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Practical jokes can be funny, although, it must be said, rarely as funny as their instigators imagine. Anyone who has been to boarding school or been part of a big institution such as the armed forces is likely to have, at some point, been the butt of someone's gift for hilarious antics. Practical jokes do though have another, darker, side and there are many examples of them going wrong, sometimes to the point that no win, no fee lawyers have had to step in and get involved.
I should first say that it is hard for me to be impartial on the subject. I once had my football boots filled with shaving cream and sand, which, although unlikely to cause personal injury, was hugely inconvenient and contributed to me being substituted at halftime. I hated being the subject of my teammates' fun and, I'm afraid to say, showed very little ability to laugh at myself. This practical joke though looks very tame when compared to some of the ones that pass through no win, no fee lawyer offices across the world.
The USA, it seems, is the world headquarters for practical wise-crackers. One common mistake practical jokers make over there is to bring their antics into the workplace. One notable example is that of a Colorado man who suffered severe spinal injuries when his colleagues surprised then bound him with rope before dropping him from height into a cold bath. It was meant to be the 62-year-old's last ever day in the workplace, but the joke left him so badly injured that his years of daydreaming about a retirement spent on the golf course dissipated in one painful and icy moment. And, although he won compensation from his employers for the incident - they had tacitly agreed to the stunt - he will never recover his pre-accident health.
Practical jokes in the workplace also appear to pretty popular with the Aussies. You would think that even the bluntest tool would be able to tell you that four-wheel-drives and practical jokes shouldn't mix. This however, was learnt the hard way by a 23-year-old Australian farm worker who was sentenced to a prison-term for killing a farmer when he drove a 4x4 through the wall of a shed in order to earn a few cheap laughs. It is understood that the deceased man's family also secured compensation for this reckless act.
School-based practical jokes are probably the ones most of us will be familiar with. They can range from old slapstick classics, like the deftly removed or collapsible chair, to the more macabre dissected-frog-in-the-bag variety.
School pranks can be fatal too, as children's naivety can sometimes lead to very ill-considered stunts. For example, in Florida in the late 90s a few students thought it would be hilarious to remove the stop sign from a nearby intersection. As a result, two people died in a fatal car crash.
However much we may all love a laugh, it doesn't take a no win, no fee lawyer to figure out that silly or surreal practical jokes can be funny, while those that are downright dangerous are just a needless risking of lives.
