“All calls were routed through operators,” Collins wrote in 2011, “and the most anonymity one could get was in the payphones prominently displayed in drugstores and hotel lobbies.” “Whoever invented the prank call was braver than today’s bored teens,” wrote Cara Giaimo in Atlas Obscura, referencing the work of historian Paul Collins. With no barrier for entry except access to a telephone and the ability to speak, nearly anyone could pick up a receiver, dial a number, and harass Wendy’s employees, cops and, occasionally, the odd world leader. Like most reboots, the tropes it formerly leaned on - topical references and catchphrases, technologically specific jokes - have grown wobbly with age.įor most of their existence, audio-only pranks occupied a space somewhere between juvenile lark (“Excuse me, but is your refrigerator running?”) and surreal social experiment (Orson Welles’s 1938 radio hoax War of the Worlds). That’s why Crank Yankers will return with tweaks that acknowledge the 12 years since it went off the air.
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.
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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.
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.
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