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@SRLevine
I'm kind of okay with jokes like this. Back in the day, when corporations didn't all do stupid tongue-in-cheek marketing on April Fools, I enjoyed a few of the ones various companies and individual sites did. And I liked it when Bill Watterson and Berkley Breathed traded comics for the day or whatever. There's room for jokes which aren't really what I'd consider a prank, I guess.

Where I draw the line is if it's misinformation which causes someone pain, however momentary. There's a difference between putting out a press release saying that you're going to switch your pasta products to be entirely tree-grown, and putting one out saying you're planning to murder my mother. If that makes sense? Obvious that's a hyperbolic example.

Here, I'll give a real one: one time I had to take a lengthy bus trip and found myself at the end of it stranded in a location I didn't want to be with no way to get back home. I had managed to arrange it so that I could catch the last bus, which was making a scenic tour of places I didn't want to go before finally taking me close enough to my home that I could arrange a ride from there. But the last bus required me to wait for a while, so I was waiting and worrying. I'm not a great traveler I confess.

At a certain point I got up and asked the station attendant whether the last bus was on time. And he said, "Oh, the last bus left fifteen minutes ago."

My stomach dropped as I contemplated spending the night homeless in an unfamiliar city. After what felt like an eternity but what was probably actually five seconds, he grinned and said, "Nah, I'm just messing with you. It'll be here in ten."

And I laughed with him at myself because what was I going to do, kill him and string his corpse up by his own intestines as a warning to others, with a message of doom to all pranksters written below in his lifeblood?

I digress.

There was a line somewhere and that "joke" crossed it for me. But I acknowledge that my line is much farther back than a lot of people's, so I'm mostly telling this story to try to illustrate my line, not to say that my line is the correct one. It is, but I won't say it 😜

I did manage to make it home, obviously, but it took going to the state prison to do it.

The bus went there, not that I was incarcerated before returning to the bosom of my family. See, that's a momentary misdirection which I think is funny but hurts no one, as with your example above. I sat next to a very talkative gentleman who had just gotten out whose plan was to get home, hop on his motorcycle, and ride to Taco Bell to get himself a giant burrito. I hope he enjoyed it.