At the end of the day, I know that I make my living by dressing up, fooling around, playing pranks and giving people a good time. I am enjoying the ride.
I've been doing pranks my whole life, so I guess I'm pretty good at it.
For about 30 years, Halloween was taken over by pranksters. By the '30s, pranks were causing cities millions of dollars of damage. They considered banning Halloween in many cities, but instead, parents got together and came up with party ideas for kids, and a lot of them involved dressing up and costuming.
If anything, 'Friday Night Dinner' is quite mean. All these pranks that we play on each other, there's a lot of hitting and slapping and jumping at each other trying to scare each other. But underneath it all it is a family, so we all love each other.
I guess when I was a kid I wasn't the type of person playing a lot of pranks. I was the type of person upon whom pranks were pulled.
When I was in school I used to prank my teachers all the time. But I was really, really nice. I love to make people laugh. And even in those pranks, the teachers would laugh most of the time.
Whenever I read stories of people doing huge pranks on set, all I think is, 'These people have too much time on their hands.' Besides, I don't want to make some poor assistant clean up someone's trailer after I've filled it with, say, Cadbury eggs. See? I can't even think of a good prank.
Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.
One of my all-time favorite pranks was gaining unauthorized access to the telephone switch and changing the class of service of a fellow phone phreak. When he'd attempt to make a call from home, he'd get a message telling him to deposit a dime, because the telephone company switch received input that indicated he was calling from a pay phone.
I met Woz when I was 13, at a friend's garage. He was about 18. He was, like, the first person I met who knew more electronics than I did at that point. We became good friends, because we shared an interest in computers and we had a sense of humor. We pulled all kinds of pranks together.