What is history's greatest prank? There's the intimate—perching a bucket of water over the door. And the grandly ambitious—say, humiliating an entire navy. These are some good pranks indeed. But history's greatest prank was something much stranger... and much darker. Read a full transcript of this episode on the Something True website. Follow Something true on Twitter @atruepodcast. (Or just follow Duncan and Alex.) Music on this week’s episode: Jahzzar – Roads that Burned our Boots Jahzzar – Railroad’s Whiskey Co Josh Woodward – Water in the Creek Alialujah Choir – After All Abunai! – Dreaming of Light Josh Woodward – Crazy Glue (All tracks have been modified for the podcast)
The prank.
For years, the world has had a love affair with the prank.
Everybody, from children to the ancient, appreciates a good natured laugh at the expense of another.
Wikipedia defines the prank as redirecting to practical joke, but we know them by many names, a trick, a jape, a hijink, a put on.
There have been countless pranks played in the history of human civilization, but how many of those could honestly be claimed to be great pranks, so daring, so humorous, that they render all other pranks ever pulled about as far funny as a rat relieving itself on the graves of our city fathers?
You're listening to something true stories from the footnotes of history, written by Duncan Fife and read by Alex Ashby.
This week's episode class clowns.
When you think of modern pranksters, one of the first names that comes to mind must surely be George Clooney, who loves to humiliate his fellow actors.
On the set of Ocean's eleven, for example, Clooney put a bucket of water over the doorway of his co star Julia Roberts hotel room, which accidentally soaked a hotel Bellman instead, who had to laugh and say, this is good.
I like this.
Clooney, however, is far from the only celebrity prankster.
Nearly a century earlier, the author Virginia Woolf once teamed up with her brother Adrian to play a practical joke so outlandish it became headline news.
Adrian Stephen was a student at Cambridge and, like his sister, belonged to the Bloomsbury group, a highly influential literary society.
Adrian loved to deceive others with a fervor Clooney could never hope to match.
In the early 19 hundreds, he pitched an extremely ambitious prank, taking control of a german army battalion and making them march across the border into France, sparking international outrage and delight.
His idea was unfortunately shot down, presumably on the grounds that people would find it too funny.
But in February 1910, Adrian, Virginia and four of their Bloomsbury friends went ahead with something almost as a prank on the Royal Navy.
The Navys prize flagship, the HMS Dreadnought, was moored in Dorset, and the gang sent a telegraph informing them to expect an official visit from six princes of Abyssinia.
And the navy bought it.
So Virginia and the rest got into costume, donning turbans, fake beards, and vast, vast amounts of blackface.