The Joker is Still Wild

The recently departed Josiah Jacobs’ career as a practical joker stretched back to his schooldays. His earliest prank was when he scraped a dog turd off of the street, sprinkled it with multi-coloured hundreds and thousands, and put it on a paper plate in the desserts section of the school cafeteria. There, it was purchased and eaten by the games master. “He was off sick for a week”, chortled Jacobs, as he described the incident to a newspaper reporter. A friend from his university days recalls Jacobs undergraduate pranks. “Whilst rugby club types thought urinating in beer glasses in the union bar was the height of humour, Josiah went a stage further. Drinkers would often come back from the toilets to find a huge floater in their pint mug. There was trouble one night when the Head of the Physics department swallowed one down without looking - he had to have his stomach pumped at the local hospital!”

Whilst politicians have figured large in Jacobs’ pranks, he also targeted celebrities from the world of entertainment. He once knocked on the door of “comedian” Syd Little, dressed as a policeman, and told him that his comedy partner Eddie Large had just been killed in a car accident. Syd immediately suffered a near-fatal heart attack. According to official sources, had “Supersonic” Syd died, Jacobs could have been in line for an OBE. In another celebrated incident, Jacobs sent love letters, purportedly from Carry On star Kenneth Williams, to popular wrestler 'King Kong' Kirk. As a result of this, Kirk stormed into Williams’ dressing room at a West End theatre one night and gave him a good hard rogering. Williams could barely walk for two weeks afterwards and told friends that it rated as a highlight in his career - better even than the 1965 blow job received from playwright Joe Orton in the gents toilets at Kings Cross. More recently, Jacobs succeeded in connecting the shower in comic Jim Davidson’s dressing room to an effluent pipe, resulting in Davidson being showered in raw sewage minutes before a Royal Command Performance. He had no choice but to perform in front of The Queen covered in reeking raw sewage, vainly swatting at the flies buzzing around him. Davidson reputedly had to have his ears syringed six times to dislodge all of the crap from them.