The Antic Arts

WHEN the pressures of school become intolerable, students have several recourses that provide therapeutic value by breaking routine. The academically embattled undergraduate can, for instance, simply take a holiday from his besieged career and abandon himself to dissolute pursuits. However, the victory-through-beer approach can hardly be calculated to win the war. Optimal relief from "study fatigue" should be short, emotionally cleansing (or at least distracting), and leave no residual liabilities such as a hangover. A good book usually takes too long to read. An engaging movie or athletic endeavor is more effective, but perhaps the best strategy to boost morale is humor. The best humor is creative, and the most available form of creative humor, the veritable blitzkrieg of academic alternatives, is the prank.

Pranks have a long and, if the word might be used, honorable history at the College. The students of the past, confined in their rooms during the long winter, would seize the onset of warm weather as a time for tricks, foolishness, and occasional riot. From the diaries of the period, it seems that this kind of behavior reached its height in the late 19th century. Some of the acts perpetrated in those times were nothing short of criminal and barbaric, but springtime ebullience manifested itself in fairly innocent ways, too.

There seems to have been a student preoccupation with putting objects in places where they do not normally exist. Dartmouth historian L. B. Richardson cites the example of some students who, finding a sled loaded with firewood in front of a dormitory, moved the sled, with wood intact, to the roof. This particular mania persists even today in the practice of removing the furnishings of a student's room and tastefully rearranging them on the fire escape. Richardson mentions, however, that the preferred objects to move were animate and that they were usually placed in College buildings. There are records of herding cows into Dartmouth Hall and driving turkeys into the chapel. Students once also spirited a corpse from the Medical School into the chapel.

Nowadays, student pranks tend to have less morbid consequences. Malicious mischief or vandalism still exist, but in the strictest sense these acts are not pranks. A prank must be relatively harmless, and it must be funny. The number of things under this definition that can and have been done in the spirit of fun among friends is endless. Most of these ideas are familiar to any college student. They range from filling a room to the ceiling with newspaper wads to locking a person into a room by jamming pennies between the door and the door-frame. But these acts are a bit hackneyed. The best pranks are more creative and elaborate.

In the winter of my freshman year there was a certain sophomore who enjoyed making life difficult for freshmen in my dorm. He had some positive qualities, but for the honor of our class a friend and I decided that we would have to "fry" him - that is, in dormitory parlance, play a prank on him.

We had heard of a really spectacular "fry," but to do it required a great weight. Coincidentally, there was an extra-large garbage can that had been filled with water and was now frozen solid beneath one window of the sophomore's room, which was on the fourth floor. (The weight of the can was certainly great enough; we later figured that it weighed at least 450 pounds.) We tied the sophomore's fire rope to the can and tried to hoist it into the air from his room. We couldn't budge it. Even with the aid of five large seniors, who were much amused by our project, we were barely able to lift the can. After much heaving and pulling, the rope was stretched from the can to the knob of the closed door of the sophomore's room. We had previously removed the window that the rope passed through, and now we placed a mattress against the wall beneath the window for padding. This accomplished, we carefully knocked out the hinge pins of the door to the room, and then our five coconspirators, who had been giving us slack, slowly allowed the doorknob to take the full weight of the trash can on the other end of the rope. We all then exited from another window, crawled along the eaves of the dorm, and re-entered through the window of another room.

One thing worried us. There was the possibility that the impact of the door hitting the wall might knock the wall off the building. We consoled ourselves with the thought that if this occurred at least we'd leave college in a big way.

When the object of all this preparation arrived, he was not uncharacteristically being pursued by a campus policeman for trying to break a window with a snowball. When he reached the fourth floor, the victim sprinted for the refuge of his room. Twelve heads peered around the corner, for by this time word of the "fry" had circulated. This was really going to be something. The sophomore reached his door, turned the knob, 12 breaths were drawn in at once, and then ... he disappeared! It occurred in an instant as if some giant hand had yanked him into the room. We heard a few quick bumps and a huge bang. The sophomore appeared a moment later, pale and trembling. He stammered, "What happened?" In his mind his room had appeared to implode. We were all laughing so hard we couldn't breathe. At this moment the campus policeman turned the corner. With his first glimpse of the room he forgot all about the snowball. "My God," he bellowed. "They ripped the door off!" "No, officer," offered one of the seniors, "they only knocked the hinges out." "You be quiet," said the officer. "I'm in charge here."

I think there is something about college that encourages high spirits and a little bit of wildness. Perhaps college, as much as it is a place where we are asked to be adults, properly represents a time of life when we can still be young, a time when it is still possible to break some of the rules if only for the reason that we will be obeying all of the rules for the rest of our lives. Let us hope so. In doing the trash-can prank, my friend and I broke numerous rules but caused no significant harm. At the same time, we had a memorable experience that will stay with us long after the more mundane details of college existence have faded. Provided that I am not disciplined retroactively (is there a statute of limitations?), I will recall that crazy night when the freshmen had their revenge with as much delight as anything else that has happened to me in Hanover. It was, I believe, a proper part of my Dartmouth experience.