Prank Call

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Laconic: Prank calls

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.

Examples of Prank Call include:

Fan Works

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

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.

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 unsuspecting subjects of their pranks were usually subjected 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.

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.

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.

Real Life

• 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.