Punk'd by Pranksters

Dr. Larry Ginsberg vowed revenge. More than 20 years earlier, his best friend, Randy Gottlieb, had played a prank by sneaking a tongue sandwich into the trunk of Ginsberg’s car. The sandwich went rancid over several days.

“You can’t lay down when someone plays a prank on you,” said Ginsberg, 54, a professor of diagnostic radiology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “If it was something minor, I could probably let it slide. But the smell in my car was so foul.”

The two men had been best friends since attending the State University of New York at Stony Brook together, and Gottlieb had consistently gotten the better of him in pranks. But Ginsberg was determined.

He mailed a fish fillet to Gottlieb’s biopharmaceutical-business office and then left, satisfied with his devious effort, on a week-long cruise.

But when he got home, it was his own apartment that reeked. Gottlieb had sent back the fish, and Ginsberg’s superintendent had put it in the apartment. Ginsberg had turned up the thermostat in his apartment while he was gone, and the fish chunk had been rotting there for five days.

“This piece of fish smelled far worse than the sandwich ever did,” Ginsberg remembers. “I nearly died walking in.”

Outwitting someone or laying a trap for the unsuspecting is appealing – sadistic and cruel perhaps, but often hilarious, at least for the trap setter. Our society has even dedicated April 1 to it.

The April Fools’ Day prank played on one Houston doctor left him shaking and teary-eyed.

He had received a jury summons but had thrown it out so as not to miss work. As he had explained to co-workers, “They can’t prove you got it.” About a month later, a police officer came to his office and told him he knew the doctor had ignored a jury summons.

The officer handcuffed him and walked him down the hall, past his patients. At the end of the hall, they were met by his laughing partner and co-workers. The officer had been there for an appointment with the partner, who’d put him up to the prank.

“It took me all day to get over it,” the victim said.

And he didn’t forget.

The next year, he wrote a letter from a fictitious Austin law firm that informed his partner that several of her patients had complained about fraudulent coding to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services. If they could document fraud, the letter said, she would be arrested. He FedExed the letter overnight to give it more authenticity and timed it so that his partner would get it March 30.

His partner received the letter and took it to the office manager’s office. They closed the door and called their attorney and their coding service. “They hadn’t frauded…, but when you’re dealing with the government, it’s like having a tax audit,” the doctor said. “They were freaking out.”

He then walked into their office and started laughing. The white-faced partner and office manager were visibly relieved, and the office manager gave him a hug and said, “Oh, thank God.”

Not all pranks are at the expense of someone. Carol Lester’s are fun improvisations with strangers.

After watching public pranks put on by New York City’s Improv Everywhere, famous for choreographing public scenes such as freezing in place on Grand Central Station, she wanted to do something similar.

So Lester started the Neartown Pranksters.

Last summer, they played their first prank, a surprise birthday party for a stranger at The Ginger Man. They sat down at his table, wished him happy birthday, gave him cards and a gift card, put on a birthday hat, and bought drinks.

The man was tentative – it wasn’t his birthday. Lester told him to go with it, and he did.

At this year’s Houston marathon, the pranksters set up a series of signs to encourage runners to give a high five to Tom King, who, like many in the 30- to 40-strong troupe, is a member of the West University Rotary Club.

Lester does individual pranks too. Once, she took a lifelike doll to a high school soccer match and told everybody she was watching it for a friend. Then, when the warming-up players ran near her, she flung the doll toward them, causing shocked panic.

“It seems like the young people have all the fun,” Lester said. “I’m in my 50s, and I’m just looking to have fun like we did when we were younger.”