PRANKSTERS

Boston Globe Gets Caught in the Pudding: The Boston Globe was skewered last week by those notorious pranksters at the Harvard Lampoon, the university humor magazine. The Lampoon fed official-looking press kits naming Roseanne Barr and Tom Cruise as winners of the annual Hasty Pudding Club awards to several newspapers including the Globe, The Times and the Chicago Tribune. The phony info ran in the Globe’s Saturday Names and Faces column, but Richard Gulla, spokesman for the Globe, said the awards information had first been confirmed over the phone with a “Hasty Pudding publicist” whose number had been listed on the fake release. Monday, Pudding “publicist” No. 2 called the Globe to correct the announcement, and the paper scrambled to verify her identity. Determining that she was the real thing, the Globe printed a correction Tuesday, calling the joke a “well-prepared hoax.” Curator of the Lampoon, Elmer Green said the incident was “fun for all. Pudding was a little upset about it but mostly people really like what we do. I guess the Globe wasn’t too happy about it either. . . .The Lampoon has gotten away with quite a bit over the years.” The Globe’s Gulla said, “We’re not real happy about it simply because you never want to think that you’re putting inaccurate information in the newspaper.” Hasty Pudding, the oldest and largest undergraduate theatrical group in the U.S., plans to announce the real winners Monday, as scheduled.