Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

  • http://twitter.com/randywalters Randy Walters

    That’s just mean.

    • strangefriend

        . . . none of those waked up didn’t immediately come up with a 9MM & pumped seven bullets at anyone moving.  I’m surprised.

      • Preston Sturges

        What was the line from the Venture Brothers?  

        “If that happened to me I would run right at the first living thing I saw and kill it.” 

        Update – that was ATHF, Master Shake of course

        http://www.hark.com/clips/chlxgylfdd-kill-it

  • spacemunky

    Look at that spousal abuse. Just look at it.

  • Kenmrph

    Watching that made me a terrible person.

    • LinkMan

       I feel less guilty about the watching and more guilty about how hard I laughed at some of the dumbest ones…

      • ldobe

        I’ve perpetrated a number of them.  The table’s my favorite, I wish I’d been that creative.  I let sleeping dogs lie now.

  • blueelm

    These are people I never ever want to know.

    • http://celesteagnes.blogspot.com/ Sekino

       I’d want to know them just to know how best to avoid them.

  • BarBarSeven

    Quick! Someone overdub David Bowie’s “This is Not America” to it.

    • http://twitter.com/amanicdroid Dr. Chronobiologist

      Excellent song choice:
      The Ultimate Wake Up PRANK Compilation vs. This Is Not America
      http://youtubedoubler.com/7h4U

    • http://twitter.com/amanicdroid Dr. Chronobiologist

      For fun I made a 90s Bowie edition:
      The Ultimate Wake Up PRANK Compilation vs. David Bowie – I’m Afraid Of Americans
      http://youtubedoubler.com/7h5b

    • http://twitter.com/amanicdroid Dr. Chronobiologist

       And..
      The Ultimate Wake Up PRANK Compilation vs. Benny Hill Theme
      http://youtubedoubler.com/7h6M

    • PaulDavisTheFirst

       please. Pet Shop Boys “I want to wake up” ….

      • gijoel

         Wham’s “Wake me up, before you go.”

  • millie fink

    Oh lordie, so MANY assholes in this world.

    • Paul Renault

       No kidding!  It reminded me why, after the first set of room mates, I always lived by myself.

  • gwailo_joe

    But…why?

    (because people are fucking assholes…that’s why)

    Yet while watching, I laughed.  Which makes me culpable in such crimes against humanity.  I’m a terrible person, but at least I’m not alone!

  • timquinn

    Don’t be too hard on yourself. It is your lizard brain laughing at those poor people.

    • oasisob1

      I call it a caveman brain. I don’t want to be associated with lizards – the conspiracies, you know.

      • http://www.facebook.com/major.schlochbrennt Major Schlochbrennt

         I, for one, welcome our new lizard overlords.

  • splashu

    I have a good sense of humor, but mean spirited pranks like this are awful and I hope the idiots that make them got it back twice as hard. I can never understand why some people think it’s funny or okay to be completely shitty and humiliate the people they claim to be friends with.

    • http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi

      Because then as a friend you get the opportunity to do the same back and hilarity ensues?

      • http://twitter.com/amanicdroid Dr. Chronobiologist

        this is why we can’t be friends.

    • http://twitter.com/amanicdroid Dr. Chronobiologist

       I have a terrible sense of humour and agree with your statement. While I don’t actively hope some of the assholes got stabbed mid-reaction, I’m fine with it if they did.

    • SomeGuyNamedMark

      Lucky no one had stroke.  Going from being asleep to screaming.

    • http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog

      “I hope the idiots that make them got it back twice as hard.”  Maybe that’s what (some of) these videos are?

  • http://www.facebook.com/matthew.urso Matthew Urso

    this is the greatest thing i’ve ever watched

  • http://twitter.com/Moriash Nathan

    Followed immediately by the “Well Deserved Beatings of Spouse/S.O./Roommate Supercut.”

    • http://twitter.com/amanicdroid Dr. Chronobiologist

      “That’s why your house burned down and I’m not sorry” mix

      • Preston Sturges

        That’ll happen when you play with fireworks indoors. 

    • SomeGuyNamedMark

      Followed by submitting the video to the divorce lawyer later

  • http://twitter.com/DreAmeoba Gordon Klock

    I used to think milder versions of this kinda stuff was funny,I outgrew that.To be honest, if someone were to pull this stuff on me when I was sleeping (& especially if I was having an interesting dream),I would probably go serious Frankenstein violent,(& normally I’m a pathologically peaceful ‘wuss’),throwing furniture around in a tormented state of homicidal rage.
    I am the sort who takes his dreams seriously,& feel exasperated rage toward those who don’t understand that.

    • Antinous / Moderator

      The videos of people pranking people with PTSD are in the evidence locker.

    • http://profiles.google.com/spacewatcer Marios P.

      I wonder how good the Frankestain attack would work agains the guy with the chaisaw… Prolly nobody could saw you up to Frankestain’s level of perfection…

    • Jerril

       I sort of want one of these assholes to try this on my sister. Not because I hate my sister, but because if you wake her up from the Deep Sleep part of the REM cycle (even gently) the only part that comes online for about 10 seconds is the lizard brain, and it’s in full Fight/Flight mode, and firmly set to Fight.

      Like, tap her on the shoulder and she tries to strangle you until she wakes up properly sort of thing. I can’t IMAGINE what she’d be like if someone tried one of these.

  • http://twitter.com/HubrisSonic HubrisSonic

    Hey, hey, hey, hey-now. Don’t be mean; we don’t have to be mean, cuz, remember, no matter where you go, there you are. 

    • Antinous / Moderator

      If you can’t be with the one you injure, injure the one you’re with.

    • noah django

       Blue Blaze Irregular, reporting.

  • alan brown

    Didn’t laugh.  Just a compilation of people being assholes.  The world doesn’t need any more assholes, never mind a video celebrating their behaviour.

    • Rindan

      If you didn’t laugh, you are not human.  You can feel disgusted, but seriously, the vindictive ape in you is also hooting at the top of its lungs with sadistic glee.

      • Antinous / Moderator

        If you’ve been the victim of violence, you might not find it very funny at all.

      • welcomeabored

        I have no problem laughing at the pranks of Jackasses harming themselves.  It’s low humor, but still pretty funny.  No problem with the Clousseaus and Katos trying to do each other in.  Hysterical.

        Hurting someone while they’re sleeping, literally scaring the piss out of them for laughs? – that’s mean, cowardly and stupid, imo. 

        I try to keep my ‘ inner ape’ on a tight leash, but sometimes I fail and have to ask for forgiveness.  Now *that’s* human.

      • Jerril

         My vindictive ape doesn’t know any of these victims, why the hell would it be gleeful?

      • mrgoldenbrown

        Today I learned I’m inhuman for having too much empathy to laugh at pointless cruelty.

    • SomeGuyNamedMark

       Well at least now you have video records of who some of them are.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jane-E-Hawkins/1810641406 Jane E. Hawkins

       I laughed, but if someone pulled even the mildest of those stunts on me I might wind up in jail for murder. 

  • KBert

     Very sad ways to wake up anyone. Mean asses.

  • Nat trax

    I think the harmless ones are funny, waking up the wife in front of the truck being towed. The one where they woke the guy up put a banana in his mouth, gave him a tv and walked him into the closet was priceless, and harmless.

    • http://www.facebook.com/matthew.urso Matthew Urso

      the moustraps on the ears and the dudes head in the fan were a bit much for me, but i’m all for giving people heart attacks

    • Preston Sturges

      After falling asleep while driving, I pulled into an empty rest area.  Because of the load in the back seat, I could not recline so I nodded off sitting up.  I woke up thinking I’d fallen asleep while driving again, and I found myself parked  in the middle of an empty parking lot, clutching the steering wheel and screaming.  Refreshed, I continued on my way. 

      • SamSam

        I woke up thinking I’d fallen asleep while driving again

        Remind me where you live again, and which streets you usually fall asleep on?

        • Preston Sturges

          A friend used to fall asleep at the wheel and one night he nodded off on winding road, then awoke with a thump but he was on the road and drove home no trouble.  The next day he went back to the S curve and could see tire tracks where he had gone through the front yard of a house, just missed the house,  passed through a 5′ gap between a couple trees, sailed off an embankment and landed back in his lane.

    • oasisob1

      Yes, Russian guy was absolutely the best. He paused in the closet for a moment, collected his thoughts, exited the closet (not ‘came out’), calmly told his friends to fuck off and went back to bed. He was the real hero.

    • otterhead

      Some of these are downright horrifying — who the hell wakes up their spouse by throwing eggs at her for lulz? — but the Russian banana guy and the truck fellow were brilliant bright spots.

      • mkanoap

         I think those were snowballs.

    • invictus

      The TV and closet prank has been one of my favourites for a long time. Not only is it almost entirely harmless, it’s also largely truthful. The perpetrator yells “get up, we’re being flooded! Grab the TV, save the teddy bear, leave me, and run for the closet!”

      The banana, well… I got nuth’n, but given where we’re having this conversation…

      Just look at it.

  • http://twitter.com/amanicdroid Dr. Chronobiologist

    Because hitting someone with a hammer on camera is just cruel while surprising them into bashing their head is hilarious. To prove this I’ll dig out a link for “3 guys 1 hammer” and get an audience poll (no I won’t).

    • spacedmonkey

      That’s pretty much the plot of a lot of totally hilarious Marx Brothers and Abbot and Costello routines.

      • Antinous / Moderator

        You know that those were fiction? Featuring actors.

        • Preston Sturges

          When we were kids we didn’t have any of your fancy video games. For entertainment, we took turns hitting each other in the head with a hammer.And if you were good, maybe you got a new hammer for Christmas. And we LIKED it.

  • Katey Corrigan

    What next, Gallon Smashing on Boing Boing?

    • oasisob1

      Galleon smashing? That would be awesome!

  • The Rizz

    …and here I was hoping this would be a compilation of movie clips of bad ways to wake up. Anyone up for putting together such a video rebuttal to this, so we can actually laugh without being assholes?  (First clip suggestion: The first scene in Shakes the Clown.)

  • Jaan

    I once woke up my friend, who was sleeping in the back seat of his own car, by doing donuts in the snow on the highway.  I would have given anything to have a camera.  He thought we were in an accident.

  • Shanjaq

    Anyone notice the dark syruppy liquid gushing out the head of the unfortunate ceiling fan victim?

    • robuluz

      It was hair, not sweet delicious brains.

  • nachoproblem

    I didn’t do so much laughing as wondering when it would become a snuff film. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=13001904 Jeremy Sweeney

    The clip where the two guys flip the couch and slam their friend’s face into the wall? If that happened to me, I’d wake up in jail after kniving them repeatedly. I appreciate the creativity of a lot of these fools, but 75% of the clips show hideously dangerous and largely fatal stuff, especially the poor sucker who almost got decapitated by the ceiling fan. Thanks, Xeni, for taking BB into Jackass territory.

    • http://profiles.google.com/joshuabardwell Joshua Bardwell

      I have owned many ceiling fans in my life, and for the life of me, I cannot imagine how one could be “decapitated” by them, or even, really, seriously injured. A bruising at best.

      • Preston Sturges

        I knew someone with a big scar from getting hit by one of the sheet metal ceiling fans.

        • Antinous / Moderator

          I bought one that was meant to go in a warehouse. The slowest speed was about twice as fast as any fan that I’ve ever seen. The top speed blew the end tables over.

      • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BOOM27DBLMZQIJVK4BQLE7K5YA Nagurski

         Mythbusters explores this possibility in excruciating detail:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wVVkCJpY4U

      • brucearthurs

        Once when my wife and I were getting into bed, she spied a large spider crawling across the ceiling.  Being the gallant type, I stood up on the bed and started chasing the spider, trying to swat it and missing repeatedly.  I was interrupted in my efforts by the sudden BONKETABONKETABONKETA across the back of my head.  Only temporarily painful, I can report.  I don’t remember if I ever managed to smack the spider.

        (My wife didn’t laugh.  Damn good wife, she is.)

    • SomeGuyNamedMark

      Hey, you have to be pretty clever to prank someone who is unconscious.

    • jackbird

      Did you notice that the same guys and couch appear to be involved in the “stuff the guy’s mouth with wasabi and have him hurl all over your basement” one?

  • robuluz

    Crowd’s getting ugly. Add one more vote for faint sense of guilt but awesomely laugh out loud funny.

  • anansi133

    If Boingboing depicts men being mean to women, I can assume it’s to illustrate some point about feminism. But if it’s just generic human beings being mean to others, I’m just left with the message that people are shit. I guess I should be happy that no one’s ever done this sort of thing to me (outside of basic training, anyway!) and I’ve never heard anyone I know speak of doing such things.

     On a basic level, society is founded on the need to leave someone watching out for danger while you sleep. I can’t imagine a better illustration of the dissolution of society than this video. Laughs a plenty, sure! _The Mountain People_ of northern Uganda comes to mind.

     Yuck.

    • Preston Sturges

      I many shamanistic cultures it is taboo to awaken someone because the soul roams the earth when the sleeper dreams, and awakening the sleeper could leave them without their soul and insane. Likewise it can be forbidden to put a hat on a sleeping person or otherwise disguise them so the soul can’t recognize their home.  Presumably this includes using felt tip markers to draw dicks on someone’s face. 

  • Steve Taylor

    An no one’s said “Christ what an asshole!” yet? We’re getting slack.

    Ok – I guess technically “Christ what a lovingly curated collection of assholes”.

    • SomeGuyNamedMark

      “Christ what a lovingly curated collection of assholes”.

      There are websites for that…

  • steve heath

    Years ago when my teenaged sons failed to get up after the 3rd call I would slip the nozzle of a CO2 fire extinguisher under the sheets and fire it off. It sounds like a tornado on steroids and produces an impressive cloud of cold white fog. So instantly awake, so insanely pissed, so unlikely to stay in bed in the future. Of course the rotten little darlings returned the favor. I do draw the line at likely physical harm though…the ceiling fan stunt was not ok

    • SamSam

      And then you replaced the fire extinguisher every time you did that, right?

      Those things are really not supposed to be used more than once.

  • brerrabbit23

    Xeni.0

  • Daemonworks

    Two words: Justifiable homicide.

  • http://profiles.google.com/marc.k.mielke Marc Mielke

    That one where the gf woke her guy up to an ENTIRE ROOM FULL OF MOUSETRAPS must have taken some time. Someone spending that much time setting mousetraps must be seriously vindictive. 

  • http://twitter.com/twistmeyer Mike Meyer

    This is why I’m glad I live alone.

  • Preston Sturges

    Put your shoes on, honey. we’re at grandma’s house. 

  • GlyphGryph

    Some of these are potentially amusing – I come from a family that appreciates a good scare, and the chainsaw+mask one would have gone over awesomely, heh. As would the backward truck one. Even the more outright pranky ones are pretty funny assuming a situation where’s part of an actual playful back and forth instead of just feeling like a dick move.

    But a lot of these, well… dick move is probably the best you’re going to get as a descriptor, being generous.

  • bolamig

    Lots of potentially brain damaging concussions clearly followed.  Makes you wonder how the perpetrators got their brains damaged.

  • http://twitter.com/sckinjctn SCK

    I laughed, sometimes. I especially laughed at the truck on the highway one, since my wife and I drive long distances a lot and that has its… potential. But most of these are superdickish. If I did ANY of those to my wife, who is INCREDIBLY hard to wake up, I’d happily expect and accept divorce papers later that day. But some of them were still funny.

  • Robo Pastierovič

    That woman waking up next to a stranger is so funny. Will have to try some day :-D

    • Ipo

      No, don’t.  It’s happened to me. 
      It’s not the waking up part that seemed like fun at the time. 

      • Preston Sturges

         ”I went home with you?”

    • blueelm

      Yeah. Right up there with waking up with a plastic bag on your head. Cuz nothings funnier than thinking you’re about to get raped!

    • Preston Sturges

      I think that was a mannequin head

      • Forkboy

         Yeah it’s a pretty famous prank from the Prankvsprank Youtube channel (AKA “the crasiest couple on the internet”)

  • howaboutthisdangit

    I hope to see a flood of funny revenge videos as a result of this.

    A few of those dickheads may have caused serious injuries. I’d be the sort to retaliate HARD.

    • DreamboatSkanky

      Maybe these are the revenge videos?

      • http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog

        That was my assumption.  Not that this is a healthy way to go about resolving problems, but presumably some of these antics lack context.

  • KevinRaposo

    Wow, a lot of these were hilarious! I felt bad for the kid with the mouthful of Wasabi sauce!!

  • SomeGuyNamedMark

    Not sure what is clever about going to someone sleeping and just smashing stuff on them.  Sounds like the Ted Bundy school of comedy.

  • bardfinn

    I seem to recall reading something somewhere about US case law (or possibly military case law) setting a time span after awaking in which one’s actions are blameless – the theory being: fugue states, dreaming persistence, blood flow, lack of rational capability, persists for a period of time after sleep is interrupted.
    Damned if I can find a citation.

    I guess what I’m trying to say here is, caveat joculator; ignoratio somnium excusat.

  • Sean Nelson

    Is there any better investment than causing permanent hearing damage or other serious injury to an unsuspecting loved one for a few seconds of laughter?  /s

  • http://www.facebook.com/juancarlos.diaz.73997861 Juan Carlos Diaz

    the russian guy with the banana tv and teddy bear is fucking amazing. Fuck you, im keeping the teddy. 

    • howaboutthisdangit

      As I watched that part, the words “Just look at it!” ran through my mind.  I spend too much time reading BB.

      • bardfinn

        Nosir, you’ve spent /just enough/.

  • MossWatson

    The only reason I even finished watching this video was because I was hoping that at least one “prankster” would have ended up getting punched in the face. 

  • UncaScrooge

    The world needs assholes, but their endless drive needs to be channeled into something productive. Otherwise you end up with a mildly amusing catalog of Crimes Against Sleep. Just think if these kids were in charge of the theatrical end of labor demonstrations. We’d all be working a three day week by now.

    • http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog

      Careful there, that cuts both ways: remember what happened to ACORN?

      EDIT: Sonofagun, he’s in the news…

  • Fangaffes

    If any of those happened to me, the perpetrator would not wake up.  Christ, what a bunch of assholes!

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Andy-Murdock/783770273 Andy Murdock

    If you kill one of these pranksters in the first 15 seconds after waking up, you would be able to claim self defense and not be charged. Some of these psychotic morons don’t deserve a beating heart.

  • Preston Sturges

    My dad woke me one time by bonking me on the head with a big novelty inflatable bottle of Seagrams, not realizing that the weight in the bottom of the bottle was a disk of pasteboard that hit me in the forehead.

    You know, stuff like that gives you permission to make your own mistakes as a parent.

  • brucearthurs

    I remember one time as a kid when my family was camping.  The big tent only held four people, so a couple of my brothers slept in smaller pup tents.  Dave was one of them, and he slept with the end of the pup tent open, his head visible.

    As it happened, Dave was really phobic about spiders.  As it also happened, the campground had a whole lot of Daddy-Long-Legs spiders around.  One morning, when all us brothers except Dave were awake, we put two and two together, gathered up a bunch of the Daddy-Long-Legs, and dropped them onto Dave’s face.

    It was hilarious.  Being chased around the campground by a screaming brother with a Boy Scout hatchet in his hand, not so much.