How Four Comedians Nearly Pulled Off an Epic Super Bowl Prank

Fifteen years ago, during the halftime show of the Super Bowl between the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears, four improv comedians nearly pulled off what would have been the greatest media prank of all time.

By Mike Hoban

Just after the New Year in 2007. John Hargrave, longtime friend and the publisher of ZUG.com, a comedy website specializing in pranks, called me up. I knew him, he knew me. John asked if I could meet to discuss a stunt designed to help him promote his book, Prank the Monkey.

“What’s the prank?” I asked. With Hargrave, you always knew there was the potential for something a little nuts.

“I can’t tell you over the phone,” he said, uncharacteristically serious. “But it’s big.”

Hargrave had history of pulling off imaginative stuff. He’d gone after Michael Jackson, Ashton Kutcher, and Bill Gates, even the United Nations and the U.S. Senate, with varying degrees of success. He was ambitious.

I agreed to meet him the next day at a coffee shop. When I arrived, he had his PowerBook open and his back to the wall.

I plopped into the booth.

“Okay. What’s the gig?”

After swearing me to secrecy, he leaned forward. “We’re going to pull off the biggest media prank in history,” he said in a whisper. “We’re going to hack the Super Bowl.”

In order to pull off the Super Stunt, as Hargrave named the operation, the team would need to smuggle 2,250 lights into a Level-One (that’s as high as it gets) national-security event—in advance—and stash them in the bowels of Dolphin Stadium until halftime of the big game. On the day of the Super Bowl, they would infiltrate the stadium posing as event staff, with fake IDs and uniforms, and hand off the sequenced lights to the fans. All of this would be done under the eyes of stadium security, multiple state and federal law-enforcement agencies, hundreds of uniformed police officers, and 3,000 additional security personnel.

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