Wife's Tune-Up Addition to Husband's Car Has Internet Howling

In the realm of playful marriage pranks, one TikTok video recently made waves with a woman's ingenious—and highly personalized—gift to her husband.

In the video posted by Jade Craig (@jadecraig7), her husband walks to his car and opens the door to find a projection of his wife's face on the ground. "I secretly got my husband a car [projector] with my face on it," she wrote over the video.

Viewers of the video were quick to react with amusement and their new ideas about accessorizing their partners' cars.

One TikTok user, @senjamaru2, suggested a rule to balance the scales of surprise: "Got to have a rule. You add something to his car, he gets to have a chosen decoration in the living room with none of your say."

Another TikToker joked about the husband's desire to get rid of the gift. "He will definitely crash the car to get a new one now," @evilpermy wrote.

Social media pranks have become a common trend, often leading to virality. Whether everyday pranks, like Jade's, or pranks around significant life events like birth announcements or weddings, it's a sure-fire click generator.

Research has been done to examine the filmed prank trend and what drives people to create this type of content.

In a study conducted in 2019 on filming pranks on intimate partners, researchers examined the reasons people carry out these pranks and found out if there were correlations with self-esteem, gender, age, and amount of social media use.

The authors found that these factors do predict the tendency to perform pranks with their romantic partners and that pranks may even decrease the level of satisfaction within relationships. However, the authors also pointed out that this research contradicts a 2017 paper that argued pranks are a powerful measure of sustaining certain romantic bonds.

"Those who engage in social media pranks have less satisfaction with their romantic partners which may lead to a breakup," the authors wrote. "Drawing from the data obtained and discussed from the study, it is clear that the self-esteem of partners significantly influences their rate of engagement in social media pranks. The higher the self-esteem of the partners is, the lesser their desire to engage in social media pranks."

The study doesn't seem to bode well for the plethora of social media relationships in which pranking is a common gesture. However, it does encourage more academic research about social media behaviors regarding pranks and humor, which might contradict it.

Regardless, after Jade's video, the inside of husbands' cars may see many, many more jokesters.