55 Tales Of Famous Folks Goofing Off

It sure is difficult being famous, getting handed sacks of money for doing nothing, and being showered in adoration. Good thing, though, that you can really let off steam with the occasional burst of mad foolishness ... 

1. George Clooney 

One time, George Clooney found a hideous painting of a nude woman in a dumpster. He added his signature to it, pretending to have painted it, then he gifted it to friend Richard Kind (known for such lovable characters as Bing Bong from Inside Out). Afraid of offending Clooney, Kind had to pretend to like it and hang it in his home. Clooney didn't tell him the truth till five years later. 

2. Jonah Hill 

During a Wolf of Wall Street scene, Jonah Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio's characters talk over a plate of sushi. At the end, Hill improvised, telling DiCaprio to eat the piece there. So when they shot a second take of the scene, Leo had to eat a second piece. Scorsese (likely in on the joke) had them do 70 takes, forcing 70 pieces of sushi down Leo's gullet. 

3. Jim Carrey

Andy Kaufman had an alter ego named Tony Clifton, and when Carrey was invited to the Playboy Mansion while playing Kaufman in Man in the Moon, he wanted to go as Clifton. Hugh Hefner ruined the joke by telling everyone the strange man in a wig and sunglasses would be Carrey, so Carrey twisted the joke by having someone else come dressed as Clifton. 

4. Peter O'Toole 

One time, O'Toole cut the tip off his finger when boating, so he dipped it in brandy and tied it back on. He was too drunk to get it right, though -- it tied it back upside down. 

5. Danny Lloyd

The Shining had a difficult shoot, but you wouldn't know it watching the kid, Danny Lloyd. When cameraman Garrett Brown discovered that the boy weighed exactly the same as his new mounted camera, he replaced the camera with Danny in a sling and flew him around. 

6. Chris Pratt 

7. The Game

In 2011, The Game tweeted to his hundreds of thousands of followers that they could call a number to apply to be his intern. The number was actually a Compton police station. Hopeful rap fans tied up the emergency line for hours. 

8. Franklin D. Roosevelt

FDR once assembled the press corps for what he called a "massively important" press conference. The reporters then had to listen to a random farmer, who talked to them about bulls inseminating cows. 

9. Trey Parker 

For a while, everyone knew Trey Parker's name as the co-creator of South Park but not his face. Invited to a Hollywood party and caring little for networking, Parker convinced a male porn star to pretend to be him. Parker, meanwhile, pretended to be a porn director, and he ordered "Trey Parker" to strip naked -- which did. 

10. Robin Williams 

Know who else loved getting naked? Robin Williams. On Mork & Mindy, he'd often interrupt scenes by fully stripping or would discard the scripted dialog in favor of dirty riddles. Costar Pam Dawber said she found the antics "so much fun," and the writers sometimes slipped her the answers to the riddles in advance. 

11. James Cameron

Okay, James Cameron was not the person responsible for this gag. But someone on the set of Titanic laced the chowder with PCP and got everyone high. 

12. Zach Galifianakis

Galifianakis hosted a talk show on VH1 ... till they canceled it and made the mistake of letting him host a few last shows as a lame duck. He stopped promoting any of the movies or bands he was supposed to plug and instead started filming himself out of the studio, one time in a retirement home and another time in a bus. 

13. Daniel Radcliffe

14. Alan Rickman

In the third Harry Potter movie, the kids camp out in a big hall in sleeping bags, and Daniel Radcliffe requested that he be put next to one particular actress he liked. Rickman interfered with the budding romance by slipping an electronic farting machine in Daniel's bag and setting it off remotely. There's a video of this glorious event. 

15. George H.W. Bush

Someone printed porn on Barbara Bush's personal printer. We don't know who, but George H.W. Bush was the one who drew up a fake letter on attorney general letterhead, informing the First Lady that she was being investigated as a sexual deviant. He made sure the whole family was present when she opened the letter. 

16. Mel Gibson 

Mel Gibson has a tradition of sending freeze-dried rats to the ladies starring alongside him, including Helen Hunt when filming What Women Want and Julia Roberts when filming Conspiracy Theory. It's not a very clever joke, but he likes making women scream. 

17. Channing Tatum

Acting in a movie called The Eagle and filming in Scotland, Channing Tatum decided to keep warm by opening hot water bottles and drenching himself. He should have checked the temperature first because he ended up scalding his penis. 

18. Michael Rooker 

Just about every character from the Marvel movies showed up in Infinity War. Not Yondu, played by Michael Rooker. Didn't stop Rooker from posting photos of himself at all the filming locations to fool fans into thinking he'd be in the movie after all. 

19. Lionel Douglas

Shooting in costume can be tough, especially if it's a Predator costume. But for Predator 2, one of the costumed guys was dancer Lionel Douglas, so between scenes, he choreographed a music video starring the Predators. And the end, Danny Glover joins in and jams with them. 

20. Frank Oz

21. Tim Kaine

Kaine, known as Clinton's 2016 running mate, used to be governor of Virginia. When he left the job, he hid a series of cell phones in hard-to-reach places in the governor's mansion (like on top of an elevator car) and dialed them in the middle of the night to screw with his successor. 

22. Adam Savage 

Adam Savage attends Comic-Con, and a lot of Mythbuster fans would be happy to meet him. But he makes it a point to go in costume, hiding his identity, challenging fans to find him. Most fail to. 

23. Joan Crawford

When on tour, Crawford's contract insisted that she receive two-fifths of Smirnoff 100-proof vodka, one-fifth of Old Forester bourbon, one-fifth of Chivas Regal Scotch, one-fifth of Beefeater gin, and two bottles of Moet & Chandon champagne. For a 24-hour visit. 

24. Bob Saget 

Full House regularly used a 4-foot doll as Michelle's stand-in during rehearsals to limit how long the actress had to work. Bob Saget thought it was funny to sometimes lift the doll representing his on-screen daughter and pretend to have sex with it. 

25. Nirvana

The audience was mean to the opening act at a Nirvana show, booing Calamity Jane and throwing mud at the singers. Nirvana took revenge by putting on the worst show they could. They'd play the opening riffs of their biggest hits, then each time instead launch into their most hated songs, sung badly. 

26. Ashton Kutcher

Kutcher had a whole show of pranks, of course, Punk'd, but one prank never made it intact to air. They covered Zach Braff's $100,000 car in fake spray paint graffiti and had a 12-year-old actor pretend to be the vandal responsible. The kid was supposed to flee and leave Braff alone and in anguish, but Braff caught him and started severely beating him. 

27. Bert Kreischer

28. Brad Pitt 

On New Year's Eve 1999, Pitt invited friends to a Mexican resort, then paid the place to cut the lights at midnight, making it seem like the effect of Y2K. In case that wasn't enough, he then had armed military officials storm the resort and fake-arrest one of his friends ... 

29. The Beatles 

The first time The Beatles took LSD, a dentist friend of theirs dosed them without telling them. They headed to a club, entered the elevator, and started screaming about an imaginary fire. 

30. Adam West

Adam West and Frank Gorshin (who played The Riddler) decided to crash a Hollywood party in full costume. Only, it turned out not to be a party but an orgy. Which threw the two uninvited actors out. 

31. Burt Ward

Ward, who played Robin to Adam West's Batman, told reporters of how the network complained about his visible crotch bulge and made him take pills to reduce the size of his protuberance. Given that doctors know of no such pills, it's fair to say that he was just trolling the press. 

32. Charlize Theron 

How do you break from your character when filming something like Mad Max: Fury Road? By starting a knitting circle. This initially contained just Theron and the other women of the cast, but they soon got Tom Hardy and Nicholas Hoult to join it too. 

33. Michael J. Fox

Playing an '80s kid transported to 1955 forced Michael J. Fox to be the straight man in a bunch of wacky situations. To really have fun, he onetime showed up to the Back to the Future set in a sleeveless T-shirt and played the scene as Cheech Marin's pothead Cheech And Chong character.

34. W.C. Fields

35. Kiefer Sutherland 

Jack Bauer was known for saying "dammit" a lot on 24, prompting a drinking game where viewers follow each of these exclamations with a shot. Once he learned of the game, Kiefer Sutherland resolved to say "dammit" more than a dozen times in an episode to send those kids into alcohol-based comas. 

36. Carlos Bernard

While playing Tony on 24, Bernard had a couple cop friends come on set and fake-arrest costar Mia Kirshner for smoking weed, something she had not actually been doing. Then he came in and fake-fought the cops. It was "a fun day at the office," claimed Bernard.

37. Jefferson Smith

This Oregon politician found a way to unite the parties: Get everyone to sneak the lyrics to "Never Gonna Give You Up" into their House speeches, so he could stitch them all together and make a Rickroll video. This took a year and a half.

38. Barbra Streisand 

Ever made a sex joke related to Indiana Jones' whip? Barbra Streisand made the best one by showing up on Temple of Doom's actual set dressed as a dominatrix and surprise-whipping Harrison Ford. 

39. The Rugrats Animators

When they were bored, the artists working on Rugrats drew some stuff that Nick would probably not include in episodes. Like Tommy watching his parents have sex. Or his mom in S&M gear. Or Tommy's dad lusting after Angelica. 

40. Duncan Scott

This New Mexico politician tried to pass a bill saying that all psychologists and psychiatrists have to dress up as wizards when they testify in court. Sadly, the bill failed. 

41. Mark Summers

42. Elagabalus 

Roman emperors tended to be a bit nutty. Elagabalus fulfilled these expectations by getting his guests drunk, putting them to bed, then releasing a lion or bear into their room. The animal was trained not to attack, but the guest didn't know that. 

43. Keith Moon 

Moon would regularly visit a department store incognito with a friend, ask for the strongest trousers they had, and then test the pair by pulling the legs till they ripped apart. A second friend, a one-legged man, would then walk in and offer extra money for the half-trousers that suited him perfectly. 

44. Russell Brand 

Brand prank-called 79-year-old actor Andrew Sachs, graphically claiming to have slept with his granddaughter. Sachs was so disturbed that even after he realized it was a joke, he refused to speak with his granddaughter for years. 

45. Cary Grant 

Cary Grant had a drinking problem, but he soon found a fine substitute: LSD. Which gave him trippy dreams of pooping, blood, and being a penis.

46. Harlan Ellison 

A publisher snuck a cigarette ad into a Harlan Ellison book against the author's will. So Ellison mailed him 213 bricks, postage to be paid by the recipient. Then he mailed him a dead gopher to give the mailroom a pungent, dead gopher scent. 

47. Penny Mordaunt 

This British MP made it a point to give a speech in Parliament using the word "cock" as much as possible. Since it was a speech on poultry, no one noticed, so she then went to the press to brag about the deed, finally earning her condemnation for lewdness. 

48. Joaquin Phoenix

49. Brook Bangsboll

Brook Bangsboll's name was Brook Bangsboll. That's all the story you need. But this lieutenant colonel also pranked the Pentagon by furtively hanging a painting on the wall -- a painting of a 2004 guy, but Bangsboll added a caption saying it was of a 1908 man lost at sea. 

50. Bill Murray

Bill Murray and Hunter S. Thompson discussed a new type of golf, where someone with a shotgun tries to blast the ball away from the golfer. Sadly, the world was not ready for it. 

51. John Huston 

Huston often directed drunk. Which turned out for the best at least once: When he directed 1951's The African Queen, he drank Scotch while everyone else drank the local water and got dysentery. 

52. Donatello

This famous sculptor pranked a carpenter into thinking he'd switched bodies with some guy named Matteo. Everyone greeted him as Matteo, police (in on the joke) arrested him for Matteo's debts, then Matteo's brother's bailed him out and took him home. Then they drugged him and moved him back to his own bed, and the next day, he met Matteo, who said he'd spent the previous day in the carpenter's body. 

53. Peter Dinklage

Westeros could be a silly place. For one take caught on film, of the very serious scene of Tyrion entering the court for his trial, Dinklage inexplicably started dancing and made everyone clap along to his song.  

54. The Dallas Stars 

The hockey team once played only Nickelback songs for an entire game. 

55. Bryan Cranston