When I was in school, there was a popular range of joke shop tricks that you could buy off the stores and play pranks on your classmates – a popular prank was a trick pack of chewing gum (chewing gum was still allowed then) that had a small mousetrap in place of a stick of gum. Offer it to a friend, and instead of a stick of gum, they would get a sharp sting on the thumb! Of course, tricks like these were quite costly for a primary schoolboy’s budget, so I was quite tickled to see what kind of pranks kampong boys came up to – without spending a cent!

yg writes about one prank involving the lallang grass:

another trick which we played on newbies is using the stalk of the lallang flower. you can only play this once on some uninitiated ones. once they have tasted a mouthful of it, they will not fall for it again. the flower of the lallang is rather cottony. we would tell our would-be victim that the stalk was sweet. the moment, the victim put his lips to the stalk, we would pull it across and he would end up with a mouthful of the cottony stuff.

Read what other pranks kampong kids came up to in ygblog.