Imitation, as they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. Real veterans were outraged and the group was denounced by Congress. They even had their own salute: an outstretched arm similar to the Nazi Party, except with the palm turned up, ready for a handout. Overnight, Veterans of Future Wars parties sprang up on campuses all over the country. Thus, as future veterans, they deserved their bonuses up front while they were still able to enjoy them. In 1936, some prophetic Princeton guys, disgusted by bonuses being granted to veterans of World War I, reasoned that the odds were quite strong that sooner or later they too would be called to war. The New York Times got ahold of it and the prank swept the country.Īh, political humor. Even the vice president at the time congratulated them. “It is a pleasure to testify to the career of that sturdy patriot who first planted the ideals of our party in this region of the country,” the Secretary of Labor wrote. None could attend, but their glowing remarks were read aloud at the banquet by gleeful students. Frye out of thin air as “the father of the Republican party” and invited prominent GOPers to attend the banquet for his 150th birthday. When students at Cornell’s campus paper needed an angle for their second annual banquet, they landed on the idea of embarrassing gullible politicians for a few laughs. At halftime, they were treated to the surprise of a carefully choreographed flip-card show that concluded with Washington students unwittingly displaying signs that formed the word “CALTECH.” Angered over their continued exclusion from the Rose Bowl proceedings, Caltech students had spent weeks creating 2,232 replacement flip cards. At the 1961 Rose Bowl game, Minnesota squared off against Washington in front of 100,000 stadium fans and millions more watching NBC’s broadcast of the game. It’s a little tame by today’s standards, but this one’s in the pantheon of legendary college pranks. Fifty years later, a group of engineering students came forward and explained how they did it with three groups using winches, ropes, and pulleys. Police and firemen had to disassemble it to get it off the roof. Nothing is better than pulling off a prank that makes people say, “How the heck did they do that?” For half a century that’s what people in Cambridge were saying after someone parked an Austin Seven on the roof of Cambridge University’s Senate House in 1958. Gullible folks at the Humane Society bit, and bit hard, hard enough that the feds got involved and exposed the hoax. The site featured outrageous photos of a person supposedly using a shoehorn to stuff one of the cats in the “insertion process,” and an uncomfortable looking kitty pressed up against the glass. In 2000, a website appeared claiming to sell kittens sealed into glass jars in order to permanently make them the shape of the container. Amazingly, Smith then proceeded to enter Burdell in all his classes and do all his homework and tests twice, changing them slightly, to serve as Burdell’s “work.” Thus began the legend of the “man” who has since received every undergraduate degree at Tech, served in World War II, worked at Mad Magazine, and had a Tech school store named after him.īeware when MIT students get bored. In 1927, when precocious student Ed Smith received two enrollment forms for Georgia Tech, he decided to enroll the imaginary George P. When your prank becomes a running joke at the school for nearly 100 years, you know it’s legendary. If you want it badly enough, you can make fools of us all. It doesn’t matter that you’re not drunk, responsibility-free, and reckless. But don’t we deserve a better class of jokester? Is it too much to ask for a little thought and effort? Consider these legendary pranks by college kids as inspiration, and be like them. Every year on the first of April you’ll see coffee cups glued to car roofs and Facebook statuses claiming surprise marriages.
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