Bug de l'an 2000/Wikimedia

Where many saw panic and desperation, Brad Pitt saw a chance to be a dick to his friends. As Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk relates in this clip, on New Year's Eve 1999, Pitt and Fincher rented a Mexican resort and filled it with their friends, ostensibly for the purpose of partying like it's today. But then, at midnight, Pitt and Fincher "bribed the government to cut the power and the phone lines," presumably making their friends believe human society had just collapsed.

Helena Bonham Carter via Total Film

And then they turned the lights back on and a bunch of big-titty Mexican strippers came out? Nope! The worst was yet to come: At that point, government troops burst in carrying AK-47s and arrested one of Pitt's friends on drug charges. In the clip, Pitt seems pretty amused when he talks about how the guy's fiancee was in tears as the man she loved was taken away into the pitch-black darkness by corrupt officers. And ... then the big-titty strippers showed up? Actually, that's as far as Pitt has ever told the story, so presumably his friend is still rotting away deep inside some Mexican prison, convinced that the lights never came back on and that monkeys rule the Earth by now.

So, in hindsight, Jonah Hill got off easy.

Daniel Radcliffe started his practical joker career back when he was still Harry Potter. While shooting the Potter movies, he would do things like leave whoopee cushions laying around or change the language on people's phones -- you know, typical "annoying little shit everyone hates" stuff. However, much like the boy genie he played in those wonderful films, Radcliffe started off evil but would eventually reject his cyborg overlords and use his powers for the forces of good. (Now might be a good time to mention that I have never read a Harry Potter book.)

New Line/WireImage/Getty Images

In addition to making movies, Radcliffe also stars in theater plays in which he's occasionally naked and fondling horses (artistic stuff). But being in a play isn't all fun: It involves going to the same theater multiple times a week, acting your ass off, and then leaving the place to find a mass of paparazzi shooting flashes at your face. Every fucking night, for months at a time. However, while starring in a play called Equus (Latin for "horse fondler") in 2007, Radcliffe noticed something: If he was wearing the same outfit as the night before when he left the theater, the paparazzi would just groan and not bother taking pictures, because they'd look like they were from yesterday and couldn't be sold.

So, naturally, Radcliffe started wearing the same outfit every night. For five months. February 2007. March 2007:

Spokeo

April 2007. May 2007:

Contact Music

Same cap, same jacket, same pants. I can't find any pictures of Radcliffe from the play's last month, June 2007, so I'm assuming all the paparazzi had smashed their cameras in frustration by then. This is the star of one of the biggest movie franchises in the world, appearing in a play where he had to take off his undies, and they just left him alone. Here's a photo from November 2007 where he's still wearing the same basic combo (only considerably stinkier, I'd imagine):

Bauer Griffin/Zimbio

And then, while appearing in another play called The Cripple of Inishmaan in 2013, he pulled the same trick: Check him out in May, June, July, and August of that year. This time he was nice enough to cycle through a few different T-shirts, though.

Mark Robert Milan/FilmMagic/Getty Images, Niki Nikolova/FilmMagic/Getty Images

Think about the tremendous sacrifice that wearing the same clothes every day must mean for someone image-obsessed enough to become a world-famous actor ... and he did it just to bug the paparazzi. I've never seen one of his movies, but I'm now convinced that this man is a genius. May Odin bless you forever, Daniel Radcliffe. (Odin was his father in the Harry Potter movies.)

I'm pretty sure that, in the future, future-people won't believe that Keith Moon, the former drummer of the Who, ever existed. They'll look at the unbelievable footage of Moon playing "A Quick One, While He's Away" and they'll say No, no, that wasn't a real person. That was a CGI holo-projection created by Walt Pixar, the 20th century video game director/warlock.

As soon as the last person who was alive at the same time as Keith Moon dies, he'll become a crazy legend, like a Santa Claus of destruction, and that's in great part because the man really did behave like a fictional character. His most famous prank is probably the time he put explosives inside his drum kit during a live TV presentation in 1967 -- the subsequent detonation was so loud, the Who's Pete Townshend still can't hear right.

Moon's favorite pastime was annihilating hotel toilets with cherry bombs and sticks of dynamite, but he also had slightly less destructive, considerably more surrealist ways of messing with people. He was good friends with members of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a real British group so absurd, most people assumed that Monty Python had made them up for a sketch. Moon would go around late 1960s London with fellow drummer "Legs" Larry Smith and Bonzo frontman Vivian Stanshall using speakers to announce snake invasions or tidal waves, requesting that all panicked beachgoers please "stay in their shoes." Moon and Stanshall once spent weeks dressing up in Nazi uniforms, just going into pubs and feigning outrage when denied service.

Clash Music

But the greatest practical joke from this era (the era when Keith Moon apparently had his own untelevised comedy show) was the "trouser testing" prank. This consisted of three phases. Phase one: A friend of Moon's would go into a department store, sometimes accompanied by a fake wife for added realism, and request the strongest pair of trousers available. Phase two: Moon himself would come in, acting as a complete stranger, and offer to help the buyer test the strength of the piece of clothing he was about to purchase, as one does. Then they'd each grab a leg, pull on the pants until they completely tore in half, and complain about the shoddy fabric in front of the scandalized attendant.

And phase three, the master stroke: When the store employees were sufficiently upset, a third person (by some accounts a one-legged actor) would appear and offer extra money for half a trouser. Presumably at this point they'd all look at the camera with a shrug as an "end of the sketch" trumpet noise played from out of nowhere. What's amazing to me is the amount of restraint this gag required from someone with a personality as chaotic as Keith Moon's: Imagine how much self-control it took for him not to just blow up those pants with dynamite. And he did it all in favor of a punchline that he didn't even deliver. That's devotion to one's craft.