A prank punishment is something that is both a punishment and a practical joke: it serves to amuse the one who does it as much as to teach a lesson to the one to whom it's done.
These sorts of punishments are usually non-malicious in nature, and often given by a mentor or a parental figure. Say, if you cheat during your magic exam, your wizard mentor would cast a spell on you... causing you to speak with a funny Verbal Tic. If you disobey your parents, they will not shout at you or ground you... but instead tell you that they've bought you one very cool thing today, but now that you've disobeyed them, this thing will remain secret till your birthday. If you misbehave towards your girlfriend, she will not break up with you... but will orchestrate an elaborate prank to make you realize that you were wrong.
A Trickster Mentor or a Trickster God would often specialize in those. When something like that is done not to a loved one or an apprentice, but to some random stranger for being an asshole, it's more of a Karmic Trickster. Often overlaps with Restrained Revenge, where someone dishes out a much less harsh punishment than expected. Also compare Cool and Unusual Punishment for when goofy methods are used as straight-up torture, and Friendly Tickle Torture. When this sort of punishment is seen as an erotic "turn-on", the trope overlaps with Power Dynamics Kink.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- The Absurdly Powerful Student Council from Girls und Panzer declares that the penalty for losing a challenge match against Saint Glorianna's Academy is to perform the onko dance in public. Which includes the council. The Oarai girls dress in costume as anglerfish, then dance in sync to a children's tune on a truck's flatbed around the streets of town.
Saori: I can't get married now!
Comic Books
- Wonder Woman Vol 1: As Etta Candy is leader of the Holliday Girls she gets to come up with punishments for them being late to meetings or lying, which tends to involve forcing them to try to get places blindfolded or turning out the lights on them or otherwise messing with them as they try to complete a task.
Films — Live-Action
- The plot of Pants on Fire
is that the main character Jack's lies are all coming true, like the time he fought off lumberjacks (an excuse for breaking his arm) or got abducted by aliens (he was late for an appointment with his friend). In the end, it turned out that his sister Hannah staged everything, from a nonexistent kid named Mikey that Jack claimed to tutor (as well as his dog with a robotic tail), to Jack's wrestler uncle, to his girlfriend Lisa from Arizona who drove to Jack's neighborhood, to the aforementioned lumberjacks and aliens, all as a ploy to get Jack to quit lying.
- The 1968 movie Great Catherine, based on the eponymous play by George Bernard Shaw, features a flirtatious version of this. When the titular Empress orders the British ambassador to come to her and he disobeys, she orders to tie him up and take to her private torture chamber... where she "tortures" him by tickling with her bare foot. As a condition for getting him untied, she tells him to kiss her foot, and after that, they spend a passionate night of love.
- Down Periscope: When XO Lt. Pascal tries to mutiny and take over the USS Stingray, Commander Dodge and the other crew dress up as pirates and hold a mock execution for him, forcing Pascal to walk the plank off the submarine, blindfolded. He falls harmlessly into the net of a waiting fishing trawler that takes him back to shore.
- Watch It: The title refers to what the characters say after they play pranks on each other. After John, at his cousin Michael's request, pranks Michael's housemate Rick by leaping out of the refrigerator when Rick opens it, Rick gets back at John at a party later by having a woman flirt with John, only for her "boyfriend" to come in, grab her, and start to "beat" her inside the bathroom - except the whole thing is a joke.
- Late in the film, after Rick and his other housemate, Danny program John's car so Rick can control it with a car phone, John gets back at them, and at Michael for stealing away Anne, the woman they're both in love with and cheating on her, by getting Rick's girlfriend to lie and say she's pregnant by him so he'll grow up, pretend to be a cop investigating Danny for stolen cars, and arranging a prostitute to be at a concert Michael takes Anne to so Anne will catch the two of them together and finally break up with Michael.
Literature
- In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the magician Coriakin turned the Duffers (a kind of dwarves he was assigned to govern) into funny one-legged creatures called Monopods as a playful punishment for disobeying him and doing stupid things like planting boiled potatoes (so they wouldn't have to be cooked after) and washing dishes before the meal. One interpretation is that he wanted them to understand how ridiculously they behaved by making them look just as ridiculous. (They still didn't get it.)
- The Wheel of Time: The Wise Ones give their apprentice Aviendha more and more arbitrary punishments throughout The Gathering Storm, like filling water buckets with only her fingertip, until she snaps and tells them either to make her a Wise One or send her away. They burst out laughing and admit that asserting her own will over them was the final test to become a Wise One, and she could have been finished weeks earlier if her Pride had let her admit that her work was absurd.
Amys: You forced us to be very creative.
- Mary Poppins is the queen of this trope, often on the extreme end of it. Locking a rude Babysitter from Hell in a birdcage to make her apologize and sending the children she cares about to hostile fantastic worlds to teach them a lesson are her usual methods.
- Likewise, the Blue Fairy from The Adventures of Pinocchio is really fond of those: making Pinocchio's nose grow when he lies and giving him fake food as a punishment for skipping school are just a few examples.
- In The War with Lilliputians, when Alice and Pashka try to fend off Granny Lucretia by telling her that they have to care after "skunusiks" (a fictional breed of animals), Lucretia pretends to believe them and creates holographic images of fantastic monsters to convince them that their lie came to life.
- In The Masked Empire, when Empress Celene's bodyguard Michel is challenged to a duel by her rival-for-the-throne Duke Gaspard in front of the entire court, she manages to defuse the situation by reminding Gaspard that the challenged may choose the dueling weapon (a choice Michel immediately defers to her) and decreeing that the duel will be fought with the plumes on their hats. Because in Orlais, the plumes are a symbol of the chevalier warrior class, this both humiliates Gaspard (who prides himself in his chevalier status) as punishment for openly, if indirectly challenging the Empress, and transforms the duel from a potentially lethal incident to a source of amusement for the entire court. To his credit, Gaspard takes it in stride and duels Michel to the best of his ability, though the book never reveals who "won".
- One of Halt's favorite teaching methods, in The Ruins of Gorlan, is to let the over-eager Will try a task on his own before telling him the correct way to do it. Most notably, he allows Will to mount a "ranger's horse" before telling him how. (It immediately bucks him off, as it is trained to do to anyone who hasn't given the password.)
Live-Action TV
- Dog with a Blog: Chloe tricks Tyler into getting her ears pierced when Ellen and Bennett wouldn't let her. They naturally find out, and punish her with no TV for 5 weeks. They don't punish Tyler for the act as they recognize Chloe lied to him, but they do draw a mustache on him as punishment for drawing mustaches on everything throughout the episode, including Bennett's doctorate.
- Friends: In "The One With The Truth About London", Rachel teaches several practical jokes to Ben, leading the boy to annoy his father to no end. When she refuses to change her behaviour, Ross decides to get back at her with a prank of his own: he disguises a mannequin as himself and hurls it from the upper floor. Upon witnessing her best friend "fall", Rachel panics and rushes to his aid, only to realize his trickery and glare at him as the episode ends.
- Full House: Stephanie has writer's block for a school assignment and finds inspiration in DJ and Steve fighting over Steve giving Kathy Santoni a ride home from school. When they reconcile, she decides to reignite the fight so she can finish her assignment. Danny figures this out when he notices Stephanie's story conveniently matches what DJ & Steve are fighting about. They decide to teach her a lesson by having Steve propose to DJ and Danny being so supportive he lets Steve move into Stephanie's room. Stephanie is incredulous, and when DJ says it'll make the perfect ending to her story, she realizes she's being pranked.
- Home Improvement: Brad and Randy convince Mark that the family (sans Mark) are aliens. Tim convinces Mark to let him and Jill stage an actual alien invasion (with the help of a strobelight, a hazmat suit, and Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida), which freaks the boys out.
- Every episode of Impractical Jokers ends with the Jokers pulling a grandiose prank, called a punishment, on whichever Joker lost the most challenges in that episode. These punishments often place the losing Joker in awkward public situations and are sometimes tailored to each Joker's specific fears.
- In one early episode of Not Going Out, Lucy announces that she is pregnant, much to the shock of Lee, who had ejaculated into her bathwater and now fears he is the father. When he reluctantly admits the deed to Lucy, she initially reacts with horror and tells him to Get Out!, then reveals that she knew about it the whole time, and the "pregnancy" was just a prank to get back at him for it.
Western Animation
- The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In "The Phantom of Retroland", after Jimmy's parents discover that he snuck out with his friends to debunk the mystery of the titular Phantom, they get back at him by pretending to be the Phantom themselves and scaring the kids away. Ironically, they then encounter the REAL Phantom, sending the two fleeing in terror as the episode ends.
- The Casagrandes: In "Monster Cash", Carl runs a "haunted tour" scam in spite of his Abuela's warnings about a demon called "El Cucuy", who is said to eat rotten children. Later, Carl finds himself being haunted by El Cucuy, but it turns out to be Abuela scaring him into doing his chores and giving everyone their money back.
- One episode of King of the Hill has Bobby and Luanne get into a prank war. After Bobby replaces Luanne's birth control pills with children's vitamins, Hank and Peggy get involved. First, Luanne tells Bobby that she has to take those pills to avoid becoming pregnant (conveniently leaving out the part that she also has to have sex) and since she couldn't, Bobby now has to marry her. After the ceremony with Bill officiating, Luanne asks when they're going to reveal the prank. They then tell Luanne that they just discovered that Bill was an ordained minister so the marriage is now legal. They decide to let Bobby and Luanne sort things out before telling them he wasn't.
- The Loud House:
- In "Cover Girls", after the Loud kids disguise themselves as each other for a video chat with Pop-Pop (It's a Long Story), their parents punish them by making them spend the rest of the day dressed as the sibling they're pretending to be at that very moment, which put a snag in their plans for the day. Lincoln (dressed as baby Lily) thinks he got off easy since all he's doing to do is watch TV with Clyde... only to find that he invited their entire class to join them.
- In "Fool Me Twice", the Louds punish Luan for her over-the-top April Fool's pranks by pretending that they're moving house.
- In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Rainbow Dash goes on a pranking spree through Ponyville, which leads to the town pranking her back by making her believe they all turned into cookie-crazed zombies.
- In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Hooky", after his warnings about the dangers of hooks are ignored by Patrick and Spongebob note , Mr. Krabs resorts to a combination of this and Scare 'Em Straight. He gets Squidward to catch SpongeBob's pants on a hook, then when SpongeBob comes running to him for help, Krabs tells him that the only thing he can do is take off his pants — in front of Pearl and her friends. And so, poor SpongeBob learns the hard way to never play with hooks again, at the cost of his dignity.
- Done again in The Other Patty, where Mr. Krabs and Plankton are having another one of their disputes, so SpongeBob creates a new kind of Krabby Patty called the "Flabby Patty" to get them to work together and steal it due to the recipe being better than both of their own. Eventually, SpongeBob reveals that he was behind the act, and Mr. Krabs and Plankton decide to "work together" to get SpongeBob
- In The Tofus episode "Out, Out, Fake Spot!", when Chichi fakes illness to skip a math test, his eco-hippie parents catch on with it, but pretend that they fell for it and subject him to exotic "alternative medicine" treatments, like having his feet licked by goats.
Real Life
- In her autobiography, Geri Halliwell from the Spice Girls writes that she stapled the sleeves of a colleague who kept reporting her to management, just before she resigned.
- Stories abound of military personnel being ordered to do something humiliating as a punishment, to the amusement of everyone on base. This is based on the fact that the "official" punishment involves a ton of paperwork, so giving them something funny to do is much more satisfying.
