Truckload of a prank

What would you do with a truckload of awesomeness?

It may sound like a vague, fratboy rumination, but this is precisely the dilemma junior Avishai Shuter was forced to consider.

Eight hundred T-shirts richer, Shuter is the winner of CollegeHumor.com's "Truck Load of Awesomeness" contest, in which entrants were asked to submit what they would, quite literally, want by the truckload. And each and every one of those 800 T-shirts reads, in custom pastel blueprint, "Daniel Krasna Smells and Has Been Terrible at Things His Whole Life."

As you can likely guess, there's a story behind the slogan.

Shuter and his friends, junior Daniel Krasna and sophomore Saul Shamash, were perusing the website - a popular hub of humorous videos, pictures, and articles - when they stumbled upon the contest last month. They decided to put their heads together to come up with the perfect entry: "Not just what would win, but also what we would really want a truckload of," Krasna said.

In a 2008 New York Times article by Streeter Seidell, front-page editor of the CollegeHumor website, he described the site's audience target demographic as "the kid you'd like to kick out of the house - a son aged 18 to 24 who, say, rises for Pop-Tarts at the crack of noon, or wails on Guitar Hero III."

Sixty-seven percent of CollegeHumor's viewers as of June 5 are male, according to Quantcast.

And indeed, some of the men's initial ideas sound straight out of that kid's dream: jello, silly putty, marshmallows, TVs, paintball equipment, even "Spartan swords and equipment - you know, like 300 - 'This is Sparta!'" said Shamash, citing the testosterone-happy, blood-and-guts 2007 film.

With an eye on the website's content and its staffers' tastes, Shuter suggested shirts that insult someone, believing the judges would appreciate the whimsy. Shamash concurred.

But Krasna was not pleased.

"That's horrible - why would we want a truckload of shirts making fun of someone?" he said.

But the folks at CollegeHumor seemed to know the answer when they picked Shuter's submission out of more than 5,800 entries - a number reported in early June by Mediaweek.

Krasna remained clueless to Shuter's revenge until he saw Shamash's congratulatory Facebook status dedicated to Shuter.

"[Krasna] called me from Hawaii, and he was really upset," Shuter said, laughing.

Shuter recalled that Krasna demanded to know the nature of the truckload of awesomeness. But at the time, Shuter said he wouldn't give a straight answer.

"I don't remember, but it makes fun of you," he remembered saying.

A video of the pick-up truck delivery, made personally by Seidell to Shuter's doorstep, can be found on the website. In it, Seidell greets Shuter in enthusiastic, badly accented Hebrew - "He doesn't speak Hebrew at all," Shuter said - then unceremoniously dumps 800 T-shirts on Shuter's New Rochelle, N.Y., front lawn and calls it a day.

The boys had originally planned to evenly split the winnings should one of their submissions be selected. Krasna does want his one-third share from the original deal, Shuter said, "but I think he just wants to get rid of them."

Asked what he would do with his 266 shirts, Shuter said gleefully, "I'm going to hand them out on campus for free."

He then added, in his good-natured, CollegeHumor spirit, "That will make [Krasna] even madder."

newsdesk.dbk@gmail.com