B.J. Novak ‘pardoned’ by MFA for 1997 high school prank
B.J. Novak returned to the scene of his 27-year-old crime on Friday night.
The 44-year-old actor, comedian, and author, best known for his work on “The Office,” stopped by the Harry and Mildred Remis Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts to talk about his prankster past while growing up in Newton. In conversation with Amir Dehestani, his high school classmate, Novak detailed to a sold-out crowd how he and his friends swapped out audio tapes on a self-guided tour of the MFA exhibit “Tales From the Land of Dragons” in 1997 and replaced them with their own, nonsensical version.
“I took a tape with me, we transcribed where everything was on the tour, and then we wrote a new tour,” Novak told the audience. “We got a friend of ours and a CD of ancient Chinese music, and we got our friend to record the new transcription we had written.”
For museum-goers who had the misfortune of using a cassette player with the altered recordings, they were treated to three full minutes of the normal tour before its narrator chimed in with everything from his negative opinions on the art to instructing people to do the hokey pokey. The real tapes were hidden elsewhere in the museum.
“We were such good kids that we took the tapes we had stolen and put them in a bag in a locker at the MFA and wrote a ransom note,” he said.
The perpetrators were so proud of the stunt that they sent an anonymous report to the Globe, which promptly published it with the headline “Wild Ride through ‘Dragons.’” He did not publicly own up to the incident until 2011.
Novak said his parents were comedy lovers, and quickly got over it.
“They forgave it,” he said. “My dad had faxed [the article] to his friends, which is how I knew I had been pardoned.”
The conversation between Novak and Dehestani also touched on other schemes from Novak’s life, including a very elaborate plot to secure a fake ID from the DMV when he was 14, as well as his professional prank work as an actor on “Punk’d.” He said that the ability to affect important establishments and people is what initially drew him into that lifestyle.
“I had such respect for these institutions — the library, the museum, the department of motor vehicles,” he said, “to scratch the surface of that was reverential in a way.”
For those wondering if Novak could still be punished for his crimes, museum leadership put that discussion to rest. Director of the MFA Matthew Teitelbaum concluded the evening by officially pardoning him for “a stunt that both confused countless innocent visitors and reminded us that even one of the pettiest and sophomoric pranksters amongst us can leave an impact on a historic national institution.”
“This is the opposite of a sting,” said Novak, who voiced his fears of getting caught by the museum as retribution throughout the night. “I feel like the turkey on Thanksgiving.”