by Drew Price

Created on: April 05, 2007   Last Updated: April 23, 2007

An April Fools gift should be personal to the recipient. It should be humiliating, and it should be public. The following is a story of an April Fools experience that I hope will inspire you to find your own creative way to create a good laugh!

We are used to hearing that smoking is such an expensive habit, so naturally any smoker would be overjoyed to receive a free pack of cigarettes. While in college a buddy of mind smoked like a chimney. It seemed every time I turned around he was either deeply inhaling, or in the process of forcing the smoke out of his mouth with a heavy puff. His friends constantly griped at him for his "chain-smoking," but their protests were ignored.

One April fools I hosted a cookout and I devised a plan to attempt to curtail his smoking habit, and get a few laughs as well. The prank was simple and would occur in front of a dozen friends. We simply hid his pack of cigarettes which sent him into a near panic. But simply stealing his smokes wouldn't do the trick at all. We replaced them with smokes of our own. We actually "doctored" 3 or 4 a few cigarettes in the pack that we gave him. By doctored I mean that we opened them up and removed most of the tobacco and added match heads. We rolled them back up and fixed them to wear our "operation" was hardly noticeable.

Needless to say we watched with anticipation as he lit each cigarette and slumped with disappointment each time nothing happened. He failed to notice that every time he flicked his lighter the every conversation stopped abruptly and was replaced with barely muffled giggles and any other form of silent laughter. Well, he continued to puff away until he reached what must have been his tenth cigarette. Silence, again, drowned out the noise of conversation, and all eyes watched and listened as the lighter clicked. We could hear the hissing of the lighter as he held the button. He cuffed his hand protectively over the flame to shield it from the wind. The end of the cigarette was orange, and became brighter as he took his first long exaggerated drag. He always began each cigarette with a long drawn out inhale, something no one noticed until that night. Again, our shoulders slumped with disappointment and the chatter resumed.

About fifteen seconds later conversations were interrupted with a sound I've never heard before. The closest I've come is when I accidently kicked my dog with a soccer ball and she let out an odd yelp. Immediately following this yelp out of my friends mouth came the words "What the Hell! My damn cigarette just blew up!"

I should have mentioned that this particular friend was not the sharpest tool in the shed and failed to put 2 and 2 together. He did not immediately realize that he was being pranked. In fact, he actually called the customer service number on the back of the pack to complain about the dangerous cigarettes. We could only stifle our laughter for so long as he threatened to sue the cigarette company for selling him an exploding cigarette. One by one, we broke down, some of us with tears in our eyes; some of us fell to the floor. All of us laughed. Eventually he joined the laughter informing us how much we sucked, which is kind of ironic if you think about it. Then, he lit another cigarette.

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