A new exhibit, "The Art of College Humor," opened last week on the UW-Madison campus and was the subject of a story in Friday's State Journal.

As the story noted, the exhibit celebrates "the glory years of humor magazines on college campuses," including UW-Madison's own, The Octopus, which was published from 1919-1959.

It's probably too late, but I wish the people responsible for the exhibit had thought to include at least some material on my personal favorite sub-category of college humor -- the prank.

I am not referring to fraternity hazings or anything of that kind. I'm talking about the kind of prank that requires inspiration, planning and fiendish cunning. Nobody gets hurt, and everybody laughs. OK, almost everybody.

It would have been particularly nice because UW-Madison has a storied place in the history of college pranks.

But don't take my word for it. Ask Neil Steinberg, columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, and author of the definitive 1992 book on the subject: "If At All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks."

"The book was originally going to be called Searching for Cheesetopia,'" Steinberg was saying Friday. "There's a whole chapter on Madison."

"Cheesetopia" referred to Leon Varjian's unsuccessful effort to have Madison renamed Cheesetopia when Varjian was an officer with the Pail and Shovel party, which took over UW student government in the late 1970s on a platform of taking nothing seriously.

Steinberg's book, which is both studiously researched and very funny, has become a cult classic and has as its cover image Bascom Hill covered with more than 1,000 pink flamingos.

That was the famous stunt perpetrated on the night before the first day of classes in 1979 by a Pail and Shovel party member named Michael LaViolette. He rented a truck and drove to Chicago, where he procured the plastic birds. Back in Madison, several friends helped distribute them on Bascom Hill.

Earlier that year, Varjian had hatched the equally famous "Statue of Liberty on Lake Mendota" prank, which gets abundant coverage in Steinberg's book.

Steinberg said this week that the consensus number one college prank of all time was engineered at the 1961 Rose Bowl football game by students from the California Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Caltech.

(When the University of Wisconsin football schedule for this year was announced and I saw Cal Poly was coming to Camp Randall, I momentarily thought the Badgers were going to be playing host to the school responsible for the mother of all college pranks, but alas, Caltech and Cal Poly are not one in the same.)

Caltech is in Pasadena, not far from the Rose Bowl. In researching his book, Steinberg interviewed several of the students responsible for the prank, but doesn't name them -- in fact they have never been identified except as the "Fiendish Fourteen."

A brief synopsis can hardly do justice to the scope of the prank, but essentially what happened was that somehow the Caltech students managed to substitute more than 2,200 flip cards that were to be held up by students in the stands during the halftime show of the University of Washington marching band. The cards held up by the Washington students would spell -- for those watching on television and from across the stadium -- "Huskies," the team's nickname.

Except that when the students held the cards up, they spelled "Caltech."

One account described what happened next like this: "Even the television announcers were momentarily speechless. For a few seconds this silent tension enveloped the entire stadium. Finally the significance of what had just happened began to sink in, and then the laughter began."

Steinberg said his book began as a magazine article. When his research revealed there were no books on the subject, he expanded it. "It's really a social history of colleges," he said, adding that an early title he considered was "Wicked Acts of Sacrilege," which was what the pranks were called in their earliest incarnations.

He's thought of bringing out a new, updated edition, and said Joan Strasbaugh of Madison-based Jones Books had expressed some interest but ultimately passed.

Joan knows her business, but I think it would be a natural, especially with all the Madison ties.

It would give Steinberg a chance to include his favorite prank of more recent vintage, which occurred at Cornell University in October 1997.

You need a photo to really appreciate it, but somehow somebody was able to put a huge, hollowed out pumpkin on top of a famous towering spire on the Cornell campus. It took weeks and a crane-hoisted gondola to get it down, but the perpetrators had somehow managed to get it up, unnoticed, overnight.

"Who did it?" Steinberg was asked.

"Nobody knows," he said.

Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com.