Prank: Watch This Bar Get Transported Back To The 1860s

Going to a new, hole in the wall bar is always an adventure. One time my wife and I stopped in at one in Los Angeles, and much to our surprise, every single poster on the walls was in Russia. The décor looked like an explosion of Stalin-era memorabilia, and there were more than a few men with elaborate facial hair. Needless to say, we absolutely loved it, which seems a whole lot like how these dudes felt when they walked into a new Brooklyn establishment and found themselves transported back to the 1860s.

Conceived by BBC America as a way to generate publicity for Copper and executed by the group Improv Everywhere, the idea was to take a neighborhood Brooklyn bar and make it look exactly as it might have in the 1860s. From a complete lack of electricity to a startling lack of options to the greatest prices in all of New York, everyone involved takes the idea as far as possible, and luckily, they got rewarded with two ideal pranking victims.

Half of a good prank might be the set-up and the execution, but the other half is finding the right unsuspecting victims. You need people who are both go with the flow and yet still have very expressive faces, and these two guys have those attributes in spades. Instead of leaving or asking questions, they just happily have a beer and make side comments to each other, and instead of being pissed off about being duped, they’re clearly grateful for having such an inventive and out of the ordinary experience.

For more than a decade, Improv Everywhere has been pulling off hilarious large scale stunts. They’ve lined up outside dollar stores. They’ve turned the subway into a scene from Star Wars, and they’ve even held a large business meeting in the middle of a Staples. Naturally, this stunt fits in pretty well with that catalog, and it will no doubt be fondly remembered by those involved for years to come.

Since it’s Tuesday, and you’re probably at work and looking for a way to kill some more time, I’ve gone ahead and embedded another of Improv Everywhere’s greatest pranks below. Here are dozens and dozens of actors dressed up in their most standard blue polo with the goal of causing mass confusion inside a Best Buy.