The Presentation Prank

It began with noble intentions—well, noble-ish. My senior seminar capstone was titled 'The History of Silent Films: Mimes, Moustaches, and the Magnificent Absence of Auto-Tune.' I’d spent three weeks researching Buster Keaton’s eyebrow raises and the tragicomic logistics of intertitle font kerning. My thesis? That silence wasn’t empty—it was curated. And to honor that curating spirit, I composed my entire 12-minute presentation script in Comic Sans. Not as a joke—oh no—but as aesthetic commentary. A visual wink at the absurdity of taking silent cinema too seriously. (Also, my professor once called Times New Roman 'the Helvetica of existential dread,' so I figured he’d appreciate the gesture.)

Then came D-Day: Presentation Day. I wore a bowler hat (Keaton homage), adjusted my monocle (plastic, slightly fogged), and plugged in my laptop like a man about to conduct Beethoven’s Ninth.

Slide one: 'Silent Films Were Loud in Their Own Way (Cue: Mime Scream Emoji)'. Smooth.
Slide two: 'The Rise of Intertitles: When Words Wore Top Hats'. Still solid.

Then—blorp.

My laptop didn’t crash. It rebelled. Screen went black. A beat of silence—genuine, beautiful, historically accurate silence—hung in the air. Then, from the tinny speakers, like a tiny, aquatic demon summoned by PowerPoint’s dark arts: "Baby shark, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo…"

Not once. Not twice. On loop. With volume at 11. And somehow—blessedly—my mic was still live.

I froze. My professor, Dr. Armitage—a man whose eyebrows had their own pension plan—leaned forward. His left eye twitched. His pen hovered over my rubric like a vulture over a very confused worm.

Panic, in that moment, whispered: Improvise. Commit. Become the art.

So I stood up straighter, gestured grandly at the screen, and said—deadpan, dripping with faux-intellectual gravitas—"And here we see the deconstruction of narrative innocence: the infantilization of cultural memory, the sonic intrusion of algorithmic nostalgia… a primal scream reduced to a nursery rhyme. Performance art, Professor. It’s about the loss of control. The surrender to chaos. The… uh… shark.”

He blinked. Slowly. Like a startled owl who’d just been handed a tax audit.

The chorus hit again: "Daddy shark, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo…"

A freshman in the back snorted. Someone dropped a highlighter. Dr. Armitage closed his eyes. When they reopened, they held the quiet fury of a man who’d just discovered his coffee was decaf and lukewarm.

He didn’t yell. He didn’t sigh. He simply underlined ‘FAIL’ on my rubric so hard the pen tore through the paper and nicked the desk beneath. Then he said, voice eerily calm: “Miss Chen, your thesis was sound. Your research was thorough. Your choice of font was… audacious. But if you ever weaponize ‘Baby Shark’ against academia again, I will personally dub your graduation video with bagpipes and send it to the Dean’s office set to a polka beat.”

I got a 47%. And yet—I’d won. Because as I packed my things, Dr. Armitage stared at the looping shark, whispered, “Why is it always the chorus? Why not the bridge?” —and for one radiant, ridiculous second, I saw it: not a failed student, but a co-conspirator in the universe’s goofiest inside joke. The grade? Temporary. The image of a tenured film scholar mouthing ‘Mommy shark’ under his breath while frantically Googling ‘how to mute Zoom audio permanently’? Immortal.