If students saw any questionable event fliers or new clubs last year, perhaps the joke’s on them.
Professor Beauvais Lyons’ freshman seminar 129 course, entering its third semester, stages several organized pranks across campus over the course of a semester.
“It’s hard to know what the feedback is, but it sounds like setting off a harmless think bomb because you leave it up and you go, and it’s interesting whether people think it’s real,” Lyons said.
The class analyzes the prank, and Lyons said it plays into the college experience.
“Part of the college experience is exposing yourself to other ways of thinking and knowing about the world, so maybe the prank is rupturing what we think is normal or status quo,” he said.
But it’s not all just gags. The class also looks into the ethics of the prank, and what is harmless fun and what is not.
“18- or 19-year-old students may have one set of sensibilities that may be different from me in my early 50s, but it is interesting to play with what we consider to be normative activities,” he said.
One part of the class is meeting with a police officer to discuss pranks.
“The UT police has been dealing with pranks for decades, right?” Lyons said. “So what may their perspective of prankings be? Their primary concern is a safe campus.”
One rule for the prank class was not having any hoaxes involving firearms, broken glass or other violent material.
“You can’t be a total anarchist,” he said.
Lyons’ view of what is an ethical prank fits exactly with the UT Police Department’s view of pranks.
UTPD Capt. Jeff Severs said pranks were fine as long as they’re safe and don’t jeopardize anybody’s safety.
“Anything that would be considered a threat or impact the university’s daily operations would be dealt with appropriately,” Severs said.
But the pranks in Lyons’ class are a far cry from such dark humor.
The class is broken up into five assignments.
The first assignment is writing a prank letter to a company, corporation or government agency, Lyons said.
One student last year wrote a letter to Hallmark cards saying she was a devoted Hallmark card customer, but what she really needed was a card to help her break up with her boyfriend.
“Someone else wrote a letter to the Iron Maiden fan club, claiming to be a devoted Iron Maiden fan, but what they were really looking for was the ideal Iron Maiden iron maiden — yes, the medieval torture device,” Lyons said. “Not that they would use it as a torture device, but they wanted it with an Iron Maiden logo.”
The second assignment involved group improv. Last year the class went to an intramural softball game and cheered for what looked like the eventual losing team.
A third project involved annotated bibliographies from the Journal of Irreproducible Results — a 50-year-old journal full of fake academic papers.
But the campus community at large has the greatest chance of witnessing the fourth and last assignment of the semester.
Assignment No. 4 involves students putting up 20 copies of a fake flier for a new club or event.
Past examples include promoting a found left shoe, announcing a party taking place at a fictitious fraternity and advertising a $10 sale for a History of Rock textbook that either does not exist or is not for sale.
One flier advertised trying to get together the largest group of people eating Cheetos.
But coming up with the ideas for fliers is just the beginning.
“It’s one thing to make the fliers,” Lyons said. “It’s as much or more work to put them up.”
Students would gather the fliers, collate them and then two or three students would attack putting fliers up at the Hill, others would do certain dorms and still others would do the Humanities building and surrounding area.
Then there’s the fifth assignment, which was for the class to create a fictitious university organization.
Last year, the pranks class chose a Urine Drinking Club.
The club had two separate days — one at Presidential Courtyard and one at the Pedestrian Mall — where the “Urine Drinking Club” offered samples of urine to try.
Urine drinking actually has a real background, at least according to Wikipedia. Called uraphagia, there’s a movement that says it has medicinal value, as well as a place in history.
With the Wikipedia page as its main source of research, the Urine Drinking Club set up an information table touching such topics as urine drinking and The Bible and the idea that Mahatma Gandhi was a urine drinker.
“People were walking by, and we’d say, ‘Would you like a refreshing glass of urine?’” Lyons said.
Believe it or not, some passersby answered that question with a “yes.”
“People would come up and say, ‘Wow, this tastes a lot like apple juice,’” Lyons said.
Apple juice and iced tea were the two varieties of “urine” that the club had out for students to try.
Some freshmen had a hard time keeping a straight face during the pitch for urine drinking.
He said that, as a freshman class, some students had to be reined in creatively, but others needed a bit of a push to participate.
“In interesting ways, freshmen are kind of risk-adverse, in terms of creative risks, because they don’t want to be judged or criticized,” Lyons said. “... So on a certain level, I’m encouraging them to take creative risks, yet sometimes they might have ideas that just might not be appropriate.”
Lyons said pranks can encourage creativity while also being life-affirming rather than denigrating.