Title: Emergency Landing
General Information about Item:
- Customary, Practical Joke
- Language: English
- Country of Origin: United States
- Informant: Jack Kurtz
- This data was collected during a one-on-one interview in the library of Dartmouth College with Jack Kurtz on October 28th, 2018.
Informant Data:
- Jack Kurtz ‘21 is a male student studying Economics and Quantitative Social Sciences at Dartmouth College. He is originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Jack participated in a canoeing trip before the start of his Freshman year at Dartmouth as part of the First Year Trips DOC program.
Contextual Data:
- Social Context
- Jack encountered this joke first when he was a tripee during August of 2017. Jack described that this practical joke is specific to the canoeing section of trips, where students camp out by an airstrip.
- This joke is typically played by upperclassmen or students leading trips on their first year tripees. As the objects of the prank, the new freshmen are supposed to be initiated and bonded together as a new class by going through the embarrassment of this prank together.
- Cultural Context
- This joke occurs on first year trips, which close to 95% of every incoming class at Dartmouth College participates in. Trips are used as a way to welcome each new class to Dartmouth and to break down whatever misconceptions they might have. Accordingly, jokes on trips are used often as they a offer great way to subvert expectations and to make everyone have a good time. Typically, the practical joke is played once the members of the trip and the leaders have left Dartmouth’s campus and are together somewhere in the surrounding wilderness of New Hampshire/Vermont. In this way, practical jokes like this one are very common to the Trips setting as they serve to bring everyone closer together through group humiliation/embarrassment.
Item:
During canoeing sections of trips each year, trips camp one night next to an old, seemingly unusable airstrip. In the middle of the night, their trip leaders and members of Trips Crew come and wake them up, telling them that they need to move their campsite and provide help with a plane that is attempting to make an emergency landing. When all the tripees get involved and begin waving flashlights to signal the impending arrival of the supposed plane, a bus with wings strapped to its sides arrives, much to the chagrin of all of the tripees.
Transcript:
- Jackson: Could you tell me a little bit about your name and background?
- Jack: Yeah, my name is Jack Kurtz. I’m from Philadelphia. I’m a 21 here at Dartmouth.
- Jackson: What are you studying?
- Jack: I’m studying Economics and Quantitative Social Sciences.
- Jackson: So, I understand you went on first year trips. Where there any really funny pranks or anything that happened that was of note before you came to Dartmouth?
- Jack: Yeah, so there was one while I was on canoeing. We were camping by this old landing strip that airplanes used to land on in the middle of New Hampshire, actually it was Maine. They [our trip leaders] woke us up in the middle of the night, when a group of the Grant Crew raided our trip. They told us that there was a plane that was coming in that needed to make an emergency landing because of some mechanical failure. They got everyone like woken up because we were all still kind of tired, and so we believed them and we all ran out. We were supposed to line the runway with flashlights so they knew where to land, so we all had headlamps and flashlights and like waving them and then they pulled out of the woods in like a truck that they had put wings on. At that point, I guess it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t a plane, but they still got everyone pretty good.
- Jackson: Thanks!
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
Audio file
Informant’s Comments:
- “We were so tired we just were in a total panic when our leaders woke us up. I thought it was really funny after the fact, though”
Collectors’ Comments:
- As Jack mentioned, the brief experience of fear and the need to work together as a team to accomplish a supposed goal both brought his trip together and served as a really funny way to prank everyone. The fact that this prank was taken as seriously and continues to be performed in such an over-the-top manner really underscores its function to bring trip sections together.
Collector’s Name: Jackson Baur
Tags/Keywords:
- Joke. Pranks. Practical Jokes. Trips. Dartmouth.