Choir Nears High Note, Boy Breaks out Helium Balloon and Nails It
As part of an April Fools’ Day joke four years ago, a British university choir used a helium balloon to perfectly nail a high note.
But it wasn’t just the helium-influenced performance that made this stunt hilarious. It was the backstory that the King’s College Choir of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, crafted to go along with the performance that made this April Fools’ one of a kind.
In a video uploaded April 1, 2014, chaplain Richard Lloyd Morgan explained that new regulations had made it impractical for the choir to continue using pre-adolescent boys to hit its high notes.
As such, the choir needed an alternative… but one that preferably avoided surgery.
“After a lengthy consultation process, during which we learned that the ‘surgical’ solution was surprisingly unpopular with the choral scholars, somebody in the chemistry department came up with a very simple solution,” Morgan said in an entirely deadpan manner.
“And now all we need is a very large tank of helium,” he added.
Watch the April Fool Day’s joke video below to see what he meant:
As of mid-February 2017, the video was up to almost 3.5 million views, 50,000 likes and 3,000 comments. Congratulations, y’all are famous now!
The prank became so popular that The Huffington Post and the so-called Museum of Hoaxes wound up picking it up. The Post noted in its write-up that the students’ performance was of “Miserere Mei Deus, Gregorio Allegri.”
And just two years ago the BBC labeled this video as one of “(t)he 8 best musical April Fools’ Day pranks” ever.
“It’s fair to say that no one was fooled by this joke from 2014, but that didn’t stop it from being extremely funny,” the BBC wrote.
Especially given the source, King’s College, which describes itself as “a Catholic, comprehensive college … that overflows with values for a lifetime.”
Some folks might not necessarily expect a religious college to have such a great sense of humor.
But clearly, they would be wrong — very wrong.
Please share this story on Facebook and Twitter and let us know if you can hit a high note without a helium balloon.
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