Playing the Fool: Vegas comics have turned pranks into an art form

Tuesday, April 1, 2003 | 8:25 a.m.

They called it "Labscam."

Several years ago a group of colleagues at Bell Labs in New Jersey told their boss Arno Penzias a 1978 Nobel Prize in physics honoree that they were working on a highly advanced voice recognition system.

The computer program was so cutting edge it could recognize voices, understand words, sort them and participate in dialogue. To demonstrate its high-tech brilliance, Penzias was asked to select from a list of celebrities whom he could "interview" solely by using video clips of their appearances on "The Late Night With David Letterman."

What Penzias didn't know is that the list had been designed so magicians Penn and Teller would be the automatic selections. Penzias selected the duo and began the interview.

Remarkably, the computer returned the correct (and semi-correct) video clips as answers to Penzias' questions.

"He was sitting there saying, 'This is amazing, this is just amazing,'" Penn Jillette said during a recent phone interview. "The way we scammed him is, we were in the other room."

It was true. The Nobel Laureate, who co-discovered cosmic microwave background radiation, was being duped by his colleagues in a practical joke several weeks in the making.

From a nearby room Penn and Teller were answering Penzias' questions and changing their hairstyles, clothes and positions to enhance the effect. Meanwhile a handful of colleagues were altering the audio and decaying the video before it reached Penzias.

Finally, when Penn and Teller pretended to be walking (on video) into the hallway of the "Late Night With David Letterman" show, they walked in on Penzias to reveal the prank.

"There was this huge pause," Jillette said. "He was looking at the computer screen, looking at us, looking at the computer screen, looking at us. You see this massive mind try to put everything together.

"In the career of Penn and Teller, it may very well be one of the things we're most proud of."

And Penzias?

He stated at the end of the video that the practical joke was, "a bigger thrill than winning the Nobel Prize," Jillette said.

"The feeling of having your whole paradigm shift is mind blowing. It was a big love letter ... A practical joke that's done properly should make the person it has been done to very happy."

Practical approach

On this annual celebration of tomfoolery, jokesters abound. A joy of the "gotcha" reigns above all else.

And any serious prankster will tell you, pulling off a practical joke is sheer pleasure. "I live for it," said Amazing Johnathan, a local magician and notorious practical joker. "I love that kind of stuff. I love to see people's reactions. If somebody says, 'I'm going to take a shower,' I am behind the door ready to jump out and scare 'em." Though his license plate reads "PRANKSTER" and his friends know to be wary of him at all times, Johnathan manages to pull off the unimaginable.

"Amazing Johnathan knows exactly where my kryptonite is and his cruelty, as far as I know, is unbounded," Jillette said. "It's quite an art form."

It's an art form that he's been perfecting since childhood. Growing up in Michigan, Johnathan said he would dump buckets of water down the laundry chute anytime he heard his mother rounding up the clothes.

Johnathan once convinced a friend to spend four hours digging for phony buried treasure and another to drive to the Nevada/California border to pick up a phony rare poster. He had another friend's car painted when the friend sent it off to be washed.

Another time Johnathan blindfolded a friend and told him he was taking him to a really nice restaurant as a surprise.

After driving for 2 1/2 hours, yet never leaving the neighborhood, Johathan pulled up back at his friend's house, led him inside where a phony hostess greeted them and other assistants made clanking noises as if it were a restaurant.

When the blindfold was removed, the bewildered friend realized he was inside his own home.

"When you do something like that, they get so mad," Johnathan said. "But afterward there's so many great stories ... I actually got somebody to fly to another city to do a fake show for a funeral."

The funeral was supposedly held for a child who recently died. The child's dying wish was for a photo of the entertainer. The entertainer, however, had been on vacation. By the time he got the e-mail and responded, it was too late.

When he learned that the child had wanted him to perform at his funeral, he agreed. It wasn't until he got off the plane in Pittsburgh (where nobody was waiting for him) that he realized he had been duped and had to fly back home.

Of course, Johnathan picked up the tab.

"I will pay a lot of money for a practical joke," Johnathan said.

Why?

"It's like chess; it keeps you sharp," he said. "You have to constantly be second guessing human nature. I'm really good at predicting how people think and where they're going to go. I just think in terms of chess: If I make this move, he'll make this move.

"They do suspect it a lot of times. They will go check it out, but I will get there one step faster."

Confessions of a King

Johnathan's ongoing mischief with fellow pranksters Penn and Teller is common talk in this town of magicians, tricksters and comedians. And both acts have written books on practical jokes.

But they'll tell you that today is one day that many of the pros set aside their pranks.

"It's a day for amateurs," Jillete said. "April Fools is a time for people who have been following the rules of truth in society. They have that one day where the proscenium is put around the 'truth.' "

Comic magician Mac King, who has also written a book on tricks and pranks, says the key to a good practical joke is to "make sure you know who you're doing it on."

"It's not funny if people know you can't take it either," King said.

King's list of victims can be traced to his childhood in Kentucky, when he said he became "enamored" with the bug-in-the-ice-cube gag.

As time went on King's pranks became more elaborate. By the time he was in college in Minnesota, King was using winter's sub-zero temperatures to freeze puddles of urine on pizza pans. The frozen puddles would later be slid under the doors of dorm rooms. Come morning, dormmates would awake to the head-scratching mystery.

King once emptied tea from a tea bag, filled the bag with powdered Kool-Aid and discreetly slipped it into someone's swimming suit. Earlier the crowd of swimmers had been told that there was a new chemical in the pool that detects urine by turning the infected water purple.

"That one works great in Las Vegas because everyone has a swimming pool," King said.

The pranks and gags King can't bring to his afternoon show, "The Mac King Comedy Magic Show," he details in "Tricks With Your Head," a book he co-wrote with Mark Levy, contributing editor at Magic magazine.

Taking a more wholesome approach to gags than his colleagues, King's book is designed to humor, inspire and instruct a potential joker (or one who likes to live vicariously through other jokers). It is an elaborately detailed "how-to" in the world of pranks, tricks and gags.

In between the self-inflicted "Thumb through ear," "French fry up nose" and "Eating a flame" are golden opportunities to dupe, disgust or displease your neighbor, co-worker or family member.

Among them is "Cat chiropractor," a very carefully animated pretend neck adjustment applied to a cat accompanied by a simulated cracking sound created by a plastic cup or water bottle under the arm or dried macaroni in the mouth.

There is also "Funnel in Pants": Tell a friend to stick a funnel in his pants, place a quarter on his forehead and attempt to drop the quarter into the funnel. While not looking pour liquid into funnel."

"The funnel in the pants, that's great," King said. "Especially for kids."

Of practical joking, King said, "It used to be a big deal. One of the hard things in this world is keeping a secret.

"It's really hard to think of an idea, carry it out and fool someone. If you can, hooray.

"But part of the practical joker is you're also looking for a little attention, and I got a show here that I do every day, so my attention quota fills up.

However, he added, "I think it will start to be part of my life again. I have a 2 1/2-year-old daughter."