Hitchcock’s Practical Joke

“Once, we were at a party in a restaurant with some twelve guests to celebrate my wife’s birthday. I hired an aristocratic-looking elderly dowager and we put her at the place of honor. Then, I ignored her completely. The guests came in, and when they saw the nice old lady sitting alone at the big table, each one asked me, ‘Who’s the old lady?’ and I answered, ‘I don’t know.’ The waiters were in on the gag, and when anyone asked them, ‘But what did she say? Didn’t anyone speak to her?’ the waiters said, ‘The lady told us that she was a guest of Mr. Hitchcock’s.’ And whenever I was asked about it, I maintained that I hadn’t the slightest idea who she was. People were becoming increasingly curious. That’s all they could think about.

“Then, when we were in the middle of our dinner, one writer suddenly banged his fist on the table and said, ‘It’s a gag!’ And while all the guests were looking at the old lady to see whether it was true, the writer turned to a young man who’d been brought along by one of the guests and said, ‘I bet you’re a gag, too!'”

— Alfred Hitchcock, interviewed in 1962 by Françoise Truffaut

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