The anatomy of a failed practical joke

Sometimes in life you get an idea that you think is a winner. (Like deep-fried butter.) You share it with your friends and they think it is a winner. You execute the idea and then you don’t get a positive reaction at all, including from your friends that thought it was a winner. It represents a failure of not only the idea but your sense of humor. This is what happened to me when I thought I deployed the greatest practical joke in the history of mankind. (Next to the career of Brendan Fraser.) Instead of it making a room full of people laugh it blew up in my face and ended up with a room full of silent people. Let me take the time to explain the anatomy of the practical joke.

About six months ago my friend broke up with his girlfriend that he had been living with. I was back home in Western, NY visiting my friends and at our normal bar, the Vital Spot. After a night of drinking my friend’s brother had to empty the back of his truck before driving all of us drunkards home. The contents of the truck were the left over remnants of his brother’s girlfriend belongings from their house. Everything was thrown in the dumpster including a life sized self-portrait of the ex girlfriend, which I noticed getting tossed in with rest of the clutter and junk.

Now I am an asshole. And in my drunken mind I thought that the life sized portrait had value. There were many things I could do with it including:

-Putting it on the back of my bathroom door for masturbation material.

-I could reenact the painting scene from Titanic without having to actually draw or paint anything.

-Pearl necklace target practice.

-I could put it at my kitchen table and feel like I have someone to talk to when I eat breakfast, fulfilling my otherwise empty life.

Or… I could wait for our fantasy football draft, cover the picture like they did in the movie “Major League” and strip off pieces each time my friend and I had a draft pick. Removing the pieces of “clothing” would end up revealing crudely written messages on her body and a hidden fleshlight vagina for the final punch. The few people that knew about it thought it was a winner.

There were some concerns brought up over this joke. Would it be too personal? Over that six-month period my friend got a new girlfriend, so it wouldn’t really pouring salt into a wound. It looked liked all systems were go and the one or two people that knew about this sat on it for months. In fact I even forgot that I pulled it out of the dumpster and stashed it at my friends house until 6 weeks before the draft when I came back to visit.

When the time came to put all this together I approached it like the greatest arts and craft project of my life. I had to figure out how to not only stand up the picture but how to support a giant plastic flashlight that had a vagina at the end of it. I finished it the night before the draft and was giddy with the reaction this was going to get. In my mind I figured I would get the laugh and the person that we were pulling the practical joke on would bash it into pieces. We all would laugh and move on with our lives. Perhaps threats of bodily harm would be tossed about. How wrong was I?

The next day when I revealed it at the draft the room fell silent. The victim just looked at it and didn’t say anything. He gave me a star of death and said, “classless”. To say it didn’t go over well would be an understatement. The entire room had that awkward feeling you get when a couple gets in a fight with each other in a confined space where you have to spend the next few hours with them… Epic FAIL.

I took the picture down when we took a break at the draft, broke it in two to get it out of the building as fast as possible… I threw away the structure and all I was left with was a fleshlight for my trouble.

Maybe that isn’t a bad thing?