Safer just to hire actors.) And some comedians such as the Jerky Boys and guests on the former Comedy Central show Crank Yankers have relied on the prank call for laughs.īut generally it seems as kids grow up, the needs these prank calls served tend to dissipate, and they leave the jokes behind for the next generation of puberty-flustered youngsters to discover. (Even a fairly silly one-a contest promising “100 Grand” that ended with the winner receiving the candy bar instead of cash-ended in a lawsuit accusing the radio station of deception. Although it seems most such calls may be faked these days for legal reasons. I’m thinking mostly of morning show radio hosts whose pranks are often curdled into meanness-trying to catch people in the act of cheating, and the like. This is not to say adults never prank call. The boys were ultimately fired-this is partly why women ended up working as telephone operators in a time before it was common for them to work outside the home.
Bell's chief engineer ended up referring to the boys as "Wild Indians." They purposely crossed lines so that strangers would suddenly find themselves talking to each other. The boys disconnected calls as they were still taking place. They also regularly played practical jokes on those customers. And they did, but as my colleague Megan Garber wrote in 2014: When Bell Telephone first started back in 1878, the company hired teen boys to be its operators, thinking they’d make for cheap, energetic labor. In fact, in the early days of the phone, the pranksters sometimes were telephone-company employees. This is probably particularly satisfying for kids, who usually carry out adults’ demands. “In executing the prank, he is able to assume a position of authority … make demands … and have the majority of these demands carried out,” Harris writes. Then the prankster calls over and over again in the next 15 minutes, “and if they answer let go a blood curdling scream.” “Telephone pranks serve as a means of releasing hostility and frustration with a minimum risk of retaliation.” In one variation, the caller warns them not to answer the phone for 15 minutes “because if they do, the telephone repairman will receive a fatal shock,” as one survey respondent told Harris. In another common genre of phone prank, the caller pretends to be from the telephone company and tries to get the answerer to do something, like blow in the phone to “fix” it. “Pranksters become aware of the power of words in unusual or different contexts.” “There is also a certain amount of linguistic delight in discovery,” Harris writes. “Do you have pop?” “Yes.” “Send him home Mom wants him.” Perhaps the most well-known is the “catch question,” à la “Is your refrigerator running?” A few others:
There are several classic forms this can take. “Telephone pranks serve … as a means of releasing hostility and frustration with a minimum risk of retaliation,” Dresser writes. The calls are almost always made in groups, her survey found, so there’s a bonding element, and “the caller becomes the center of attention among his peers.”ĭresser, Jorgensen, and Harris all note that a prank call also serves as a sort of low-stakes rebellion, a chance to embarrass the adults that usually have power over them. In her 1973 paper “Telephone Pranks ,” the folklorist Norine Dresser writes that the pranks “serve several social needs” for kids that age. The few studies on prank calls that exist estimate that the pastime is most popular among kids from ages 11 to 14 or 15. In each case the denouement was highly farcical, and the reputed corpses are now hunting in a lively manner for that telephonistįrom then to now, most people have tended to make prank calls during a brief window of adolescence. A Grave Joke on Undertakers.-Some malicious wag at Providence, R.I., has been playing a grave practical joke on the undertakers there, by summoning them over the telephone to bring freezers, candlesticks and coffins for persons alleged to be dead.
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