If you were a prospie yawning your way through yet another college tour, wouldn’t you choose the school where a horde of frenzied students, followed by a marching band and a walking keg, suddenly started running around screaming, “It’s drinkin’ time!”?
Everyone loves a good prank, and Dartmouth students are no exception. With April Fool’s Day right around the corner, it’s an opportune time to take a look at when our creative muscles were exercised for the most entertaining purposes.
THE DARTMOUTH JACK-O-LANTERN:
The Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, Dartmouth’s resident humor organization and magazine, has long been a mastermind of campus pranks. Matt Garczynski ’14, one of the magazine’s editors-in-chief, said that the premise of the organization has always been uniquely based on “prank humor.”
“We capitalized on the idea of prank humor and made it our own thing,” Garczynski said.
The Jacko’s most celebrated prank is undoubtedly the “Drinkin’ Time” video posted in 2007, which currently has 596,000 views on YouTube. Created by Mike Trapp ’08, the infamous film follows an unsuspecting tour as it approaches Webster Avenue and is ambushed by an ecstatic group of students who declare that “it’s drinkin’ time!” just as the tour guide awkwardly begins to discuss Dartmouth social culture.
Jacko members also set up a fake booth at the student activities fair for a club called “The Dartmouth Yale Enthusiasts” in a 2008 video.
During a fake interview for the clip, one of the members explained that the club is for people who “did not get into Yale, despite numerous attempts. But that doesn’t mean we’ve given up.”
More recently, The Jacko also took advantage of the Dartmouth social cups initiative to prank students eating at Class of ’53 Commons. Last spring, Jacko members printed posters advertising blue “DTF Cups” for those who were “down to flirt.”
“I saw some people taking the cups without reading the sign,” Garczynski said. “If there was anyone who used them while knowing what they were, that would be very funny and very sad at the same time.”
DIMENSIONS DECEPTION:
Members of the Jacko are not the only students guilty of pranking prospies. In 2004, several students pulled off a “fake kidnapping” during Dimensions weekend.
According to a Sept. 2007 issue of The Dartmouth, a Dartmouth student posing as a high school student befriended several prospies over the course of the weekend and later went with them on an unofficial tour of campus. During the tour, a black van suddenly appeared and the people inside grabbed the fake prospie and threw him into the vehicle.
Despite the alarm and panic of the prospies who witnessed the event, the tour continued. The tour guides conceded, “It’s too bad, but the tour must go on. He’ll probably be okay.”
At the end of the tour, the van reappeared and the fake prospie, his hands taped together, stumbled out wearing only his boxers. He ran down Wheelock Street yelling, “I hate Dartmouth.” The tour guides revealed it was a prank after the other prospies refused to leave until the incident was resolved.
STREAKING & PEEKING:
Dartmouth pranksters have also adopted a beloved activity that almost every student will witness before graduation: streaking finals.
Benjamin Kessler ’13 said he streaked anywhere between 150 and 300 exams during his four years at Dartmouth. He decided to try the prank when his math final was streaked his freshman fall.
“I was stuck on a problem, and the final got streaked, and all of a sudden, I knew how to do the problem,” Kessler said. “I realized this is a great thing. It’s like giving back to the community.”
His favorite streak occurred during his own final freshman year, when he wore a mask and later put his clothes back on to finish the final.
Other times he wrote formulas on his body, pretended to be a robot and handed out Coke Zeroes to every test-taker.
Kessler said that professors’ reactions to streaking vary greatly, from chasing after culprits to writing “Welcome, Streakers” on the blackboard.
NOT-SO-RECENT PAST:
Even Dartmouth’s distant past is rife with pranks. A 1925 issue of The Dartmouth reported that 75 students once fell for a “fake duel” when they watched six pranksters run into the woods and fire four shots in quick succession.
David McConnell ’88 recalled that on the night before the 1984 Dartmouth-Harvard football game, four Dartmouth students traveled to the rival campus and painted the John Harvard statue green.
“Even though they had to remove the green paint, I was there a year later and there was still green paint on parts of the statue,” McConnell said.
Harvard certainly did not appreciate the joke. The four students were forced to pay $2,004 for the damages, and The Harvard Crimson titled its news story “Dartmouth Vandals Pay Dearly For Damage to John Harvard.”
In the spring of 1985, McConnell, who was a member of Alpha Chi Alpha fraternity, said he dressed as a Viking for a 1950s-themed party with members of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. Because the fraternity’s social chair was away for the weekend, McConnell and his friends decided to wear in attire from 950 instead.
“We went as Vikings and carried a battering ram down to KKG,” McConnell said. “There were some really funny looks on the faces of the sisters when we showed up.”
