Note: Many of the jokes I perpetrate on others are humorous because of their spontaneity—which is inevitably lost in translation. Additionally, I seldom ever repeat gags, as freshness is a highly prized virtue—which means that the stunts may seem unpolished but believe me, in context, they handily achieved their objective—the clarion manifestation of my twisted humor.  

 
                                              "Lip Gloss"
Date:  May 2001
Overall Rating: 8    Spontaneity: 8    Originality:  10  Mean-spiritedness: 4   Effectiveness:  8
Background: Studying late at night/morning with a friend in the architecture lab for a project due the next day in a class that was patently over-demanding.
What happened: So we were working side by side on neighboring computers, often turning to one another to discuss our project and our presentation. Although usually unobservant, I kept noticing that every 10-15 minutes she would reapply lip-gloss. Not unusual except that in over 7 hours of continuous studying that amounted to over 25 applications.
      So as she's characteristically reaching for her lip gloss from her book bag, I exclaim, "Oh my God, your lips are dry!"
      She immediately covers her lips and gasps "Really?!"
      You could barely hear me say "No" as I fell off my chair laughing, later asking, "How could your lips have been dry, you put that stuff on every 10 minutes."
Repercussions: She laughed it off...and immediately smeared some more of that gunk onto her lips.
 

                                           "Bogus Gift Certificate"
Date: circa 2000
Overall Rating: 10    Spontaneity:  6   Originality:  10  Mean-spiritedness: 9   Effectiveness:  9
Background: At the cash register at Best Buy, the $10/$15/$20 gift certificate cards grabbed my attention. I looked closely and realized, not much to my surprise, that they are valueless until activated by the cashier. So I ask the lady behind the desk if I could have one. She consents. I immediately recognize the potential mischief of such a tool.
What Happened: On my friend's birthday I give him a nice personalized greeting card and slip in the gift certificate. Elated by the $100, yes $100, gift card, it wasn't long before he patronized that store and accumulated close to $100 worth of assorted merchandise at the register. He recalls the stun quickly turned to rage once he realized that he had been bamboozled by this infamous trickster. His mother was there and bailed him out of the embarrassing prospect (for him) of putting all of the items back (especially on the cusp of his birthday).  
Repercussions: He was very angry for a while, using it against me for months (2 years), but he got over it, and I got over his anger. Basically, it worked out perfectly although the whole family still look at me down the barrel of suspicion.
 

                                        "Password: Martin"
Date: June 2002
Overall Rating: 6    Spontaneity:  9   Originality:  8  Mean-spiritedness: 3   Effectiveness:  7
Background: In emerging from the movie theatre one overcast afternoon in otherwise sunny Gainesville, a friend and I were returning to my car .
What Happened: As we walked it began to drizzle—speeding our steps. About 15 meters from the car I think about and say almost spontaneously, "The password is Martin," which engendered a quizzical look. As we reached the car I open my door and sit down, escaping the grips of the cold downpour. I turned to my friend with a smile as she's struggling to open the [locked] door. After a few more seconds of me holding my position you could see lights go off and with her head snapping back, as if by force, the parking lot was flooded with the shriek, "!!!!!! M A R T I N !!!!!!"  I then graciously let her in.
Repercussions: I think she enjoyed it.
 

                                         "The Salt Factor"
Date: Repeated since 1990s
Overall Rating: 3    Spontaneity:  3   Originality:  1  Mean-spiritedness: 6   Effectiveness:  5
Background: Despite all of my efforts at originality there are certain jokes that never get old. Putting a foreign substance in someone's drink/food is one of them.
What Happened: I've got people to spit their salty beverage halfway across the room, lose taste sensitivity in their mouth, but never upchuck. I've rinsed out a Fruitopia bottle and filled it with a toothpaste/vinegar/ketchup concoction. I've caved out cavities in bread and filled it with scraps.  
Repercussions: People uniformly get mad, but internally they always partially blame themselves for not being more attentive, which deflects their anger.
 

                                        "Publicity stunt: Ottawa Citizen"
Date: February 2, 2004
Overall Rating: 8    Spontaneity:  9   Originality:  9  Mean-spiritedness: 4   Effectiveness:  10
Background: I had been depressed at the lagging hits on my website recently: a consequence of having less time to devote to new posts because of a few job contracts I had been working on. 
What Happened: I decided to spoof an Ottawa Citizen article and re-write it to appear as if my website and I were being featured. Writing the article was easy since I can duplicate any style, and hosting it wasn't a problem, since I have my own ad-free website. The genius arose in the execution.

On my personal page I put a link first to my hosted article, then a note where they could read it in the paper section of yesterday's newspaper (It wasn't even there but people are lazy!!) plus a link where they could read it on the Newspaper's website--but I just linked it to a random page that required a membership to view! Then I saved my statistical page locally and adjusted it to show 12,000+ hits on Feb 2nd. I was too lazy to Photoshop the graph so I deleted it and wrote "ERROR -Too many hits. Upgrade to Pro," which linked to the stats upgrade page. Providing a way for people to see through the scam I added invisible comments to the code of the article page to read, "This is NOT a real article from the Ottawa Citizen, it was created by Martin Braithwaite as a humourous piece of fiction..." Viewers would have to click 'view source' from there browser, but the opportunity was there to uncover the duplicity.

I was getting congratulations from all over—my closest friends from Ottawa, Florida, and farther were all patting my back. My own brother didn't know and when he finally got it out of my mom he was devastated at the embarrassment of telling so many people about it and later remarked that he felt sick. Guilt, on my side, was clearly building. I exposed the joke by placing a more far-out article indicating that I had been nominated for Time's prestigious "Person of the Year Award" for 2004 within 24 hours of the original posting—but the word had already spread!

Repercussions: As of this writing I am unsure of the fallout from this little deception, but I'm sure that it will mirror a comment of a best friend in Florida who said this to me when I was moving here, "Martin, after all of the games and tricks that you've played, I have tried to always give you the benefit of the doubt. I keep waiting for you to say something genuine and sincere but it never comes." (I think he was still peeved at the 'Bogus Gift Certificate' prank above.)

                                         "Phottery"
Date: April 8, 2004
Overall Rating: 7    Spontaneity:  8   Originality:  7  Mean-spiritedness: 4   Effectiveness:  7
Background: I really enjoy attending 19-Day Feasts as it is, but [Bahá'ís] are encouraged to find means to continually make it more interesting, effective, and spiritually nourishing. I did that to the extreme on this night.
What Happened: H____ was asked to take notes on a dry erase board listing activities we could do during the 12 days of Ridván in Ottawa's Sector 1. Sitting next to her as she had trouble hearing everyone's ideas I decided to push things a bit. She had 'Pottery' written on the board as a suggestion so instinctively and with a very serious voice, I kindly informed her that Pottery was spelled with a 'Ph.' She asked if I was sure to which I nodded and someone else, catching on quickly to my obvious scheme, calmly reassured her. So, to the amazement of everyone, she changed it, engendering flummoxed looks from across the room while you could see them mouthing Ph-o-tt-ery and seeming even more confused. I would have chuckled more had I been convinced that it was really happening.
Repercussions: I got good laughs from my target audience although the 'victim' of this duplicity vowed never to talk to me again, let alone trust me—which is fair.


                                         "Duplicitous Website"
Date: September 12, 2004
Overall Rating: 8    Spontaneity:  9   Originality:  9  Mean-spiritedness: 3   Effectiveness:  9
Background: Because of all of the rich content on my website, some browsers have trouble loading my page.  One of my loyal supporters, Elaheh, wrote me in frustration stating that my shoutbox caused her browser to crash and asked me to fix it.
What Happened: I made a copy of my homepage, removed the shoutbox, and saved it under a different name the link to which I gave her. All was good...until I got the idea to dupe her with an outlandish post that was only visible to her, not to my general website audience, since I had assumed correctly that she would not check my site from home as well as work. So I posted:

    My victim condescendingly replied with:

    I realized I could continue this ruse ad infinitum but realized that my real site was suffering from this diverted attention. So I decided to raise the stakes and write an entry so flagrantly controversial that she would have to verify its truth immediately, bringing this game to an end. I posted:

   Elaheh immediately called ABC, as I had predicted, whom I may add I purposely did not inform of my prank. She grilled ABC, since they were close friends, very upset that she would learn of this news on my website and not through a phone call. Elaheh even led ABC to the 'special link' I had given her with ABC still, at this point, completely unsure what was going on. After a few intense minutes everything neatly unraveled, no feelings were hurt, and the jig was up. This will remain however one of my best jokes of all time. :) That Elaheh would let me post this is indeed a sign of her character. (her rebuttal prank will be posted here as well)