Now imagine trying to do twenty of these pranks simultaneously, and you'll see why my life was a blur of chaos for six months. I was making daily trips to the post office for my prank letters, and waking up at 6:00 am to prank phone call the Queen. I was really killing myself (pun intended) to make every prank hilariously successful.
As I mentioned, a lot of my stunts don't pan out. I really wanted a prank against the medical industry, for instance, and I spent months trying to pull off a prank I called "HMO-No!" The premise was that I was sick of my HMO asking me to fill out unnecessary paperwork, so I began creating ridiculous fake paperwork of my own, then sending it in to see if I could waste some of their time for a change. The paperwork kept getting more and more bizarre, but I kept sending it to them, insisting that my doctor required them to fill it out before he'd see me. I spent the better part of a year on this prank, but when I finally read over the chapter, I realized the flow of correspondence was confusing, and it wasn't particularly funny. Hours of toil, down the drain. I should have called it "HMO-Crap."
Many of the pranks required refining as I went along. The United Nations prank, for instance, went so well that I had to stage a quick "elimination round" at the end, as I feared I could keep stringing along the ambassadors forever. That's a nice problem to have.
And some of the pranks just came together far better than I could have planned. The infamous "Celebrity Sincerity Test" is a great example, where this gift (albeit an extremely frightening gift) just arrived out of the blue. The Michael Jackson and Ashton Kutcher pranks, both stunts where I personally had a lot of money on the line, both turned out brilliantly. I am blessed with a weird kind of luck when it comes to these pranks, which I can't explain. I'm just thankful when it happens.
Many of my pranks were executed slowly, by U.S. mail, over a period of months. But the real-time pranks, like cornering Bill Gates and then kissing his nipple, are just the most exciting things you can possibly imagine. I'm a bit of a thrill-seeker, and the moments just before we begin to put a prank into play are deliciously heady: they're moments of perfect tension, like an arrow strung taut on its bow, just before being shot into the unknown. I can't tell you how much I both love and hate that feeling.
I still remember hiding in the stairwell at Comedy Central, many years ago, with my collaborator and cameraman Al Natanagara. We were shooting our guerilla comedy show Computer Stew, and preparing a prank where I would come in to the Comedy Central offices, dressed like a robot from the future. The robot -- really just me covered in several layers of aluminum foil -- was going to try to pitch Comedy Central executives a new show about a robot from the future. We didn't have permission to be at Comedy Central, and in fact had snuck past the security guards to get in. Now we were cowering in the stairwell, trying to wrap several boxes of foil around my body, as quietly as possible. It was absolutely insane, but those moments just before we went into the lobby and they immediately called the police were priceless.
While you're in the middle of a real-time prank, it's even better. It's the ultimate improvisational comedy, because it's real. You're not on a stage, asking the audience for suggestions; the world is your stage. Your mind is racing, you're frantically trying to plan your next move. You've planned every detail, and yet you can't plan every detail, so now you're deep in the middle of it, trying to find your way out. Our best pranks are like a caper, a beautiful multilayered heist. They're like robbing a bank, except no one gets hurt, no laws get broken, and everyone laughs in the end. It's the legal version of robbing a bank.
So I spent almost a year on the book, trying to build up enough funny prank material, before I really began to sit down and write. And that's when things really got fun.
Next: Write Right!