It's not Boston's most famous art heist, but it might be the funniest.
Back in 1997, when he was in high school, B.J. Novak and a friend made convincing replicas of an audio tour for an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. The Newton South student who would go onto fame as a TV star, writer and movie director swapped out some of the original tapes for the spoofs, which start off like the original version did before taking a wild and debaucherous turn.
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The museum described it as "a stunt that both confused countless innocent visitors and showed us that even the pettiest and most sophomoric pranksters among us can leave an impact on a historic institution," in a Facebook post Monday as they officially proclaimed that Novak was pardoned.
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The Newton native returned to the museum to give a lecture called "Art & Pranks" last week, where he was presented with a scroll of the proclamation.
"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, according to to a Boston Globe account of the evening.
Safe to say it was not quite at the level of the nearby Isabella Stewart Gardner heist seven years earlier, though apparently it made an impact on the MFA's security, too.
"I even got to talk to Edwin the security guard who was there on the day of the prank. I thought it might be a sting operation at first. But it seems all is well. Thank you MFA for your sense of humor and mercy and to everyone in Boston who came to see it," Novak said in an Instagram post Tuesday.
A representative for the museum didn't have a copy of the recording they could share with NBC10 Boston. While Novak embedded a video of the recording in a 2014 post explaining the prank on his blog, that video is now private.
At a 2011 fundraiser at Newton South, he opened up about the prank for what he suggested then was the first time, according to a contemporaneous Globe piece, which described the recording.
But in 2007, before Novak first appeared on "The Office," a recording matching the tour's description was uploaded as a podcast, with a brief news clipping about the prank as its cover art. It's credited to Peter Owen Nelson (a friend of Novak's) and B.J. Novak, and at least as of Tuesday afternoon, was available to listen on Apple Podcasts. (If you do listen, there are some curse words.)
"Quietly remove the glass and smell the rich aroma of the paints," the narrator says, sniffing. "That's it. Take it right in. Then, please, replace the glass to its previous position."
Later, in a sidebar on the Oscars, the heavily accented narrator says, "Show me the money," in a Tom Cruise impression before an elaborate "Hokey Pokey" routine.
"You see, we are spicy here at the Museum of Fine Arts. We always keep you on your toes," Bronstein says.
The recording ends with the narrator going off the rails, followed by about three uninterrupted minutes of a Tito Puente cha cha song.
