While I’m not usually one to enjoy pranks (I find phony phone calls, for example, to be a bore), I had great fun with this prank.  The article regarding the prank, written by Chris Moody for CNN.com, made me laugh quite a bit:

How One Man Pranked The Presidential Race

Please click on the link above and read the full story…it is worth it.

I’ll provide a summary below, but, again, you should read the whole thing and check out the video as well.

So here’s what happened: Vic Berger, a freelance video editor “with a sharp eye for absurd humor”, took a Jeb! Bush video on YouTube where the candidate talks about his love of Apple products, edits it to highlight Jeb!’s cringe factor, and got a lot of views of it…including from Jeb! Bush’s staff.

Realizing the Jeb! campaign was looking at his work, Mr. Berger communicated with them and stated he would get a Jeb! tattoo if his post hit a million views.  The Jeb! campaign, thinking this was great promotion, aided him in getting those views and Mr. Berger then did (not really) what he promised: He took a video of his visit to a tattoo parlor to get a terrible (and very large) “Jeb4Prez” tattoo on his neck.

And this is where the ingenious/hilarious elements of this prank kicked in.

Though I really wish you’d read the full article, this single paragraph notes what happened next and had me laughing out loud.  I present it in full:

Back on Twitter, an account claiming to be run by Berger’s father started sending messages to Bush and his campaign staff telling them that they had made a terrible mistake encouraging him (to get the tattoo). The man claimed that Berger had “undiagnosed issues” and that by pushing him to go through with it, he had lost his job and that his life was ruined. Berger himself began telling reporters that he no longer wanted to talk because he was repairing relations with his family after the episode.

You can imagine what happened next.  Those “encouraging” Jeb! texts/tweets suddenly disappear and the Jeb! campaign goes silent regarding the issue, thinking they’d just destroyed -or at the very least harmed- a mentally fragile man.

Read the entire article and see the absurd tattoo for yourself!