Rebecca Barry: Dreaming up pranks is a fool's errand

Memo to every April Fool's Day fan: You're not a comedian, you're a local version of David Brent. Photo / Bay of Plenty Times

Pranks are dangerous and mustn't be tolerated.

Promoting them, writing about them, reading about them. You'll end up alone, in court or wearing a coffee poncho hiffed by a co-worker who's been slapped 17 times before he realises the post-it note is stuck to his boss' back.

Or told, as a joke, he's been fired. Or that the Government is considering hacking into the side of Great Barrier. Oh, wait. That's actually happening.

If you're lucky you'll end up with mere skin grafts, like the house husband whose friends thought it would be funny to phone him while he was doing the housework.

So the urban myth goes, the guy got confused while pressing his slacks and answered the iron.

With April Fools two days away, we have just hours to hide from such vile pranksters, who spend the morning chortling like David Brent, unable to contain themselves.

Or you could become one yourself, videoing the occasion for YouTube.

The real reasons for April Fools are contradictory to their origins, when the lighthearted larking about was a way to herald in the spring.

For us, April marks the start of a depressing slide into winter.

As T.S. Eliot wrote, "April is the cruellest month". And he lived in the Northern Hemisphere. He must have been talking about April Fools.

It appears this half-day of tomfoolery has either fallen out of fashion or been relegated to the nostalgia cupboard where we keep the whoopee cushions.

Short-sheeting the bed used to be the height of hilarity in my childhood; other Gen Y-ers report (while barely able to breathe they are so overcome with their comedic talents) leaving a message for dad to call Mr Lion alongside a number for the zoo, putting a fake dog poo in teacher's drink and bursting out of an unplugged fridge in the middle of a particularly solemn school assembly.

Actually I saw that one and it was pretty funny.

Then there was all that prankstervision, first with Candid Camera, then Jackass and Punk'd, shows which, like Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross' phone call to Andrew Sachs, often put the "rank" in "prank".

They used to be done with style. In 1938 Orson Welles' War of the Worlds was broadcast as a news bulletin, famously leading to thousands of listeners thinking Martians had landed on Earth.

In 1957 the BBC fooled as many with a spoof documentary showing spaghetti trees being harvested in Switzerland.

Anyone who has seen Peter Jackson's Forgotten Silver will likely have been walked down the garden path for much of the film.

My personal favourite during the 90s was a DIY scheme to trick friends' love interests into spilling their most personal thoughts.

This would involve ringing the adolescent's home number (remember those days?) and asking to speak to the male of the household of a certain age.

The speaker would then purport to come from an Australian women's magazine and claim to be doing a survey on love, sex and relationships - if I really got going I'd convince even myself that the issue was actually going to be published "so make sure you keep an eye out for our special sealed section!" Said in a fake Sydney accent.

Unethical, illegal, highly inadvisable. But quite powerful.

The next few minutes involved the not-so-private investigator asking many intimate questions about the innocent subject's likes, dislikes and romantic conquests.

These answers would then be disseminated to the female party who had ordered the information, and anyone else interested in whether or not this guy preferred blonds or brunettes.

Another poor idea I do not wish to write about was to prank someone for no other reason than I was bored and it sounded fun but almost caused the victim to lose her mind.

This involved constructing a false email address which then spewed nonsense from a made-up man asking if she remembered "that party in Mt Eden where we bonded over our passion for macrame".

Armed with secretly acquired information (gym, favourite bands, address of old flat), the prankster would then drop hints to make her seriously question if he was in fact, there.

Unable to fathom who this person could be, she couldn't resist responding with a few questions of her own. As the emailing grew in intensity and frequency, so would the details. Did she not remember the man's frog fetish?

This was a multiple-date prank that should have been left to April 1. Because it didn't go down so pretty, even in the two-way world of email.

To quote a wise person, pranks are dangerous and mustn't be tolerated. Do not even read about them.