laugh about it although i don't think anyone has ever told him.

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Windy Miller
7/11/2016 03:06:30 pm

I always remember my Uncle giving my Nan a Crap a Lot teabag.
She was rushed into hospital the next day to have her appendix removed.
How we all laughed.

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Elvo
7/8/2017 09:45:32 pm

I used stink bombs to clear the crowd around the Streetfighter 2 machine. Very effective, stopped people interrupting my game too.

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Abu nayeem link
2/4/2021 11:52:25 am

Lurpak is a Danish brand of butter owned by Arla Foods. It is sold in seventy five countries worldwide, and is best known for its distinctive silver packaging. Lurpak started in 1901, as a combination of several Danish dairy farmers to create a common brand for butter to increase sales. To put it simply, Lurpak is a pale-coloured lactic butter.

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