Imagine coming home after a long, wearisome night of cramming at Knight Library. Your mind is a muddled pulp of physics equations and Shakespearean sonnets. You head to the bathroom for a hot, relaxing shower. While you’re washing off a day’s worth of study stench, your peace is interrupted by a power failure. You finish up, cursing, and stumble in the dark for the door. That’s when your bare, dripping feet step on upturned bottle caps. Your pain is considerable.
So goes prank No. 45, “Lights out in Chinatown,” in “Prank University,” an illustrated book that gives “the ultimate guide to college’s greatest tradition.” The book’s author, John Austin, takes pranking to a level the boys of “Jackass” and “Punk’d” would be proud of. Austin meticulously illustrated 100 pranks and labeled them with icons, including a movie camera if the prank’s effects are too good not to film, a sun or moon for the proper time of day, a five-pointed star if the prank could result in “fine or time,” and a one-through-five rating of the prank’s difficulty.
While the pranks can be a little cruel (they are pranks, after all), “There’s nothing really malicious in there,” said Austin. “If you can’t terrorize your friends, who can you terrorize?”
Austin, 28, lived with a group of guys while attending the University of Wisconsin. While there, he and his roommates engaged in some territorial disputes – usually involving things along the line of beer pilfering – that ended up in what would come to be more than 75 percent of the pranks in the book, Austin said. His favorites include the “Dixie Surprise,” filling Dixie cups with water and covering the whole of someone’s floor with them, and “Rain Mâché,” placing unfolded newspaper that’s been soaked in water on someone’s car – “The real kick in the balls is when the sun rises the next morning,” it says in the book.
Austin is confident that no serious, lasting injuries will occur from using the book, although a friend of his from college claims otherwise. “I did the firecracker under the stove prank to my hungover friend one morning,” Austin said, laughing. “And he said his ears are still ringing, and he’s going to sue me someday.”
Austin, a designer for Hasbro who’s worked on such toys as the forthcoming Spider-Man 3 action figures, came up with the idea when he was talking about college days with his coworkers. “I was saying, ‘Yeah, I did that and I did that,’ and I’m like, man, I did a crapload, and I thought it would be really cool to turn it into a book.”
Each prank takes up two pages: one for a paragraph description, the other for the accompanying illustration. Drawn full of detail in Adobe Illustrator, the pictures help explain the pranks nicely.
While the book would be an amusing coffee table read for most
college students, it definitely has its target audience.
“It’s a great freshman book,” Austin said. “Or for someone living with a bunch of guys.”
The book isn’t something readers are supposed to pick up and read cover-to-cover, Austin said. “You can pick it up for a quick read, skipping ahead to the pranks that look interesting.”
For more information, go to www.prankuniversity.com. The site has an animated video of a prank and an area for pranksters to submit their best ideas on ways to terrorize their friends.
And after committing any pranks, Austin said, “It’s run-as-fast-as-you-can.”
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