5 funny pranks to play on your housemates
No uni experience is complete without a good old prank war. Here’s the best of the best… As a student, you’re basically in the prime of your pranking life – you’re living with your best mates, and never again will you get such an opportunity to wind them up, night and day.
Having multiple housemates means you’re spoilt for choice when choosing who to target (if you can’t choose, prank them all).
If you pull off some good pranks, they’re bound to create some of your funniest uni memories – just remember to keep it safe…
Funny pranks to do at home
Here are our best pranks to play on your housemates without ruining friendships:
1. Take the labels off their tins prank
This prank is great because despite only taking a couple of minutes, it causes months of headaches: break into your flatmate’s kitchen cupboard and peel all the labels off their tins. Suddenly their cupboard becomes a Russian roulette of foody surprises – will it be baked beans or custard? The only way they’ll be able to find out is by opening the tins – meaning they’ll have to use up whatever’s in there pretty quickly. So simple but so effective.
Elite prank tip: Add in other tins, such as pet food or something equally gross, and remove the labels from those too.
2. Wrapping paper on furniture prank
While there are loads of different bedroom pranks around, these are probably some of the funniest. However, half the time they take a lot longer to create than they do for the victim to put right, so you’re just pranking yourself really. You can fill their bedroom with hundreds of balloons (fill some with baked beans, talcum powder, or custard for added ‘pop’ factor), cover the floor with millions of water-filled cups, or sellotape everything to the ceiling.
The classic uni prank is the wrapping paper one, though. If you’re going to do it, you have to do it properly and that means wrapping the floors, walls, ceiling, bed, furniture, and anything else on the show. You can use wrapping paper, tinfoil, or newspaper but keep it consistent. If nothing else it’s good practice for when Christmas rolls around…
3. Fake cracked computer screen desktop prank
4. Hide an alarm clock in their room
Housemate, not a morning person? Buy a mini alarm clock, set it for 5 am, and hide it somewhere in their room. You can then enjoy sweet dreams of them stumbling around trying to find the source of noise in the early hours. Ramp up the evil genius factor by hiding multiple alarm clocks, with their alarms set an hour apart. Just be aware that depending on how soundproof your house is, you could annoy quite a few housemates with this one…
5. Autocorrect their words
This one is best to play on more technologically-incompetent parents but works well at uni too.
You basically set autocorrect on their phone or laptop to replace certain words with another phrase.
If you manage to get hold of their iPhone, go to Settings > General > Keyboard and click ‘Text Replacement’. There, you can make words they type autocorrect to something totally different.
You can do the same on Google docs or Microsoft too. In ‘Tools’ select ‘Preferences’ for Google docs or head to File > Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect Options in Microsoft Word.
You’ll then be given the option to enter a word that you’d like to be replaced with something different.
