I'm a big fan of "Candid Camera."

I cracked up the time they confounded gas-station attendants using a car equipped with a 12-foot dipstick.

Last week, I talked to Jessica Gutshall, a Chattanooga-area woman who was recently duped on a modern hidden-camera television show. The gag was for "Scare Tactics" on the Syfy network, and it involved -- get ready -- Siamese twins and a dwarf.

"I always thought these shows were fake," Ms. Gutshall said.

While living in Las Vegas last fall and working on the cosmetics aisle at a Macy's department store, Ms. Gutshall, 23, was sucked into the elaborate practical joke by a girlfriend.

"She asked me to work in a doctor's office with her for a couple of hours late one night, which I thought was odd," Ms. Gutshall said.

Ms. Gutshall said OK, and she soon discovered that the "doctor" specialized in separating co-joined twins.

Ms. Gutshall apparently bought into the notion that Las Vegas has a co-joined twin community sufficiently large to require a full-time physician to cut them apart. One imagines a waiting room furnished entirely with love seats.

Anyway, during her late-night, two-hour watch at the Siamese-twin surgeon's office, Ms. Gutshall received a phone call from a former conjoined twin suffering from an acute case of -- what else -- "separation anxiety."

Meanwhile, Ms. Gutshall's friend had conveniently stepped out to fetch her a beverage from Starbucks -- a Passion Fruit Tea, no water, 14 pumps of syrup.

"I asked the twin to leave a message, but he wouldn't. He thought his twin wasn't going to make it. He was yelling at me. He was irate. He wanted his twin reattached," she remembers.

After a few minutes, the irate man arrived at the doctor's office carrying a pet cage.

Here's where the story gets murky as Ms. Gutshall has been cautioned against giving away too much of the Oct. 6 episode of "Scare Tactics" (9 p.m., Syfy).

A preview clip on YouTube.com shows Ms. Gutshall standing on a chair screaming bloody murder as she is stalked by a dwarf who appears to be covered in chitterlings.

As a trained journalist, I will postulate that Mr. Dwarf emerged from the aforementioned pet cage in a fashion designed to menace Ms. Gutshall and, ideally, to cause her to wet her britches.

Ms. Gutshall later learned that the offstage actors in this ruse were falling on the floor and choking back gales of laughter as she stood in the chair and screamed her brains out.

"My adrenaline was rushing," Ms. Gutshall remembers. "I was shaking. I felt like I couldn't move."

Now, that's entertainment.

Get the popcorn ready, momma. This ought to be funnier than a 12-foot dipstick.