When someone doesn’t get a joke or a prank, there’s usually two things you can do.
Either admit it was all a joke straight away, clearing the air so everyone can (hopefully) have a laugh about it. Or, you can double down, really commit to your prank and see how far it takes you.
The latter is definitely the riskier option, and often depends on the prankster’s acting abilities and confidence in their own jokes. Maybe you’ll get another five minutes out of the joke, maybe it’ll last months. On the other hand, it could end things between you and your significant other almost immediately.
Ryan Hill is one such joker, who decided to pull a prank on his girlfriend with the help of a very convincing appearance-changing Snapchat filter.
The social media app recently introduced a new filter, not another animated animal one, but one that will allow people to transform themselves into the opposite gender.
As he wrote on Facebook:
Snap chat has a filter that makes you look like a girl, so I thought it would be a good idea to wind my gf up and send her this, she didn’t take it well. See images below
Ryan sent his unassuming girlfriend a picture with the caption: ‘I have your bf’s t-shirt on’. It’s obviously a convincing photo, which was kind of the idea, though things did not turn out as he expected.
Ryan then sent his partner a text saying: ‘Don’t look at the snap I just sent you’. If there’s ever a message to make someone definitely look at a snap, that would be it.
Understandably confused, angry, and in full belief that the image wasn’t Ryan, she replied: ‘Are you fucking serious. Don’t even bother coming here after work.’
It was then that Ryan decided to double down on his prank, saying: ‘Why? What was it’.
However, even after owning up to the prank, Ryan still couldn’t convince his girlfriend that it was actually him in the picture, not another girl.
Ryan then tried to pass it off as banter – which, admittedly, it was – but anyone who tries to tell someone to calm down because ‘it’s only banter’ should know that phrase is only going to enrage them more.
Thankfully, Ryan’s tale might be a lesson to the rest of us – it’s never ‘only banter’.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.