Class clowns can evoke laughter from an entire room of people. However, in their quest for amusement, they can sometimes push the envelope and go too far in their ventures. Here are just some of the times people thought the class clown took things a bit too far.
#1 Code Red
I knew this one guy in high school back in the late '60s. He and his best friend were very close, but they had also dated the same girl. My buddy dated this girl first, then the friend started going out with her. No problems, but they both understood how this could be perceived as a potential friendship-ender. So, one day they had a joke all planned out. The best friend grabbed some ketchup packets from a fast-food restaurant. After lunch, he was sitting in class with the packets torn slightly, tucked unnoticeably in his hand. You see where this is going.
My buddy ran into the classroom and shouted, "You can’t steal my girl from me! If I can’t have her, no one can!" He squeezed the packets in the direction of his best friend. The friend, who had jumped up from his desk during the shouting, clutched his chest from the fake wound, sending horrifying streaks of red (ketchup) flying all over his white t-shirt. He collapsed.
#2 Sour Snort
This one kid thought it would be funny to snort a line of that sour powder. This was no small line, mind you. I actually think he was rubbing it off the candy. Anyways, he does his line and instantly starts screaming. His nose started gushing and I honestly think he popped a vessel in his eye. He ran out of the room and later saw an ambulance come to the school.
#3 School Computer
Someone looked up how to buy weapons illegally on someone else’s school computer. Thankfully, the victim wasn’t arrested, but he was taken in by the police for questioning. Then the next day, a beatdown occurred in the soccer field with six people attacking someone. No one snitched, but it’s pretty obvious what happened.
#4 Chairs Out
The class clown in my school once pulled out a chair from underneath a kid thinking it would be really funny when the kid fell. Naturally, it didn’t go as well as he thought it would in theory. When he ripped the chair out from under him, the poor kid ended up falling, hitting his head and getting around 30 stitches.
#5 Is It Water?
One time, there was a kid who just straight up just peed on the floor in the middle of class and convinced the teacher it was spilled water, so he cleaned it up. Honestly, it wasn’t even class clown behaviour at that point, he was just being gross. The worst part is that he didn't get in nearly enough trouble.
#6 Stunt Man
This one kid was always doing dumb "stunts" just to make people laugh. He got sick of climbing on random things and jumping stairs one day, so he decided it'd be funny to smack into walls. His first few walls were fine as they were all concrete.
One day, there was a girl crying in the hallway and he figured he could try to make her laugh by making a funny face and tackling a glass door. So, he went through the door and needed stitches. That wasn’t even the worst of it, though. On his way to the office, he left little pieces of broken glass on the way.
#7 Proving Them Wrong
I was once in a high school classroom with a chill teacher and someone made a joke about another kid’s private parts being small. Not too much happened at first because the teacher wasn’t a hard disciplinarian. But, that kid exposed himself in front of the whole class to prove that the joke wasn’t true. In the end, he got suspended.
#8 Crying Wolf
When I was in third grade we were all doing our thing, coloring, reading, etc. The class clown was being really noisy and kept goofing off. We were all having fun and the class clown eventually sat down. It wasn't long before he was laying on the floor, foaming out of his mouth, shaking violently. We all laughed because it was a joke, right? Before long the teacher came rushing over to see the new "joke" the kid came up with. She immediately called 911 and he was rushed out of the room. He had a seizure while the whole class thought he was joking. He recovered and everything was fine, I just felt bad for the kid.
#9 No Pants
A friend once decided to shove his hands into my back pockets and grab my butt when I wasn't wearing a belt. They ended up pants-ing me straight to the floor. I was wearing spandex-type underwear at the time, but those got caught on the way down and ended up like pulling it down to where I sprung out of them. What was bad became worse as our track coach had just walked in looking for me and she got a full frontal. Not to mention, the class saw everything as well as I tried to pull my pants up only to realize I was out on full display. But, hey. I didn't even get detention.
#10 No More Trips
I was that class clown in our social studies field trip to the state capitol. They let us into the gift shop first and I bought several packs of those pills that have a sponge dinosaur inside. After we were led into a very quiet listening area to watch very boring people talk about very boring things, I jammed at least eight in my mouth while my friends watched and waited. I knew they'd expand but I didn't count on how nasty they'd be as they did, so I ended up retching and projectile vomiting colorful dinosaurs over the banister in the middle of an NC senate thing.
I had to spend the rest of the trip on the bus while the driver tried her best to avoid my explosive expulsions; I threw up the whole way home. I got banned from the next field trip and I don't blame them at all.
#11 Cruel “Joke”
This class clown in elementary school made fun of a boy no one liked (he was kind of mean). But one day the boy said his mom had a miscarriage and the other kid thought it would be a great insult later in the week to tell him something along the lines of, “Your brother is better off and it’s a good thing your mom had a miscarriage.” I don’t think we’ve ever rallied for this kid as hard as we did that day. Not cool.
#12 Bullying the Teacher
We had a teacher in middle school who had a wig and a glass eye. Unfortunately for her, we had three class clowns that teamed up to pick on her. At the end of the year, she left just because of their constant disruptions and bullying. It bums me out because I actually really liked her and always felt bad for her.
#13 Toilet Paper
There was a class clown in my class and another one from the senior class at the time. They'd collaborated to throw toilet paper all over the schoolyard as a joke. I forget exactly what it was, but there was some kind of very important event going on that day and we were supposed to have a lot of visitors that afternoon.
The principal was not amused. He said if they'd done that on any other day, he'd probably just let it go after making them clean it up. Instead, they got detention and one of the teachers made them personally apologize to the elderly janitor who had to clean that up in the dark when it was freezing cold.
#14 Hall Pass
This happened when I was in senior year. The teacher wouldn’t give her a hall pass to use the bathroom (which was ridiculous). Instead of taking a more ... conventional stand, like walking out of the room, she sat down in her desk and went in her pants. Of course, she was suspended, but I forget for how long.
At the end of it all, there were heated editorials back and forth in the school paper about this whole thing. Honestly, my overall thought process was that the teachers shouldn’t try to control our bowels, but also maybe don’t go on the floor. Though, I’ll admit that I did appreciate her taking one for the team.
#15 All That Syrup
My roommate was a class clown type. We had both been out of school for years at this point. One day, I spent the entire day making this awesome syrup. If you don't know, it’s actually a lengthy process of letting the ingredients simmer down for hours. However, it’s a labor of love and I was more than willing to do it.
After I finished the syrup, I put it in the fridge to cool while I got a shower. For some reason, my roommate decided to poor a bunch of hot sauce in my syrup, ruining the whole pot and wasting my entire day. He didn’t understand why I didn’t find it funny and got super upset when I got mad. He was the worst.
#16 “Were You Fat?”
I had my moments of class clownery. The only one I really regret all these years later was from middle school. My science teacher was telling us a story about dealing with bullies. Back in his day, some punks were messing with him and his friends and he confronted them. At some point in the exchange, he said something like, "Come at me any time, I'm not hard to find" (I'm paraphrasing). For some reason, my dumb brain thought 'not hard to find, easy to spot, so large that you can see him from anywhere'. Looking for a laugh, I spoke up and said, "Why, were you fat?"
There was some muffled laughter, but all I can really remember was that the teacher stopped almost mid-sentence, staring daggers at me. His face also went crazy red. He stopped his story, turned to his desk and told us curtly to just finish doing our homework. Then he barely said anything the rest of the class.
I felt like absolute garbage. It didn't register to me that, yeah maybe he struggled with his weight as a kid and that was part of the bullying. I really didn't imagine he was a fat kid or anything, it was just a play on the "easy to find" mental image. I apologized as best I could at the end of class, but it was tense.
At the end of the year, he actually awarded me a 'best science student' award or something random like that. You know how they'll do a bunch of student awards for attendance and other stuff. I think the fact that he did that means he forgave me. But I still feel like a massive heel every time I think about that.
#17 Give it a Rest
My first year teaching I had a nightmare student who was absolutely awful. He wanted to be a comedian but every day was him shouting out profanity, harassing the girls, climbing desks, and so on. He got suspended for a week for pulling his pants down and flashing the girls. If I turned my back for three seconds, he'd be at my computer trying to search for inappropriate material.
#18 Picture Time
This one guy in high school was definitely the class clown, but he took it too far one day when the chemistry teacher decided to take some photos of the class doing their experiments. Fast forward a few days and the teacher put the photos on the classroom walls. In one photo a couple of students, including the class clown, were sitting on the top of a counter while the rest stood in front. It wasn’t immediately noticed, but we soon realized that the photo showed the clown dude had pulled himself out of the leg of his shorts and was proudly spreading it out for the camera with a big grin on his face.
#19 Concept of Chaos
In high school, this kid had to make a video about the concept of chaos. As his example of chaos, he decided to use the political situation in Israel. Then he called out this one Jewish kid in the class who never talked and he said, “Thank you [person’s name] for this wonderful moment.” The funny thing is that the teacher played the video in front of the class without previewing it, and then he never punished the student who made the video because he was afraid he would get in trouble for showing it to the class.
#20 Is it Broken?
I tripped a kid who was running for lunch back when I was in high school. He didn’t get back up and I thought he’d broken his leg. An ambulance was called and the kid was taken away in full view of well over 1000 people. I got called out, quite rightly, for the creden I’d been. And then, thankfully, comforted by the same kids when I became distraught at the thought of what I’d done to this poor kid. After a rather sleepless and guilt-ridden night I found out that he had a dead leg and was fine. Thirty years later and I still freak out at what 14-year-old me did.
#21 Throwing Cheese
There was a story here in the U.K. not so long ago about some kid who was messing around in class and flicking bits of food at people. He threw a bit of cheese at this kid who it turned out had severe allergies and ended up going into anaphylactic shock. The school mishandled it quite a bit and the poor kid ended up passing.
#22 Disrespectful Teeth
We had a younger, not great-looking, substitute teacher and everyone was cracking jokes. At one point, the substitute yelled at the class and the word “disrespectful” slipped out at some point. This one kid had the audacity to yell out, "Bro, your teeth are disrespectful" and got sent to the dean and was later suspended.
#23 Bus Ride
This one kid lit a Roman candle on our bus ride home. The cops showed up and he went right out the back door and kept running. Never came back to school. He didn’t get as far as he wanted, though. If my memory serves me correctly, one of our teachers eventually revealed to us that the cops found him hiding in his tree fort.
#24 ‘70s Light Bulb
In the fourth grade, we had a kid who disrupted class all the time because he couldn’t keep still. One day, it snowed and we were walking around the room doing an assignment. The teacher went to the class next door for a minute and this kid ran out the door to the field (right outside the door), made a snowball and threw it in the classroom, hitting a huge light bulb. It exploded, sending glass everywhere. Everyone screamed, teachers came running in, and we never saw that kid again.
#25 The Water’s Dripping...
This one class clown threw a full water bottle as hard as he could, aiming for the substitute teacher's head. It missed her by about three inches and exploded all over the blackboard behind her. The most bizarre part is that she literally didn't notice. She just continued like normal and about ten minutes later turned around, looked at the board and said, "Oh my gosh, the water's dripping..." Needless to say, that phrase was repeated a lot junior year.
#26 Teacher’s Temper
One of my old teachers was one of the nicest guys I've ever met. He was really upbeat and always wanted to help out. His son wound up getting bullied a lot and sadly, took his life. When he came back, our class clown made a really bad joke/remark about how it was the teacher's fault.
Our teacher got up, walked over to the kid's desk and stopped. The kid tried to make another jab but the guy pulled the kid out of his seat and absolutely lost it on him. Nobody in the class moved, just watched as it happened and saw this snarky kid sobbing, just getting destroyed. Our teacher stopped, walked out of the room and we never saw him again. Apparently, there were a bunch of lawsuits and the kid had to go to the hospital for a bunch of wounds, but it was definitely the most intense class I've been a part of.
#27 The Goldfish
I can recall this really strange and awful thing that happened when I was in school. This class clown once drank the teacher's goldfish. Just straight up drank it. The teacher, a buttoned-up dude, started crying. The kid threw it back up, but I'm not sure if it survived. Everyone was like "Wow, dude. Not okay.”
#28 Bots on Bots
Me and this guy I sat next to had chrome books for a game of Kaboot for Spanish class. We decided to use the code to join on a website that sends in hundreds and maybe thousands of bot participants. I honestly don’t know what the number was. Regardless, it was hilarious with the inappropriate names the bots had.
#29 Getting a Laugh
Among the boys in fifth grade, farting was hilarious. It got old after a bit but this one kid didn’t get the reaction he was used to getting. So, he thought he'd do the one thing that was sure to get a laugh. He did number two outside and spread it across three of the bins outside the classroom. It’s safe to say that he didn't go anywhere other than the toilets after a school-wide assembly was called to point it out.
#30 Math Exam
During a math exam, one of the guys who would always disrupt class suddenly pushed a bunch of his stuff off the table (like pens, calculator). Everyone turned around to look at him and he started holding both of his arms stretched out in front of him, like a zombie. People started laughing and the teacher started yelling at him.
Then he keeled over and hit his face on the table of the student next to him. He was unresponsive for a while. Turns out he had had a kind of seizure and had lost control of his body. He was taken to the hospital and we were all taken to a different classroom to finish the exam. Some people were obviously very shaken and did poorly on the exam, so we all had to retake it a week or two later.
#31 Space Jam
I once pulled a chair out under this kid in middle school and he hit his head on the metal part of the chair. The teacher was like, “Walk him down to the nurse!” while he was walking slowly and holding his head acting super hurt. I felt like the worst person ever. Then, we got out of the room and he was like, “Ha, I'm fine.” He got me. I'm not proud of it but I was 12 and we were watching Space Jam in class that day, so I was extra hyped.
#32 Tyrone… or Justin
There was a boy in my class called Tyrone-Justin. Every morning he'd be late and say, “No, miss, I'm Justin time.” Then she'd say, “Well just sit down then, Justin” and he'd say, 'Miss, my name's not Justin, it’s Tyrone'. I heard this every morning at 9:00 a.m. for a year and a half. I guess it could have been worse...
#33 High Heeled
James took "friendly jabs" way too far with a girl he hardly knew. It got to the point where I would consider it borderline verbal abuse. Bless her patience. She kept it together far longer than I would. But one of those jabs struck a nerve with her. As a result, James needed stitches on his brow after getting a solid kick to the privates followed by another one to the head...with a pointy and hard high heel. He was lucky it didn't gouge his eye out. This didn't happen in class. This was an office.
#34 Paper Mess
This happened in first-period ninth-grade biology class. The class clown shredded about 20 pieces of paper and put the pieces in the hood part of the hoodie of the kid sitting in front of them. The kid in front of them found out when the bell rang and dumped it out all over the floor while everyone walked out of class.
The next morning, our teacher walked in and screamed, “Where is [class clown’s name]? I’m going to lose it for that mess yesterday!” But the class clown was nowhere to be seen. We all came to find out about five minutes later that the class clown had collapsed while playing hockey with his friends the day before. Our teacher ran out of the room and was never the same after that.
#35 Free Period
This one kid pulled a chair from underneath a kid with a short temper. The kid threw multiple chairs at him, broke a desk, destroyed a whole classroom and generally messed up everything in his path. When his parents finally contained him in their car, he broke the door and went right back to chasing the other kid. But hey, the next period after that was a free period because the whole school was in shock and panic.
#36 Stealing Skateboards
The really attractive popular girl was chatting on the school field one day. The class clown took a skateboard off someone and decided to draw attention to himself by riding it down the path towards her. I think in his 13-year-old brain he was going to impress her with his daredevil skills, then he was going to accidentally on purpose fall and grab her for support. I assume his brain made him think that in the worst case, she’d get knocked to the floor and then he could use this opportunity to grab her hand to pull her up again.
What actually happened is that he went way too fast and smashed into her. He then landed heavily on top of her. She couldn’t move and was fully screaming saying she couldn’t move and couldn’t feel her legs. We all thought her back was broken. The teachers came running and an ambulance had to be called to the school field. She got taken away in a stretcher and neck brace. Luckily she was okay after the hospital and took a few weeks off school. The class clown moved to Australia not long after, so he got lucky there. I imagine he stays awake at night thinking about this.
#37 Kicking a Ball
My friend and I were playing with a gigantic toy ball, like a yoga ball with air. I told him to fall on it face forward with all his weight. We were in the grass, so I was going to kick it out last second and he would slam into the grass. I didn't realize we were close to the road, so when I kicked it out his body hit the grass but his chin slammed right into the pavement. His chin was super hurt and bruised. He just walked home. I still feel terrible 20 years later.
#38 Saving Private Ryan
In eighth grade, two kids in my health class were supposed to do a presentation on something. Instead, they reenacted that fight at the end of Saving Private Ryan. They knew the script, so they made sound effects and really went the whole nine yards. They refused to stop. The teacher was screaming at the top of her lungs, begging for them to stop and they just continued. She ran to her phone and called the office in tears, trying to explain the situation. The class was completely out of control, laughing hysterically.
However, the office lady just happened to have heard “fight”, so the school went into lockdown. The SRO also came in and took them both away. At the very least, I’m assuming they earned themselves detention. I don’t remember either of those two kids graduating high school, so I’d love to know where they are now.
#39 Revealing Secrets
I had an English teacher in high school that many people either didn’t like or didn’t mind her at all. There was this one day where she seemed really different with the way she interacted with us in class. Everyone thought she was probably just being weird as a joke. At a party years later after high school, some degenerates said they threw something in her coffee because they thought she needed to chill.
#40 Fighting Back
Our funny teacher thought it was worthy to mention that the class clown got the lowest grade on an assignment and teach us a lesson about what happens when you goof around all day long and not pay attention. What everyone thought was funny, since the kid was usually very upbeat and happy, resulted in him getting so embarrassed that he ridiculed our teacher for being morbidly obese, single at 60 years old, and bald. No one understood why he would say such hurtful words as a clap back. No one laughed, but he was chuckling and brushed it off.
Our teacher quietly got up as it got dead quiet, took a deep breath, flung a desk across the room, and yelled his lungs out to get out of his classroom. I swear, you could hear the building shake. Once he cooled down, he apologized, but you could hear the hurt in his voice. He went back to his desk for the rest of the class, trying not to break down and at one point exited the room to talk to a teacher next door, who was concerned and heard the whole thing. They ended up changing the kid's schedule completely around mid-school year just to switch him to another teacher. No one found him funny after that.
#41 Film School
This happened during my undergraduate in film school. A classmate made a short film depicting her professor and another faculty member in a loving homosexual relationship. It was meant to be in good fun, as the two professors were always seen arriving to and from campus together. After the short screened in class, the students all love it.
But, the professor broke down into tears, admitted they were living with the other professor because they had been served, will likely lose their house, children, and a substantial amount of their finances in the divorce. They then proceeded to cancel the rest of the class. Everyone was stunned and the student who made film withdrew from class in shame.
#42 Outbreak vs Silver
Back in the days of VHS tapes, with teacher's approval, a kid volunteered to bring in the movie Outbreak to show our science class, basically giving everyone a break from actually learning because the movie is about a virus. The tape he brought in was a recorded copy of the original tape, so it had no distinguishing stickers and the teacher assumed it was Outbreak.
A classmate was told to start the movie but instead of Outbreak, the scene that immediately played was a love scene in the movie Sliver with one of the Baldwins and Sharon Stone. All you saw was nude Baldwin enter side of the frame, throw Sharon against a pillar and do things inappropriate for children to see.
The teacher freaked out and had to run across the room to get from his desk to the TV. He pulled the plug but we all got to watch some R rated stuff together for about 5-10 seconds in class that morning. After the teacher calmed down, the kid showed the teacher that he had also brought Outbreak and he let us watch it. He was a cool dude.
#43 Pencil Sharpener
A classmate tried to convince the younger kids we would watch that she got her pinky finger stuck in the industrial pencil sharpener. One of the kids started to turn the handle and thought her screams were a joke until I saw all the colour drained from her face. Some of the kids had to go home early, they were so traumatised.
I got a certificate of "bravery" and no homework for the rest of the week for not freaking out and for telling the kids that the colour was ketchup. Though, I’m pretty sure that it was really to distract from the fact they left kids to babysit kids unsupervised while they lounged in the staff room for 25 minutes.
#44 Worth It
In high school, there was a very catty male cheerleader in my English class who thought his sassy jokes about people's appearance were funny. They weren't. He was very mean to a student-teacher we had all semester. She was a little frumpy but genuinely loved English and teaching it, and I loved English class. I thought she was great. So one day when he made her cry, we got into it, he wouldn't stop, and I threw a dictionary at his head. I got detention, but it was totally worth it.
#45 Hidden Student
As a former teacher, I was walking around while students were working independently. I stopped over at my desk to check my email and as I sat down, a student jumped out from under my desk, yelling. I was about two seconds away from screaming a string of expletives and also punching him in the face. Turned out, he already finished the assignment and was bored. He was a great kid though and super smart. This was at the beginning of the year and I quickly learned he often finished projects early so I always made sure to have an extra puzzle or task for him to do and he was always happy to help!
#46 Can You Shut Up?
I had a religion teacher in high school who was working on becoming a Jesuit priest and was a really cool guy. He always had a smile on his face and did his best to make class a fun experience for everyone.
There was a kid in my class who was really annoying, but my teacher was always really patient with him, until one day he pushed him too far. I forgot exactly what the kid said, but it definitely crossed the line. My teacher slammed his fists on his desk and shouted, "Why can't you EVER shut up?!" He then picked up his stapler and chucked it at the kid, missing his head by a few inches and leaving a huge dent in the wall and then stormed out into the hallway. I had never seen a teacher blow up like that and I definitely never expected it from him.
#47 Christian School
I went to a Christian school when I was younger. We had this one ethics class that was taught by a nun. The class clown began joking about religion, saying a bunch of inappropriate things. They were asking about the private area of St. Peter, said lewd comments about Virgin Mary, and other stuff I can't fully remember.
The nun got so flustered, her whole face turned red, and you could definitely see how angry and embarrassed she was. She held out a rosary and asked the whole class to pray together for the class clowns' soul and beg Jesus to lend us the power to fight against the demon invading our class. All the while, the clown kept jumping around poking at the praying kids. She attempted to exorcise the kid. She went to him and whisper something into the kid's ear. Tears began falling down his cheek and the nun accompanied him outside. I never saw him again. Officially, it was said he got transferred.
#48 Tile Shoe
This one kid super glued his shoe to the tile floor. We all saw this happen, but the teacher didn't. The bell rang to move onto the next class, we all remained seated to see what he was going to do next. He began to pull his foot and up comes the tile attached to his shoe. The whole class was crying from laughter and the teacher cracked a smile and then quickly wiped it off her face. He then was escorted to the principal’s office while the tile was attached to the shoe he was still wearing. I still remember the clack of his walk while he was escorted.
#49 Outing the Teacher
Some dude back in high school discovered that one of the teachers was on a dating website and printed out a bunch of flyers with his account page on it and proceeded to put up around 200 of those all around the school. I arrived just in time to see the teacher running, frantically trying to take down all the flyers and running back to his car in tears. I felt really bad for him.
#50 Desk Fan
I once had a kid in my class act like he needed to move his desk (the all in one chair/desk combo units) to be closer to his study partner. He purposely lifted it over his head and shoved it straight into the ceiling fan that was on full blast. The fan practically exploded on impact and ripped the desk from his hands as it fell on other students.
