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Prank Call: Difference between revisions
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* [["Weird Al" Yankovic]]'s 1996 parody of [[TLC (band)|TLC]]'s "Waterfalls", [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwHYenKngQs "Phony Calls"], is not only all about this trope, it incorporates a snippet of one of Bart's phone calls from ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]''.
* [[blink-182]]'s song "What's My Age Again?" includes a prank call which is defeated by Caller ID.
* One of the signature devices of the Irish comedy hip-hop group [[Rubberbandits]].
== [[Puppet Shows]] ==
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== [[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
* One of the primary inspirations for Bart's prank calls in ''The Simpsons'' is the real life [[w:Tube Bar prank calls|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.
* Apparently the fear of this has become so ubiquitous that a US senator hung up on US President-Elect [[Barack Obama]] because she thought he was a prankster. The fact that VP candidate Sarah Palin fell victim to a just such a prank several weeks earlier ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcEiR01QK7o this one from a group pretending to be the French president and his aide]) probably contributed. President Obama was said to have been amused.
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