Looking at it another way, you didn't need to set up any tooling to shepherd data into production because everyone involved understood the point of the joke. It was a very clear example of GIGO for your entire company and the cost was one meeting.
A lot of my joke errors boiled down to "you've hit an edge case I didn't handle, here's an easily searchable string to find the location". They were jokey because the subtext was another late night and you might as well soften the blow.
Actually, the opposite. The result of this, besides damaged reputations and hundreds of person-hours of time wasted, was more access controls and more reviews/oversight, which slowed things down and generally made things far less "fun" than the original joke could offset.
A lot of my joke errors boiled down to "you've hit an edge case I didn't handle, here's an easily searchable string to find the location". They were jokey because the subtext was another late night and you might as well soften the blow.