Princess Kate’s silly sense of humor has been revealed in a new podcast, and it turns out she takes after her late mother-in-law, Princess Diana, with her love of a good prank. In the latest episode of “Catching Up With the Royals,” longtime royal journalist Emily Andrews shared what the Princess of Wales was really like behind the scenes—and the very Diana-esque joke she played on a staff member.
“She’s got a great sense of humor,” Andrews told her co-host, Reverend Richard Coles. Recalling the 2014 tour William and Kate took to Australia, the royal expert continued that the couple had to stand in a certain place for an appearance, which had been “marked out on the floor with a plastic spider.”
Kate then “crept ‘round the back of the sofa to where one of her aides was sitting, and she knew that he didn’t like spiders,” Andrews shared. The princess then dropped the spider into the man’s lap. “I mean, he nearly hit the roof, and obviously, everyone thought it was very funny, including, I should say, the aide,” Andrews said.
The prank brings to mind Princess Diana’s fondness for practical jokes. Her former butler, Paul Burrell, previously told Marie Claire about the pranks she’d play on her kids, including a very R-rated Christmas gift.
Speaking of the presents she’d put in their stockings, Burrell said, “Of course, Diana was very jokey and she would put rude things in there too to embarrass them. William had a calendar one year with naked ladies on it just to make him blush and it worked.”
Diana’s former hairstylist, Richard Dalton, told People that the princess also got a kick out of pranking her staff. “She always had plastic vomit or plastic dog poop in her bag to place on people’s seats when we traveled on long flights," Dalton recalled. "She was hysterically funny and loved playing jokes on all of us.”
Fake spiders, it seems, would have been right up Diana’s alley.
