Credit Where Credit Is Due
While pranks are not my preferred form of humor, some exemplars of the art transcend the practical joke category to register high on my comedy inducement scale, the Heck Of A Guy Smirkdex, because they teach us something about the fundamental nature of the human condition. Granted, the lesson is usually something on the lines of “There are a lot of dolts out there,” but that message is important enough to bear repetition.
In the case of The Credit Card Prank, the lesson is elevated to “Requirements set by giant financial institutions don’t make us safe but at least they do make us laugh and There are a lot of dolts out there.”
The set-up follows:
Credit card signatures are a useless mechanism designed to make you feel safe, like airport security checks. So my question was, how crazy would I have to make my signature before someone would actually notice?1
The signatures on the back of credit cards used to purchase goods and services become progressively more audacious in appearance and content. In the final phase of the joke, the signatures fall just short of “I’m a terrorist buying explosives. Death to America,” which I suspect would have been used if the signature box were a tad larger.
The Credit Card Prank originates on Zug, which modestly bills itself as “The World’s Only Comedy Site.” As one might expect, there is a plethora of pranks on the site, many of them much, much more outrageous than the Credit Card Prank, and many that have a relatively heavy concentration of scatological terms. If you are, say, looking for an ice-breaker joke in anticipation of your audience with the Pope, this may not be the ideal source. The list of “Funniest Links This Month,” for example, includes
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Bigger Boobs or Bust
Do those breast enlargement supplements really work? Over 100 photos offer the proof -
The Naked Barbie Project
What would Barbie look like naked? - The Aphrodisiac Prank
We use hard science to determine if a magical sex formula really exists.
In any case, The Credit Card Prank is one of the funniest paranoia-inducing pranks I’ve found.
Bonus: The Zug 404 Page
Zug’s”Page Not Found,” is the latest addition to my compendium of favorite 404 Pages2 which I listed in previous posts, Techno-Note: If You Can’t Find A Web Page, It’s Me and More 404
Footnotes
- A graphic of his actual credit card signature is included with the comment, “You can see that I already have the signature of a monkey on crack.” It was on reading that line that I knew I liked the idea. ~back~
- 404 is an HTTP status code1 that means a server computer somewhere is responding to your request that it fork over a web page (a signal you sent when you entered a web site address into your browser) with “I can’t find that page and I dunno where else to look for it.” ~back~
