The five silliest pranks by retirement community residents refusing to ‘act their age’

Everyone knows that residents in retirement communities are not meant to draw attention to themselves and typically spend their days quietly playing bingo, walking their dogs or sipping tea on their balconies.

Everyone, that is, apart from their residents themselves.

A recent viral video from New Zealand has illustrated how retirement community residents love pulling silly pranks and generally refusing to ‘act their age’.

Retirement village operator Ryman last week released a video showing a group of Auckland retirement village residents re-creating Justin Timberlake’s video for Can’t Stop The Feeling shot-by-shot.

The video was filmed over a week during a coronavirus shutdown period and features 35 residents from three different villages.

Norris Aitken, the 79-year-old former bank manager who played Timberlake, said the video showed people “there’s life after retirement and there’s plenty of fun still to be had”.

Given the blanket media coverage and huge number of views of the above video (11,000 and counting), we’d thought we would bring you a list of four of the other silliest pranks by retirement community residents.

Victoria’s naughty calendar girls

In 2019, a group of female Victorian aged care residents - aged 75 to 99 - caused a storm by posing in the nude for a calendar.

According to aged care provider Lifeview, the idea behind the calendar came from the residents themselves, who were very keen to try their hand at modelling but "even more eager to show some skin".

Lifeview CEO Madeline Gall said:"This calendar is playful, it is creative and most of all it demonstrates you are never too old to experience something new”,

“We truly believe in giving residents the opportunity to live out their ideas and for this photoshoot they really gave it their all; there was nothing holding them back, or in for that matter.”

Mr Gall said the calendar photographer "was patient when poses couldn’t be held for long, when instructions couldn’t be heard without yelling or when teeth accidentally popped out of the glamorous models’ mouths!”

Retirement village party shut down due to noise complaints

In March 2020, a party held at a Western Australian retirement village, had to be shut down by the local council due to multiple noise complaints.

Ninety people attended the event, at the Karrinyup Lakes Lifestyle Village. 

TV news footage showed retirees - some with walking sticks and walkers - enjoying a live band and dancing the night away to floor fillers such as John Paul Young’s “Love is in the air”.

That was until local rangers turned up at 10:30pm to shut the party down, after noise complaints.

A somewhat bitter party organiser Kerry Bessen later labelled the council rangers as the “fun police”.

Lifestyle community residents go the “full monty”

Also in March 2020, nine brave men from the Halcyon Greens lifestyle community in Queensland agreed to go “The Full Monty” to help raise awareness and funds for prostate cancer.

The fundraiser captured national public attention, appearing on television in Queensland and New South Wales and running in newspapers around the country.

The inspiration came from 1997 film The Full Monty which featured a group of unemployed mine workers from the northern England town of Sheffield who decide to strip to make some extra cash.

While Halcyon Greens’ dancers kept their speedos on (unlike in the rather more ribald film final scene) they did raise more than $6,000 at the event to fight prostate cancer.