Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

One Potato, Two Potato 
(216 –20). In the 1990s and 
early twenty-first century, a popular game played by teenagers was Pass the Card, 
which involves passing a card from one person’s mouth to another’s. For a descrip-
tion of this game and its variants, see chapter 3.
Dangerous Games
Dangerous games frighten parents and teachers. In worst-case scenarios, such 
games cause injury or death. It is important to understand the appeal of such 
games for young people. Dangerous games let children prove their courage and 
skill. Insulated by the assurance of youth, players may not hesitate to jump into 
a game that looks risky. Adults, having had more experience, know that tragedies 
can happen. Parents tell stories about tragic outcomes of games to their children; 
stories of this kind appear in newspapers and on the Internet. As more informa-
tion circulates, the likelihood of preventing tragic deaths improves. 
Iona and Peter Opie identify a broad range of “daring games” in 
Children’s 
Games in Street and Playground
(263 –74). Among these games are Truth, Dare, 
Promise, or Opinion; Follow My Leader; and Get the Coward; all of these in-
volve one player following another’s lead or instructions to do risky things. Two 
road games, Last Across and Chicken, necessitate taking risks in streets: the for-
mer on foot, the latter in cars. The Opies’ last subcategory for games of this kind 
is “Misplaced Audacity,” which includes taking risks with knives, swings, and 
roller-towels. Although roller-towels might seem harmless, they become danger-
ous when twisted around a child’s neck to cause loss of consciousness. Dangling 
Man, the Spinning Game, and Faint Game are all folk names for this kind of 
activity. The Opies suggest that the main cause of such game playing is “wonder 
and curiosity” related to inexperience rather than bravado (273 –74). While this 
positive interpretation seems reasonable, we should also consider the impact of 

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peer pressure, which makes some children feel they cannot refuse to play. The 
pressure to play such games emerges in Gary Hall’s descriptions of Chicken col-
lected in the early 1970s in Indiana and North Carolina (74 –75), as well as 
in Carlos Rodriguez’s account of “jumping rooftops” in New York in Martha 
Cooper’s 
Street Play
(12).
PRANKS
According to Richard S. Tallman’s study (1974), the prankster or practical 
joker strives “to fool someone, to have fun at the expense of someone else” (269). 
Tallman classifies pranks as benevolent, initiatory, or malevolent. Some pranks 
Boy jumps from a fire escape onto a mattress in New York City 
in the late 1970s. Photograph by Martha Cooper.

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38 Children’s 
Folklore
succeed, while others fail because the prankster has gotten caught, the victim 
has not been fooled, or the prank has backfired (262–74). Marilyn Jorgensen’s 
“Teases and Pranks” (1995) suggests differentiation between malicious pranks 
and benevolent teases and tricks; pranks and tricks deceive, but teases do not 
(214). Pranks tend to be more extensive and premeditated than brief routines of 
victimization.
Elementary-school and middle-school students have played countless April 
Fool’s Day pranks, documented by Iona and Peter Opie in 
Th
e Lore and Language 
of Schoolchildren
(243 – 47). Halloween pranks have caused much damage and 
illicit joy. Such pranks should be examined in the context of Halloween legends 
and expectations (Dégh 233 – 42).
Another kind of prank involves telephone calls. One of the oldest prank phone 
call questions, from the days when men chewed Prince Albert tobacco, is “Do 
you have Prince Albert in a can?” If the listener says “Yes,” the caller replies, “Well 
then, you’d better let him out!” Twenty-first-century communication technology 
lets phone call recipients use caller ID, but clever prank callers can block their 
own numbers to protect themselves from punishment.
High school pranks follow certain well-established traditions. One of the 
most popular traditions involves letting animals loose in a high school’s hallways. 
As graduation pranks during the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, high 
school students put numbers on pigs (one, two, three, and five, for example) 
before letting the pigs run free in their school. When school officials caught the 
pigs, they wondered whether one pig was missing.
At summer camps, campers and counselors have become skilled pranksters. 
I. Sheldon Posen suggests that most camp pranks fit two closely connected cat-
egories: scatological and sexual. Scatological pranks involve excrement; for ex-
ample, campers may put a sleeping friend’s hand in warm water, hoping that the 
friend will wet the bed. Examples of sexual pranks include stealing underwear 
and giving someone a wedgie (causing discomfort by pulling up the waistband of 
the person’s underwear). Certain pranks have close connections to ghost stories; a 
ghost that a counselor has just described may appear or make frightening noises. 
Posen suggests that prank etiquette necessitates a proper response from the vic-
timized individual; even if that person does not think the prank was funny, he 
or she must laugh (303 – 9). Jay Mechling explains the process of “taking a prank 
well” in his 2001 study 
On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American 
Youth
(107– 9).
Certain pranks cause alarm that may, in extreme cases, lead to the arrest of 
the pranksters. After the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999, 
pranks involving fake guns or bombs resulted in visits from local police. The de-
struction of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, 
increased people’s worry about possible explosives and dangerous substances such 

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as anthrax. According to Zehr, after students played an anthrax prank at a middle 
school in Kentucky, the school district’s risk manager said, “Any kid with a pen 
and some flour can bring a district to its knees.” During a crisis, a prank can be 
reclassified from childish amusement to criminal offense.