Here's a funny prank! Actually no. That's sexual harrassment, chump.

By ROSIE WATERLAND

Here’s a funny prank you guys:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-9iANo4MO8

That’s Nova’s Fitzy and Wippa, the much-loved Aussie morning radio duo. If you can’t watch right now, the camera basically follows them around as they try to plant sneaky kisses on the women in their office.

Hilarious, right? Clever pranksters trying to kiss women without their permission – what could be funnier than that?

Like most FM radio personalities, pulling pranks is part of Fitzy and Wippa’s shtick. And a lot of what they do makes me laugh – I still lose it when I listen to clips of them playing The Rihanna Game.

But.

This prank really, really doesn’t sit right with me.

I just don’t understand how inappropriately kissing someone without their permission is hilarious.

I think it portrays an astonishing lack of understanding when it comes to the concept of consent.

I get that most people would probably find the prank funny, and I’ll admit that I did laugh at the awkwardness of it in some parts, but I was just left with an overall feeling of… creepiness. The skit opens with Fitzy saying that “Inappropriate kissing in the workplace is not on.”

Yeah. That’s true. But then they spend the entire five minutes lunging at women’s faces because FUNNY. Wippa even offers tips like “Catch them off guard so they don’t know it’s coming. Be friendly and engaging – then land one on the lips.”

Creepy.

And these two aren’t the only ones who think inappropriately kissing women for laughs is comedy gold. A couple of YouTube pranksters in the US recently posted a similar video of their attempts to kiss women on their college campus:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_Q5jbEtvl0

Again, there are some awkward laughs to be had, but really? Creepy.

I think these pranks bother me so much because they blur the lines of what consent actually means. They’re basically sending the message that you should never let consent or permission get in the way of a good prank.

And when you consider that we live in a world where a lot of guys think it’s okay to send a picture of their penis to a girl they’ve just met, and a group of boys pretending to jerk off on women in public have millions of fans, clearly we can’t afford to be sending a confusing message about consent.

The message needs to be clear, so that we don’t have a generation of young men and women growing up thinking that ‘consent’ is for just chumps without a sense of humour.

Never just ‘assume’ she’ll be okay with it. Not every woman will be – and that’s reason enough not to do it in the first place.

So what do you think? Are these kinds of pranks just harmless fun, or is this a trend we should be concerned about?