Sir John Hargrave hated Ashton Kutcher’s MTV show "Punk’d" so much, calling it "Candid Camera for morons," he decided to “punk” the celebrity practical joker himself.
Hargrave did it through an elaborate scheme that included legally changing his own name to Ashton Kutcher and creating a website claiming to have recordings from Kutcher’s personal voicemail, including a message from a trash-talking “mistress” and an angry tirade from Bruce Willis, ex-husband of Kutcher’s wife, actress Demi Moore.
Hargrave legally changed his name to Ashton Kutcher to "punk" the celebrity prankster.
Despite claims from Kutcher’s publicist that the site was a fake, media worldwide picked up the story, exposing a system so hungry for gossip that the truth hardly matters.
“Once you get one mention of something it’s much easier for other journalists to step on board and accept that as truth, even though it’s not,” says Hargrave.
In the end, the real Ashton Kutcher had to admit he had been "punk’d."
Kutcher shouldn't be ashamed. Hargrave has been at this game a lot longer. Few are either brave — or foolish — enough to try the following: signing credit card receipts as Porky Pig and Mariah Carey; smuggling banned books and pornography into Wal-Mart; or posing as a terminally ill girl to test the sincerity of superstar celebrities.
Hargrave has done them all, documenting the capers both on his website, Zug.com — started in 1995, he claims it’s the Internet’s oldest comedy site — and in his book “Prank the Monkey.” He's also working on a second book of kid's pranks.
One of Hargrave's more elaborate stunts involved hiring a Michael Jackson impersonator.
Depending on your opinion, he is either a crusading consumer advocate, devising clever and witty ways to tweak the noses of those in power, or a comic kamikaze going to extremes to make his point. Hargrave, who legally added the “Sir” to his name when Buckingham Palace rebuffed his self-nomination for knighthood, concedes he’s probably a little of both.
“I think normal life is kind of boring and doing [pranks] is just the most thrilling kind of experience that you can have,” he says. “When it works well it’s like robbing a bank.”
On this day, he’s about to play a prank on shopping center patrons in Boston’s historic downtown. He will pretend to be a costumed tour guide dressed like Benjamin Franklin — but the tour will be anything but factual.
It starts with Hargrave telling the story of Franklin’s life, being born on nearby Milk Street and becoming a young printer’s apprentice, but it quickly devolves into madness.
“It culminates in an invention: Ben Franklin’s robot who was sent from the past, is now coming to the future and will be chasing me around,” says Hargrave outside the shopping center.
Hargrave’s frequent accomplice, Moses Blumenstiel, will don a hazmat suit to play the killer robot.
“I just hope they don’t think we’re terrorists,” Blumenstiel says with a little apprehension. Hargrave nods.
Hargrave in costume in Boston.
“How are you sir,” he says to an 11-year-old boy with his mother. “I was one of America’s presidents.”
The boy tugs on his mother’s sleeve, “I told you!”
“I’m on Mount Rushmore,” Hargrave continues.
Smiling, the mother corrects her son, “he’s not on Mount Rushmore, and he wasn’t a president.” Around the corner, Hargrave is getting a kiss on both cheeks from two female tourists.
“Ah, Ben Franklin loves the ladies,” he says, posing for a photograph.
Born on April Fool’s Day, Hargrave says he’s been a prankster all his life — and no one is safe. In fact, he's trying to prank me right now. Hargrave attended the Berklee School of Music, but tells me he actually went to MIT — a school so legendary for pranks that the most elaborate are honored in the student center. As we walk through the Frank Gehry-designed building, he points out the “police cruiser” infamously snuck onto the top of the school’s Great Dome by engineering students in the dark of one February night in 1994.
“It was basically a hollowed-out body of a car — just the chassis — that they had hauled up using ropes and pulleys,” Hargrave explains. “There was a dummy dressed up as a police officer in the seat. There was a box of donuts on the passenger’s seat, and there was a parking ticket on the windshield.”
It’s that kind of cleverness, Hargrave says, that separates a prank from a practical joke. He continues his ruse with me — saying his years MIT also taught him that there should be rules to pranking: no one should get hurt; don’t bully people or damage and destroy things; but most of all, the prank needs to be funny. I'm sure he thinks the prank he's currently pulling on me is hilarious.
For Hargrave, the best pranks are those that challenge authority and power. His aren’t just aimless exercises in humor — they have a point.
He went after Wal-Mart for its policy of not stocking certain items they deemed offensive and “smuggled” in books and magazines which he stocked on Wal-Mart’s shelves.
Upset about the quality of Microsoft products, he cornered Bill Gates at a technology show in Las Vegas and asked him how much he could bench press. Hargrave also grilled Gates about how to shut off the autocorrect feature in Microsoft Word, then gave him a hug and kissed him on the chest.
Hargrave has pranked Congress, utility companies, and even email spammers. When unsolicited ads for a get-rich-quick seminar jammed his inbox, he tracked down the real estate guru who sent them and woke him up with a 4 a.m. phone call asking to be taken off the mailing list.
While some of his pranks seem to cross the line, Hargrave believes that making people uncomfortable also gets them to think.
Take what he calls his “Celebrity Sincerity Test,” in which he wrote a letter to eleven celebrities, posing as a terminally ill 11-year-old girl.
Some celebs, like Angelina Jolie and Oprah Winfrey, didn’t respond at all. Others like Bono and Jerry Lewis were quite generous, sending signed photographs and T-shirts. But jailed serial killer Charles Manson sent a package containing three hand-carved wooden keepsake boxes. One had an engraved pink heart on top, another, the word “Love” with the message “From: Manson” carved inside the lid.
“The most sincere celebrity,” says Hargrave, ”was the man with blood on his hands.”
Meanwhile, back at the Boston shopping center, Hargrave dressed as Ben Franklin has begun his spiel in the building’s rotunda. Visitors look amused as he tells them he invented the urinary catheter. The security guards are decidedly less pleased.
They ask him to leave repeatedly, but Hargrave never breaks character. They slump off for a moment, unable to derail the performance. Then Hargrave begins warning of the giant robot he created. Blumenstiel appears in the silver hazmat suit and begins chasing Hargrave around the building. Security follows, chasing them both out the door.
For Hargrave, shaking up the status quo, even for a few minutes, is worth the risk.
“Every one of those people will have this fantastic story to tell when they go home about this crazy guy dressed up like Ben Franklin who was chased by a robot who was chased by security guards,” he says. “You can’t buy that kind of entertainment.”
Producers: Kevin Sites and Jamie Rubin
Camera: Kevin Sites
Video Editor: Jon Brick
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