The Greatest Prank Calls of All Time Pt. 1

Like pretty much every inanimate object in the world, the telephone can be used for either good or evil. You can use it for good things like ordering a bouquet of puppies for a sick child. Or you can use it for evil things like ordering a bouquet of dead puppies for a sick child. Now, we would never encourage you to use the phone for evil. That said, it would be churlish if we didn’t acknowledge modern telephony’s capacity for hilarity and high mischief.

Hence, we offer to you the first five of what we consider the greatest telephonical pranks of all time, pranks that we in no way condone in any shape or form and that we don’t encourage you to replicate and that we definitely, definitely never played any phone pranks when we were younger, especially that one where we got the neighbours to run screaming and half-clothed out of their semi-detached thinking it was on fire.

You might find a spot of profanity within the videos, so make sure your boss/kids/parole officer/dog is out of the room. And if you can think of any more, drop them in the comments below.

Crank Krall

Prank calls come in many flavours. Many of them are racist, bile-filled rants by basement-dwelling virgins simply designed to reduce their victim to tears, or in the case of villainous online community Pranknet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pranknet), to actual bodily harm. Nah, the best prank calls to our mind are those that take the victim on a surreal journey that doesn’t so much ruin their day than enhance it, maybe even giving them a story they can dine out on for a while. Lance Krall is a Vietnamese-American (which means his Vietnamese impression is okay to laugh at, right?) who is a past master at these kinds of calls. This is one of many of Krall’s triumphs.

Palin gets a Nailin’

They might not be known for much else (Céline Dion aside), but French Canadians are the absolute masters of the phone prank. During the 2008 US Presidential election, Montreal DJs the Masked Adventures (Sébastien Trudel and Marc-Antoine Audette) managed to speak to then-US Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, pretending to be Président de la République française Nicolas Sarkozy. During the conversation, Audette asks a credulous Palin if they can go hunting for wolves via helicopter together, and even dares a reference to Hustler’s porno-satire ‘Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?’. The gullibility of Palin and her team became a major focus of the brutal-yet-hilarious post mortem conducted by Republicans after Obama took the White House.

Somebody Needs to Fire C-Span’s Researcher

Alright, this isn’t so much a single call but a collection of calls that either proves how difficult it is to screen calls for a live broadcast (judging by the number of calls like this on Youtube, it is) or that US political news station C-Span has some incredibly dim researchers (judging by the number of crank calls let through, they do). What’s often impressive is the way the pranksters patiently pretend to be a genuine caller for several moments of insightful comment before unleashing a childish knob gag. Our favourite? The caller concerned about the ongoing war with the robots, and the way the host continues to humour him. Live television: truly the playground of the prankster.

Tales from the Tube Bar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh5PO_uYV60

Ah, the Tube Bar series. In the world of prank calling, this stuff was like the discovery of fire, and are arguable the first recorded prank calls to reach a mass audience. These involved a tuberculosis-sounding barman and former boxer named Jim ‘Red’ Deutsch and his exchanges with pranksters John Elmo and Jim Davidson back in the 1970s. The two New Jersey knockabouts would call the Tube Bar, and ask Red if they could speak to a particular patron. Thing is, the names they gave were a series of bizarre and often pornographic homophones – some of our favourite calls being for Clint Torres, Mike Unstinks and the classic Ben Dover. If the methodology sounds familiar, that’s because these tapes are what inspired Matt Groening to create Moe the Bartender and his infamous telephone exchanges with Bart Simpson.

Scott Mills Versus Indian Takeaway Versus Indian Takeaway

The majority of Scott Mills’ pranking oeuvre is pretty much solely directed at takeaways and low-level service sector workers – but like the best pranks, they work so well because they’re that rare fusion of juvenility, simplicity and farce. In what is easily his greatest prank, Mills rings up an Indian takeaway, places an order, and then asks them to repeat the order. Before they start to read out the order, Mills puts them onto the phone with another Indian takeaway he’s lined up waiting to take an order. With Indian takeaway yammering at Indian takeaway, it’s like some kind of vaudevillian feedback loop.

Honourable Mention:
We Are Not Amused

Where there’s a phony call to a celeb, chances are there’s a French Canadian not far behind. In 1995 Québécois radio personality Pierre Brassard managed to con the Queen into thinking he was Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien for a truly epic 15 minute conversation, during which he convinced her to campaign against the Quebec independence referendum. Needless to say, when the hoax call was played on air, the Queen was not amused. Brassard later reserved his own personal deckchair in hell when he managed to prank Pope John Paul II, again as Prime Minister Chrétien, telling the senile pontiff that he should try affixing a hilarious propeller to his skullcap (called a zucchetto, pope fans).