5 Dickish Pranks That Celebs Pulled in School

5 Conan O’Brien Stole Burt Ward’s Robin Costume

When O’Brien was a student at Harvard, Ward came by to speak, which was pure arrogance on the actor’s part. Not only was Ward known for delivering blatant lies about his time on the Batman TV show, but he now prepared for his Harvard appearance by giving an interview to the Crimson newspaper — rather than doing the responsible thing and speaking to The Harvard Lampoon, where Conan wrote. 

Clearly, Ward needed to be taken down a peg. The solution was to steal the original Robin costume, which Ward was bringing with him to show off during the talk. 

Step one was approaching Ward disguised as security, to talk to him and determine precisely how he would be displaying the costume at the event. This bit of recon is less absurd than it sounds. Dressing as security perhaps requires just a tucked-in shirt and a nametag, and many a college student has used this trick to slip into functions where they don’t belong.

Step two was just flicking the lights off at the event, grabbing the costume and running off. Conan and his friends took it somewhere private and snapped photos with it then sent it back to Ward, to avoid actual arrest.

In the end, maybe Conan was the one who missed the joke. According to the students who invited Ward to speak at Harvard (including Peter Sagal, who’d go on to a career at NPR), inviting him was a prank in itself. They were treating him as an intellectual, which he clearly was not. This prank offered subtlety, insisted Sagal, which isn’t necessarily Conan’s style. 

4 The Imprisoned Donkey

James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Last of the Mohicans in 1826. He wrote dozens of other novels as a well, which made for quite an accomplished career for someone who had been expelled from Yale at the age of 16. 

The first offense: locking a donkey in a classroom. Well, that just sounds like fun for everyone and merited no punishment at all. 

The second offense was slightly more serious. He built his own bomb and set it off to try to break into another person’s dorm room. Exactly why he wanted to enter this room wasn’t recorded. Perhaps there was a donkey locked inside it, and he wanted to set it free. 

3 Steve Wozniak and the Fake Bomb

Wozniak, meanwhile, didn’t do something so crazy as set off a bomb when he was a kid at Homestead High School in Cupertino. No, he merely constructed a fake bomb, by sticking the labels from batteries onto a metronome of his own design. Left on its own, the metronome emitted a steady tick-tick-tick noise. Once disturbed, the device would suddenly start ticking at a much faster rate, just like a bomb about to go off.

He stuck this not-bomb into someone’s locker. He felt no particular fear about landing in trouble over this, and when he was summoned to the principal’s office a little after that, he thought this was going to be a commendation for a recent math prize he’d won. Wozniak was a high-level nerd, in case that wasn’t already clear. Instead, he faced a meeting with the police. His contraption wasn’t a real bomb, but he’d committed a severe enough offense to be sentenced to a night in juvie. 

There, he met several budding criminals, which inspired him to found Apple. 

2 Burning a Bunch of Cacti

Early in the 1980s, Munich was fortunate to host an exchange student from the exotic country of England. His name was Nick Clegg from London’s Westminster School, and during his stay in Germany, he was going to live with a professor and his family. 

One night, 16-year-old Nick got drunk and decided on a fine prank. He’d take out his lighter and set fire to the professor’s cactus collection. You might think a “prank” requires some level of deception, but fire is also always an option.

This incident resulted in his getting arrested, followed by having to manually collect replacement plants once he was back home in England. He then went on to become Deputy Prime Minister of the nation. He no longer has that position, but he remains a knight, which means he may soon need to use his fire powers to defend us all. 

1 John Cleese and the Shitting Statue

When Cleese was a boy at Clifton College, he placed footprints on the ground to make it look like a statue had gotten up and visited the lavatory before returning to its post. The way the story sometimes get told, this resulted in the school expelling him. One problem with that account is that Cleese did not, in fact, ever get expelled from Clifton College, but the remaining parts of the story sound valid enough. 

The statue was of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander of British forces on the Western Front during World War I. Some consider Haig to be one of the greatest generals in history, because he led the campaign that ended with Britain’s side ending the war. Others consider Haig to be one of the worst generals in history because he waged this campaign by essentially throwing hundreds of thousands of his own side’s bodies into a meat grinder, sometimes for no reason at all.

“Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse,” was one of his quotes, referring not only to the war he’d just fought but to wars of the future. That actually wasn’t the most ridiculous thing to say, but it’s notable in light of how his faith in horses up to this point had been tested and should have been challenged. Haig had believed machine guns were similarly no match for a man on a horse, which led to such adventures as the Battle of the Somme, where his side had 600,000 casualties without gaining anything. 

But none of that is the craziest thing about Field Marshal Douglas Haig. The craziest thing about him is that they made a statue of him after he died, and then one night, that statue walked to a toilet to take a shit and then turned around and walked back. That sounds so unlikely that it’s almost hard to believe, but we found forensic proof of it, in the form of a trail of footprints. 

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