If You’re A Celebrity, You Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Prank Regular People

My stance on pranks has changed a lot over the years. 

Part of that is me becoming old and bitter, like a clementine that’s been rolling around a minivan floor for months on end. It’s also the fault of how pranks have evolved, with them becoming seemingly more and more mean-spirited and, for some reason, targeted at service workers. I’ve stopped connecting with the mischievous cackles of the pranker and instead find myself looking into the sinking eyes of a grocery store worker that’s going to be yelled at about this later. It’s difficult to think of clever pranks, so people in search of attention look for loud or destructive ones instead. The title of most modern pranks could either be “Violating Social Norms REACTIONS,” or “I Attempt to Break the Psyche of an Adult Human.”

Nevertheless, they get views, which means that the entertainment industry smells blood in the water, and various prank shows seem to be coming back into vogue. Here’s a sampling of some of the most notable: Celebrity Prank Wars with Nick Cannon and Kevin Hart, The Prank Panel with Eric Andre, Johnny Knoxville and — inexplicably — Gabourey Sidibe, and the darkest of all: a show called Prank Encounters hosted by Stranger Things star Gaten Matarazzo. 

Celebrity Prank Wars is, of the three, the most innocent, since it’s all celebrity-on-celebrity mischief. Writing the phrases “punching up” or “punching down” cause my left eye to twitch, but by that criteria, at least here the jabs are horizontal.

The ugh-inducing skeleton at the base of the others, and one I’m afraid we’re going to see more of, is the fact that you can’t make a fried egg in Hollywood these days without a celebrity’s name attached. So these celebrity-fronted prank shows are going to keep popping up. With the main problem being that when the payoff of your show is a millionaire pointing and laughing at someone who has lived a life down here in the fields with the rest of us, it feels pretty messed up. I don’t care if the conceit of The Prank Panel is that it’s a family member who brings them in, the end result is still Johnny Knoxville making a mother think her son committed murder.

Prank Encounters was debased enough, and clearly not reviewed by anyone without a network-note rotted brain, to earn widespread backlash. That’s because the idea of this show was that people who thought they were going to their first day at a new job were, in fact, about to be pranked by a rich child. Power dynamics aside, it was about as funny as you’d imagine sliding a whoopee cushion under an unemployed man at a job interview would be.

Pranks are best between friends, and Hollywood desperately wants you to think it’s your friend because it also likes Spider-Man (as long as he’s testing well, at least). Please, greenlighting powers that be, don’t go further down this road. My mind is frayed enough by living in a modern world without having to wonder if the next time I go to the laundromat, Matt Rife is going to sneak a bank-bag ink-pack into my dryer. Don’t piss on my head and then tell me I have to sign a release agreeing that it was raining. 

Punk’d wasn’t fun because Ashton Kutcher was having a good time, it was fun because Drake wasn't.