Punk'd, Minneota Style

Many of you who met her may not have realized this, but Charlotte has a very good sense of humor and loves a good prank.  So when her brother came, she wanted to play all sorts of pranks, like giving him an Oreo with toothpaste instead of cream. Unfortunately for Toby, he didn’t know what an Oreo was supposed to taste like and just thought it was a really bad cookie.

The biggest prank Charlotte wanted to play on him was to pretend that someone from the newspaper was coming to interview them and then have the interviewer be unbelievably ignorant about German culture.  We knew that Josh and Hank, a couple of high schoolers in Minneota, would be great for the job.  This prank was pulled together at the last minute so there was no time to rehearse or go over any questions. The result was absolutely hilarious though painful to watch.  I was able to catch half of it on video.

I accidentally stopped the video from taping so I missed the part where Hank acts like he thinks the reason exchange students come to America is because they don’t have schools so they need to come here for an education.  Toby responded by saying, “You think the Mercedes Benz was created by someone who had only one year of education in America?” Hank just responded by looking confused, and when Toby listed many great inventions that were created by German engineers, he very innocently said, “I guess I just thought all of those things were invented by American engineers.”  

Hank and Josh started out asking very serious questions and engaged in a somewhat intelligent conversation before easing into the dumber questions.  Hank did an amazing job of keeping a straight face – you can see Josh covering his smile from time to time, and the rest of us took turns leaving the room to laugh and come back once we had calmed down. Charlotte told her mom what was going on so she was able to enjoy it, too.

This clip starts at end of any intelligent conversation on Hank’s and Josh’s part. Before you watch this clip, a few explanations:

-          Charlotte had a list of questions that other exchange students had actually been asked and we passed it onto Josh and Hank to use.  As they didn’t really have time to prepare, they just read them off and improvised from there.  As soon as Hank read the question about concentration camps, he thought, “I probably should have skipped that one….” to himself, but there wasn’t much he could do once he got there without spoiling the joke.  Fortunately, they actually found it funny. Afterwards.

-          Elena just happened to pick up a corn cob the day before this on our walk and brought it home so I had it on hand.  Toby had actually been told the same thing about corn cobs when he was an exchange student in Kansas 15 years ago. He (rightly) assumed they were kidding then, but when he heard it for a second time he thought maybe it’s true.

-          You will see Toby and Natalia looking over towards us again and again.  We were all just standing there stone-faced, trying not to react, and they couldn’t figure out why we were not either laughing or becoming horrified by the complete idiocy of this interview.

I should also give a disclaimer: there is one swear word in this video so you may want to preview it before showing it to children.

 

Since I wasn’t actually taping the end of the interview, I started taping after it was done (thinking I was stopping it) so you can see a bit of their reaction when they found out.