![]() We obviously don’t use landlines much, but with cell phones and social media and text and e-sports and all these other platforms, it just felt like there was a huge universe to tap into.” “We just communicate differently than we used to. “It’s not like we don’t communicate anymore,” says Jonas Larsen, Comedy Central’s executive vice-president of talent and development. A format that has always depended on static technology now finds itself grappling with the endless, not-so-funny ways in which it can be subverted. government’s own, actual propaganda chokes news feeds, while swatting, doxxing, and deep fakes are increasing fixtures of online life. Blocked numbers and ignored voicemails are routine. Because honestly: How the hell do you make a prank call in 2019? Things have changed drastically since their 1990s and early 2000s heyday. With a new generation of digital pranksters leading the way, a Crank Yankers reboot on Comedy Central, and a documentary on Colorado underground prank-legend Longmont Potion Castle making the rounds this year, a revival of the humble prank call suddenly seems plausible.īut that assumes prank calls are even still relevant. Now, those same late-night sessions are conducted over YouTube and Twitch with the aid of voice-changing software that masks the caller’s IP address. “I always wanted him to make the call because it’s more fun to listen in.” Kimmel and Escobedo connected a tape recorder to a suction cup from Radio Shack to make low-quality recordings from their phones, which they would then play back for friends. “I’d sleep over at his house pretty much every night - 30 nights in a row one summer - and we’d spend the whole night just trading off calls,” said Kimmel. Kimmel, who still keeps a few Crank Yankers puppets in a makeshift shrine in his office, traces the beginning of his prank-call obsession to age 10, when he began making them with best friend Cleto Escobedo III (now his bandleader on Jimmy Kimmel Live!) in Las Vegas. “It’s just improv, really, with an unwitting audience of one, and that’s what I love,” says Jimmy Kimmel, Crank Yankers’ co-creator and producer. And yet only a sliver of people have carved a career out of prank calling, and you can probably count them on one hand: the platinum-selling but still underappreciated Jerky Boys, the Crank Yankers crew, and the drive-time jockeys who followed Howard Stern’s career path - mostly raunchy dudes looking for button-pushing, adolescent thrills. ![]() But one thing that’s remained surprisingly resilient in the face of technological change is the prank call.Ī practical joke that grew organically out of the first telephone lines more than a century ago, prank calls are as established a format in comedy as stand-up or sketch. Just don’t play it too often, or it’ll get old quick.The digital revolution has left plenty of once-beloved formats broken and twitching on the floor, from CDs and newspapers to brick-and-mortar retail chains. It’s not very high-brow, but it’s plenty funny. There’s a bunch of good stuff here (David Alan Grier does a typically classy turn as a guy who calls phone sex but just can’t stop projectile vomiting), and some boring stuff (all that Elmer and Helen Higgins stuff) and some stuff that worked better when you could actually see the puppets “acting” out the call, like their fake UPS call where they get a couple all worked up over a lost package and they all start swearing.Īnd then, of course, there’s some not-very-hilarious racism (why does Jimmy Kimmel hate Karl Malone so much that he has to make fun of his accent? what the hell is that all about? I hate Malone too, but not because he’s a black man from the south) and some really-not-very-funny burns on mentally ill people (who the hell decided that “Special Ed” was funny in the first place?). He has another bit here with sample Hallmark cards he wants to write, but it’s not as good as the other one. The famous bit where he tries to take out a personal ad in the Village Voice: “Well-endowed player, 31, seeks dirty ho to sip Cristal,” and it just gets worse from there. ![]() The big star here is Tracy Morgan’s “Spoonie Luv” character. ![]() I’m hired”), and the second one is the one where she (under the auspices of “the Municipal Waste Management program”) calls a couple to ask them “to reduce the amount of solid waste being flushed by approximately 18%” is just rotten-spirited fun I can’t help laughing when I hear “Our motto is, ‘Too many poos, we all lose’.” If this disc was all Silverman, I’d say it was the best thing ever recorded. Her two tracks here as “Hadassah Guberman” are two of my favorite bits from the show ever the first one is her application to be a nanny (“You know what?” she asks, “I like you. ![]() This second volume of prank calls is better than the first one, mostly because Sarah Silverman is the funniest person currently alive. ![]()
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