Apparently, our generation is lazy. Or at least too serious to expend precious brain cells making ha-has anymore.

A columnist at LSU, Caitlyn Scott, bemoans our growing laziness, but not because of decreased productivity or initiative. No, instead — in “Rickrolling shows laziness of generation” — she writes that the laziness problem is actually most easily illustrated by this no-longer-new internet meme:

The rickrolling phenomenon leaves me with one burning question: Is this the direction practical jokes are headed?… Will dipping a sleeping friend’s hand into lukewarm water no longer be the established way to prank?

Heaven forbid we put the old hand-in-warm-water prank to rest. Nothing funnier than a dampened bed sheet!

(For the uninitiated: rickrolling involves misleading people to the YouTube video of the 1987 Rick Astley hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up,” by disguising the link as something relevant. How’d I do?)

Granted, rickrolling takes much of the creativity and effort out of pranks, but good old-fashioned pranking is still alive and well — especially among students.

Sure, the great Penn Obama hoax of 2008 was better than your average rickroll, but that ranks pretty low on any list of decent college pranks.

The famous MIT hacks are certainly nothing to sneeze at, but even those have been topped.

Way back in 1930, two Cornell students took it to a whole new level by getting the Vice President of the United States caught up in their fantastically elaborate stunt.

They sent out letters to prominent politicians requesting statements honoring “Hugo Norris Frye, father of the Republican party.” The catch being, of course, that Frye was completely made up:

In response, they receive[d] several letters of glowing praise for Frye — including one from the Vice President of the United States, Charles Curtis — which they read aloud to an amused crowd at their banquet. It would have been harmless enough, but when the story landed on the front page of The New York World, the victims were exposed — and they weren’t laughing.

Zing! If only someone could pull off a prank like that on Cheney.

So are all the good pranks behind us, with nothing but a bleak rickrollin’ future ahead?

Hardly.

Hats off to these enterprising Oregon high school students, who managed to steal school letterhead, obtain the school mailing list, and send out remarkably coherent letters to the parents of every senior. The letters included plenty of year-end practical advice, like:

Consider opening your home as a safe, secure place for students to have fun after the [prom]. If you provide the alcohol, you can have peace of mind knowing they did not acquire it illegally.

The pranksters also optimistically included with the letter a condom — one for every senior.

The best part of this prank? Most of the suggestions from the poseurs are far more reasonable than the actual hare-brained advice many clueless parents follow on raising teenagers.

So, dear Quakers: The year is not over yet. In the midst of all this packing and finals-taking, can’t you spare some brain cells to dream up a real prank?

No? Fine. Then just click here, and have a great summer.

Tags: never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, not politics, pranks, rickroll

This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Higher Education, Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.