Pranking for Profit : It’s a Tricky Business and Firm Has the Last Laugh
The manager of a ritzy restaurant got a good laugh when he put pink slips in his employees’ mail boxes on April Fools’ Day.
But his victims got revenge by hiring Amazing Events Unlimited, a band of professional pranksters that last year made nearly $300,000 staging outlandish practical jokes, murder mysteries and elaborate parties.
On manager Dennis Tye’s last night before taking another job, 17 actors and actresses appeared at the busy 300-seat restaurant, including:
- A bum shaving in the men’s room with nothing but a towel around his waist.
- Two men in leisure suits, smoking cheap cigars and ringing up a $218 bill they couldn’t pay.
- A young couple kissing passionately for two hours.
- A couple served a live lobster that crawled off its plate.
- Diners who complained about everything, and others who complained about the people complaining.
- Jeff Pinsker, 26, co-founder of Amazing Events and self-described “chief executive prankster,” played an alcoholic busboy who was supposed to be the owner’s nephew.
Tye, who now works in Salt Lake City, figured it was just a run of bad luck until the final gag: an underage drinker who got busted by an Alcoholic Beverages Commission agent.
“When the ABC agent came in, Dennis finally caught on,” said restaurant general manager Jim Kauffman. “It was just a scream.”
“It really showed us how well Dennis handled adversity,” he said. “In the restaurant business, you usually have one or two problems a night, but not six on top of each other. In retrospect he’ll laugh until the day he dies, but that night he was ready to crack, which was the whole point.”
Amazing Events charged only $500 for that night because the actors and actresses also got a free meal.
Other gags range in price from $85, for a bag lady carrying dead flowers as a birthday gift, to about $70,000 one company paid last year for a party for 1,500.
“We did a 1930s-style murder mystery party in Sausalito last year that featured a live cheetah, costumes and scripts for 18 guests,” Pinsker said. “That was about $7,000 or $8,000. Our client was one of those people who says, ‘I don’t need to know how much it costs, just go out and do it right.’ We kind of went wild on that one.”
Pinsker started Amazing Events in 1981 with several Stanford University classmates.
“The original idea was, we’ve been pulling pranks all our lives, let’s see if we can get paid for it,” he said.
Masterminds Are Busy
Company parties account for most of Amazing Events’ revenue, but Pinsker and partner Jill Small, 30, still mastermind several “prank days” a year.
One of Pinsker’s favorite prank days put San Jose tax lawyer Bud Ferrari through the wringer, thanks to a colleague who wanted to make Ferrari’s 50th birthday unforgettable.
Amazing Events had Ferrari’s street blocked by a phony street-repair crew. When he arrived late to work, a boastful “job applicant” bragged interminably about past sexual escapades.
Then, a janitor insisted on moving every one of the law firm’s plants into Ferrari’s office because his window had direct sunlight.
Sunbathers on Tennis Court
Then an actor posing as an insurance investigator arrived and said Ferrari might be liable for an accident. When Ferrari tried to make his lunch-hour tennis game he found three women sunbathing on the court, claiming they only spoke Norwegian.
Frustrated, Ferrari returned to work to find a religious zealot in a leopard skin, a vagrant who said he’d found Ferrari’s checkbook and deserved a reward, and a new client who said he was a psychiatrist and persuaded Ferrari to try a system of stress therapy involving gulping huge amounts of water.
The colleague who hired Amazing Events, Joseph Mell, said Ferrari was terrified all day. Mell’s only regret was that he wasn’t able to watch all the pranks because he was in hysterics.
