Prank Call

MOD NOTE: Rename to simply "Prank Call" when launched.

A Prank Call is a telephone call made in order to make somebody look foolish.

This is a common staple in many comedy situations, though less often thanks to the introduction of a system such as caller ID. Yet, many professionals have adapted workarounds, such as hiding their numbers with phony covers. Sometimes, the usage of Punny Names have often comes into play. In real life, it can depend on the location when it comes to legality, with fines being the most common punishments.

A subversion of this is known as Mistaken for Prank Call, where a call sounds like a prank, only to be found that it wasn't.

The Other Wiki has a page about this topic that goes into more detail than we do.

Fan Works

 * Mars Attacks: Simpsons: Each chapter has at least one such call to a random location, mostly to Moe's Taven.

Film

 * In the 1978 horror film Halloween, a group of friends tease one another with prank calls as a Halloween trick. During one such prank, Lynda is strangled by Michael Myers while in the midst of a phone call with Laurie. Laurie, assuming it is another friend making a prank call, hangs up on Lynda's cries of distress.

Literature

 * At one point in the Suzumiya Haruhi novels, Kyon is told by a future!Mikuru a number of things he will do in the next few days, all of which he feels are ridiculous and make no sense. Among these things is a prank call on Haruhi. When the moment arises, it of course is the right thing to do.

Live-Action TV

 * Fonejacker, a 2007 show airing on the British E4 channel, features prank calls made by star Kayvan Novak to members of the general public; recordings of the calls are aired with cut-and-paste animations (similar to Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python's Flying Circus) representing the speakers taking part.
 * The teaser for a Cheers episode had Woody not falling for a prank call, even though the caller (revealed to be Frasier) tries to explain it to him... and vice versa.
 * On Freaks and Geeks, because Bill had a history of being Picked Last, he prank called his gym teacher out of frustration and anger.

Music

 * "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1996 parody of TLC's "Waterfalls", "Phony Calls", is not only all about this trope, it incorporates a snippet of one of Bart's phone calls from The Simpsons.
 * Blink-182's song "What's My Age Again?" includes a prank call which is defeated by Caller ID.

Puppet Shows

 * Crank Yankers was a Comedy Central TV show which featured puppets re-enacting both sides of genuine prank calls made by the production staff.

Radio

 * Sal Governale and Richard Christy, writers for and on-air personalities on The Howard Stern Show, have made numerous prank calls for the show, calling up public-access TV shows, other radio programs and just random people. They have also pranked celebrities with a fictional radio program they "host" called the "Jack and Rod Show".  Unsurprisingly, Howard Stern participates in their pranks.
 * See the "Roy D. Mercer" calls in Recorded and Stand Up Comedy, below.

Recorded and Stand Up Comedy

 * The Jerky Boys were Johnny Brennan and Kamal Ahmed, a 1989-2000 comedy act from Queens, NY whose primary claim to fame was recordings of prank phone calls made either to unsuspecting recipients or inflicted on callers responding to classified ads placed in New York City-area newspapers. The victims of their pranks were usually subjected to over-the-top character voices and bizarre situations.  The Jerky Boys initially circulated "bootleg" tapes of their pranks, which brought them to the attention of radio personality Howard Stern; Stern took a liking to their comedy and gave them national exposure, which led to a record deal; their first release was in 1993, and as of 2021 they've sold more than eight million copies of their various albums -- virtually all of which were prank phone calls.
 * Comedian Tom Mabe became known for recordings of his prank responses to unsolicited telemarketing calls. One of his most famous calls involved convincing a telemarketer that he had inadvertently called the scene of a homicide.
 * Mabe is also known for attending an event at which telemarketers gathered in Washington D.C. with the hopes of discouraging new laws that would prevent telemarketing. Mabe booked a room in the same hotel in which they were staying and called the telemarketers in their rooms at 3 a.m. to pretend to sell them sleeping pills.
 * "Leroy Mercer" was a character created and voiced by John R. Bean, a Knoxville, TN resident in the early 1980s. As "Mercer", Bean would make and record prank calls, including calling businesses and individuals to threaten them with an "ass-whuppin'" if they didn't pay him money as recompense for some fictional incident.  Like The Jerky Boys' early work, his tapes were shared hand-to-hand rather than sold commercially.
 * Several years later in the 1990s, disc jockeys Brent Douglas and Phil Stone on radio station KMOD-FM in Tulsa, Oklahoma created a character (voiced by Douglas) whom they called "Roy D. Mercer", originally as part of their morning show. This Mercer also made prank phone calls in which he demanded payment for a fictional offense against him and promised an "ass-whuppin'" to anyone who refused to pay up.  Collections of Roy D. Mercer calls were eventually distributed on CD.  Despite the similarity of character names and material, Douglas and Stone denied that they had copied "Leroy Mercer".

Video Games

 * Maniac Mansion has the option for the player to pull a prank call to distract villainess Nurse Edna when she enters her room.

Web Original

 * Beginning in early 2011, 4chan organized a prank calling of the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop, home to the popular television show Pawn Stars. The callers would repeatedly ask the employees if they sold Battletoads, a video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System notorious for its difficulty. This call led Rick Harrison, owner of the store, to repeatedly swear and yell at the prank callers, who recorded this and uploaded it to YouTube. This originated several other similar videos of pranksters dialing random establishments and asking about Battletoads.
 * The Annoying Orange's episode "Prank Call #1: Tanning Salon" is a real prank call.
 * During his review of Cry Wolf, Phelous makes a prank call to the police. This leads to a cop shooting a fellow skit artist at the end of the review and then arresting Phelous.

Western Animation

 * A common running gag throughout The Simpsons deals with Bart prank calling Moe with random names, resulting in Moe's rants towards the caller. Yet, fan theories suggest that although Moe knows Bart was behind the pranks, as he's used to his voice, he still goes along due to loneliness.
 * Regular Show had an episode, simply called "Prank Callers", revolving around this and featuring "The Master Prank Caller".
 * It probably comes as no surprise that Beavis and Butt-Head had a prank call episode, called (of course) "Prank Call".
 * In Futurama, a prank call directed Fry to deliver a pizza to Seymour Asses, a false address. When he discovered this, he decided to eat the pizza himself, and shared it with a stray dog who then became his devoted pet and vainly waited for his "return" from cryosuspension until its death in 2012.
 * In an episode of Dinosaucers, the Big Bad, Genghis Rex, decides to grab a phone guide and prank call people because he is bored.
 * In the courtroom episode of Clerks: The Animated Series, the prosecuting attorney plays tapes of a prank call made by Jay and Randal (completely unrelated to the case) as part of the trial.
 * In one episode of Powerpuff Girls, the Gang Green Gang used the Mayor's emergency phone to prank call the Powerpuff Girls into beating up villains who weren't doing anything.
 * In the episode "Up All Night" of The Angry Beavers, Daggett tries to make a prank call. Not only does he botch the delivery, he accidentally calls his mom.

Real Life

 * Two early and famous prank phone calls are the "refrigerator" gag and the "Prince Albert" (a brand of tobacco) gag. The first involves calling a target to ask "is your refrigerator running?" When the responder says "yes," the prankster replies "Well, you'd better go catch it!" The second requires calling a commercial establishment to ask if they have "Prince Albert in a can." If the reply is yes, the prankster responses with "Then you'd better let the poor guy out!" The origin of both of these jokes is unknown, although it is theorized they may have been adapted from vaudeville routines rather than any single real-life incident. They have since been repeated in multiple outlets, though less for their comedic value than to convey the idea of a "prank phone call."
 * One of the primary inspirations for Bart's prank calls in The Simpsons is the real life Tube Bar prank calls from the mid-1970s. A pair of pranksters who called themselves the "Bum Bar Bastards" recorded numerous calls they made to the now-gone Tube Bar in Jersey City, NJ, owned and operated by former heavyweight boxer Louis "Red" Deutsch.  In these, they would (like Bart) lead him to call out offensively punny names for non-existent patrons allegedly wanted on the phone.  In the 1980s numerous (incomplete) collections of the calls were circulated on cassette tape and were even commercially released until the Bum Bar Bastards stepped forward, claimed the copyright, and released their own definitive collection.  (The most recent release of which, as of this writing, was on CD in 2015.)  Matt Groening has described himself as a fan of the Tube Bar tapes, and although he denies any direct connection between them and Bart's prank calls, Bart has over the years used more than a few of the same gags the BBB inflicted on Red Deutsch.