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Source/Further reading:
General Biographies:
https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-61609?rskey=g3ajzn&result=1
https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/review-the-sultan-of-zanzibar-by-martyn-downer-26706320.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-sultan-of-zanzibar-by-martyn-downer-1932681.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-sultan-of-zanzibar-by-martyn-downer-2244731.html
https://www.martyndowner.com/books/the-sultan-of-zanzibar/
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA297829235&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=0736251X&p=AONE&sw=w
https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/how-to-carry-off-a-great-hoax/
https://thehistorianshut.com/2017/08/30/horace-de-vere-cole-the-great-prankster-of-britain/
The Sultan of Zanzibar: The Bizarre World and Spectacular Hoaxes of Horace de Vere Cole, by Martyn Downer:
https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/_/IYjkQgAACAAJ?hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiR37mZ0Kf1AhUDSvEDHUV7Am8Qre8FegQIBxAD
The Cambridge Hoax:
Reid, P. (1998). Stephens, Fishers, and the Court of the 'Sultan of Zanzibar': New Evidence from Virginia Stephen Woolf's Childhood. Biography, 21(3), 328�340. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23540072
Cambridge Student Pranks: A History of Mischief & Mayhem, by Jamie Collinson
https://books.google.com/books?id=lQI7AwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=de+vere+cole&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiXhP7E0qf1AhV0mVwKHekSDDYQ6AF6BAgJEAI
The Dreadnought Hoax:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/21579/Marsh%20Bunga%20bunga%20dreadnought.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Johnston, G. (2009). Virginia Woolf's Talk on the Dreadnought Hoax. Woolf Studies Annual, 15, 1�45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24907113
How intriguing. Sasha Cohen couldn't hope to be half his equal. Absolutely riveting and funny! OMIGOD lmao!!!!!
@briandoss9232 Says:
Well. Always act like you belong there!
@ehrldawg Says:
In the movie *Catch Me If You Can*, Decaprio goes into a classroom and takes over a French class as a substitute teacher. The principle told his parents that Deccaprio had planned a field trip to a french bread factory. Now appearantly this never happened,Abignale taking over a French class. But if it were true,and Abignale *did* pull off the field trip;that would have been the most epic prank in history !!!
@briant4468 Says:
So we're getting these cow udders then serial cow udder chopper sounds like.
@HundreadD Says:
That is possibly one of the bluest names of blue blood I have ever seen that does not include a lordship or royal title somewhere in there. Good on the fellow though
@victorrojas150 Says:
I worked at a super busy catering company and barely had time to eat but always time to joke around. So one day I was in the the bathroom stall going number two and kitchen crew came in and started throwing wet paper towels and smash tomatoes at me. Bravo 👏 they got me but know it was my turn. I got toilet paper and some chocolate chips that I put in the microwave for a couple of seconds making it look like poo 💩 so I chased them around until I was able to catch one of them. We were wrestling for a a minute until I smeared it on his face the scream that came out of this grown man lol 😂 🤣 and the shock from the rest of the guys was oh so sweet!!
@brandontanis388 Says:
Y2K fun. Just after the ball dropped to bring in the new millennium, I excused myself to use the bathroom, went downstairs, and switched off the main breaker for the house. After a long silent pause I heard my dad yell "turn it back on!". Seems the microwave clock was still on and gave me away. My sister later told me that until dad yelled she thought that Y2K had actually happened.
@razier1247 Says:
In the 8th grade, I had an art class as an elective for the second half of the semester. Finding the class incredibly boring, I eventually would begin to remove the glue from gluestick tubes, and while the teacher wasn't looking, throw them at the ceiling where they'd stick. I also convinced several other people to join in and all told, we stuck dozens of gluesticks up there before getting found out. I Only had an in-school suspension for one day and it was absolutely worth it lol
@flyin4352 Says:
Very late but the greatest prank I ever witnessed was when my secondary school wouldn't allow a girl back to classes because she was bald following cancer treatment. Everyone in her class wore bald caps to school for a solid week. Didn't make them reverse the decision but it was a beautiful middle finger to those in charge anyway.
@gregrobinette8620 Says:
Amazing character lmao
@eomat Says:
This video had me in stitches in places. Just love a good practical joke. Always up for a laugh. This video had it all. Highs and lows.
@chrisvanlaarhoven2722 Says:
Well, during our graduation we had our teachers arrested and executed. Quite a prank that was. To elaborate: We had local police arrest and handcuff them in the classrooms and lock them up in our bike shed. One after another they were put in stock’s and shot in the head with whipped cream pies. The confusion was glorious.
@jakemiller1386 Says:
Best joke I've been a part of: Some friends asked us to feed their cats while they were on vacation, so me and a friend painted a life-size mural on their wall of the the 2 of us, both shirtless; me riding on a walrus (walrus had a pipe and top-hat) with a spear and spatula in my hands and my friend on the back on a bear (bear had a bowtie) carrying a sword and a plate of apple pie. Mind you, they lived in a rental. They took it well I think. Still good friends with them.
@qienna6677 Says:
Poor guy :(
@PositronWeaponD Says:
While I can’t say I approved of every prank, the cow udder and scissors gag made me laugh like an absolute dumbass
@charleskeefer9030 Says:
Rev Horton heat.
@snippyJ Says:
Fornicating but with less letters. I love that! LMAO
@jessn.2665 Says:
My best prank took months of planning. My sister works for the government, and drives through a security checkpoint onto base every day. A few years ago when the Facebook event to storm Area 51 and demand to see the aliens was a thing, my sister was getting loads of security emails briefing her and her colleagues about the potential threat. We still both lived with our parents at the time. The event had a specific date and that’s when I decided I’d mess with my sister. Months before I got to work buying an assload of inflatable aliens of all different sizes. I bought an alien morph suit. I bought some LED strip lights for my room, but waited to put them up until after the date. The plan was to play scary space music, and she would come into her bathroom to find me in a morph suit in her shower. Then I would lead her outside to her car when she was done getting ready. The inside of the car would be lit up green and be absolutely packed with inflatable aliens. The morphsuit never came in the mail, so it screwed the first part up. Instead I just had the music, and I wrote a note on her car saying I “brought her back some bad bitches” from my trip to Area 51. I got up at 3 am to set it all up, and went back to bed. It turned out great. She had to drive on base and have her ID Checked by a few airmen as she sat in her car that was full of aliens. I was pretty proud of myself for that one
@aidynsbestyoutubemoments Says:
once my friend gave me a cafeteria box with peaches with ketchup on them and said its a bloody murder scene and so i jokingly licked it and then he told me that he rubbed his balls on it thankfully he didnt
@huwguyver4208 Says:
A good one from when I was a furniture removalist that got me beautifully: we were loading the truck at the pickup point, and the client had a fairly sturdy letterbox out the front of the house. While I was inside the house my colleagues wrapped the letterbox in protective blankets to make it look like another item of furniture ready to be brought up to the truck.
When I came out they asked me to get the fridge trolley and bring it up, pretending it was a small chest of drawers or the like. Cue them struggling to contain their laughter as I struggled away trying to get a wrapped up letter box onto my fridge trolley before I realised that they had got me lol
@huwguyver4208 Says:
Not one I've seen personally but a classic prank in ambulance services worldwide is to ask the brand new probie to go and get the Fallopian Tube from the ambulance.
@isaacschmitt4803 Says:
OK, this was. . . Oof, seven years ago now? I was in the US Navy at the time, nearing the end of my contract and had already decided I wasn't reenlisting.
We were deployed to the Middle East at the time, and tensions were understandably high. It was constantly hot, things kept breaking, and to make things *even* better, we were constantly being harrased by Iran and Russian forces, trying to get us to fire the first shot and cause an international incident.
Needless to say, we were in desperate need of some (un)serious levity.
One of my daily duties was to type up the official plan of the day into the ship's internal television network, and it was done on a constantly looping PowerPoint so that you could turn on a TV anywhere and see what was on the schedule for the day, if any training was called for, and what we could expect to be approximated for lunch and dinner.
It was in the course of these duties that I began inserting jokes. I tested the waters with funny misspellings, progressed onto tame jokes, then onto pretty basic memes (for instance, on the daily PT slide I included "get over 10,000!!!"). The command definitely knew what was going on, but they allowed it. The crew needed a morale boost.
It all came to a head, one day, when I, in my infinite, unknowable wisdom, included this classic joke:
"The only difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and your uncle jack off a horse is a poor sense of timing."
Frankly, I'm amazed it took them two hours to notice and have it taken down. My officer stormed down and demanded to know who put that joke in. I got my ass chewed out from here to Timbuktu and back. Something about how it wasn't a proper use of official announcement channels and it was crude and tasteless. Everyone else I talked to that day thought it was damned hilarious. I was removed from that duty immediately, and from that day on, nothing was allowed to be added that wasn't already on the provided schedule
Curiously, I never received an official counseling report to sign, which leads me to believe that no one was actually offended by it and that they were just afraid someone might be. Which, I mean, we were all sailors. I refuse to believe there's a more crude lot of people in this world than US Navy sailors. The only thing that offends us are politically correct people.
@quester09 Says:
finally! someone puts a vast inheritance to good use.
@eileencorcoran3090 Says:
Interesting
@keirangrant1607 Says:
I really want to be mad at this guy but some of his stunts are kinda funny. I found myself laughing at them
@TheUnfallenHero Says:
In elementary school, there was a new foreign kid who was looking for pals. He asked me for my phone number and told him it was "911", thinking it was funny and that one would be foolish enough to call that number. The next day he showed up upset that police came to his house and he got in trouble with the parents. I feel bad to this day.
@pandorasbox4238 Says:
One of the most hilarious pranks I heard of among my friends, was one time they convince another friend to smoke a dried dog turd. They told him it was opium.
@LtColShingSides Says:
This guy's story would make a pretty good comedy movie
@xyz99ism Says:
I once had someone honestly convinced that, during one Grey's Anatomy season finale they hadn't seen, Meredith Grey was eaten alive by zombies.
They were a fan of the show. And yes, I did confess my prank soon after so they didn't look silly to strangers.
@theCongoleseDude Says:
Man was depressed but dealt with it with laughter. Legend!
@Retro-Cara Says:
Next year for April fools can we have a biographics on Danny?
@St.Linguini_of_Pesto Says:
I must confess, that "ungrateful hussy!" prank is my favorite one mentioned in this video.. I'd love to pull one that great.
@soaringbuddha7249 Says:
Bro I’ve been asking this for over 2 years, can you please do a video on Anton levay
@Stuck_on_pause Says:
A few decades ago when huge box TVs were being replaced by flat screens, we got a new TV and so had this huge box-type one to dispose of as it no longer worked. we had friends visiting us who lived a few hours drive away. The guy was a childhood friend of my husband so were always messing around teasing each other etc. We managed to convince his girlfriend to let us put this great heavy TV in the boot (trunk) of their car so while my husband distracted his friend in the back garden with the BBQ we were having, me and the friends' girlfriend took his car keys and loaded the TV in the rear of their car. He didn't find the TV until he was back home 150 miles away and therefore had to dispose of the TV for us. He joked for ages that he was going to courier it back to our house but never did (probably because it would have cost him so much money to do so!).
@soundfilmproduction5365 Says:
Make a biographic video on Leonard Cohen.
@crazytrain7114 Says:
Best joke I can recall was this boy really liked my older sister, he would show up every day.
We had a gigantic fishtank in the living room and were feeding the fish when he showed up one day.
My sister, cool as a cucumber stood in the middle of the living room, pretending to eat something from a can, so, of course, Dana asked if he could try some.
My sister shook out a handfull of freeze dried worms in to his hand and he proceeded to eat them saying they were pretty good! I was dying inside! So my sister gave him the can and he proceeded to keep eating them for a bit and looked at the can, and I swear he said " is this a kind of chinese food?" We totally lost it at that point and it STILL took him a minute to figure it out!!
@pakde8002 Says:
I was expecting this to be a prank actually. I've seen a couple of good April Fool's Day jokes in my YouTube subscriptions but the best online prank I recall was from a friend from India I met on Yahoo 360 over a decade ago. He made a fictional nation on Wikipedia. I can't remember all the details but it was brilliant, complete with all the details of the nation's geography, population etc. As recall the island nation was shaped like a banana.
@MR_Unlimited.29 Says:
Ir. Soekarno Biography? Bro please🙏
@brandonmckinley1413 Says:
When you sponsor squarespace does everything they can to block people from canceling and keep charging them money against their will do they give you a cut of that? Because I went to them because of your referral.
@flyboy152 Says:
In season 6 of "Downton Abbey", Neville Chamberlain attends a dinner at the Abbey. He lets one of the characters know that he was one of the crew that dug up Picadilly (at 10:26), but based on the timeline here, it seems that might have been a bit of dramatic license. 😀
@RobertWatts1 Says:
The best prank I've ever pulled off was scheduling a task on my coworker's laptop. At around mid-morning of April Fools' Day, his laptop started whispering a random number to him every minute. It took him a while to notice it through the music he was listening to, but eventually he took off his headphones and told me "I think I might be losing my mind. My computer is whispering random numbers to me!"
@serioushex3893 Says:
I've got a request, though there aren't any pictures to use, and not tons of info on him, but enough for an interesting tale. Tararre, the man who hungered. could tack on charles domery, to fill out a video's length. both interesting bits of history.
@pushinkeys Says:
The prank with the gold watch and yelling “stop thief!” Is fn hilarious!!! 🤣🤣😅😂
@andreasbakkers2210 Says:
In 1989 I was a diving instructor in Cuba.
The 21 juli is the national day in Belgium. I told the Cubans that I was very sad to miss this day.
One of the guys from the management ask of I had the National anthem of Belgium. Off course I had.
On 21/07/1989 @ 22.00hr the begin tune from Top Gun was on the speakers.!
@brucepettengill6183 Says:
This will take a bit; bear with me.
Mid 80’s, we walk into Maggie’s Irish Pub, in Shelton, CT, to knock back a few and see what women we could chat up. All the women are drooling over these fair haired guys at the bar. The German National soccer team was in country and were playing Yale University the next day. A local, who had a problem with my southern accent, starts talking crap to me. The two guys I went with were bored cause the couldn’t chat the ladies up and we were leaving. In a flash, look at my friend Frank and say “play along”. Walk up to a German bloke wearing a smile & waving and utter the German word for “b*ttf*cker. He jumps up rattling off in German. I looked puzzled and quizzically say the German word for “crap in your pants”. Two guys are grabbing me and in my face asking what I meant saying that? I pointed at the guy who always gave me a hard time and say “Dude told me that meant “hello” and “enjoy your stay”. The first German goes racing down the bar to where the a’hole was sitting and gets in his face yelling in German. As the German soccer team gets into fisticuffs with 4 innocent a’holes at the bar, I turn to Frank and say “Let’s go.” We exit with a quickness and all pulling away when 3 cars of Shelton police are pulling up to the bar.
I can be devious as hell.
@JackTheSlayer-ok5eq Says:
Hey, could you do Odoacer next, I think he would be interesting.
@nicovanderwalt205 Says:
Do one on Bobby Fisher
@BBC-dq3ki Says:
Please do an episode on Cicero. We need to take a trip back to rome to look at the Senate's greatest defender.
@AdrianWolf_in_TO Says:
Best prank I ever pulled (IMO anyway) was sending a forged email to a colleague that basically insinuated she was going to be "let go" because she was dating someone from another company. Due to an upcoming merger between our two companies - and a prohibition on inter-company dating -- that regrettably, she had been selected for termination. I'd thought the prank would be self-evident -- as I had the forged email and display name appear as though it was coming from our boss -- but using a nickname for him (he was a bit of a buffoon but not THAT daft as to use it in his email header.) We were sitting in side-by-side office cubicles when I hit "Send" and I could hear her increasing concern and worry as she read through my fake email, unleashing a string of "Ohh!" and "Noooo!" as she read. She kept trying to get me to "come read this" but I was nearly on the floor trying to suppress my laughter. It wasn't until she looked over the cubicle wall and saw me that she realized it was a prank. Fun Fact -- She ended up marrying the person that she was going to be "fired for dating" 😀. Good times!
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