CHRONICLE is an online series where we’re uncovering long-forgotten print stories from our dusty hard drives and archives. This story first appeared in the Summer 2014 Issue of Resource Magazine. Visit the Resource Shop to pick up the latest copy.
By Charlie Fish – Photos by Brad Trent
A couple checks in at a Borgata hotel. They’re escorted to their room by a bellhop, but upon entering, they notice a shirt on the neatly made bed. “Whose shirt is that?” asks the woman. It belongs to the bellhop, but he doesn’t admit it. He didn’t even know it’d be there. He’s not really a bellhop, but one of the four Impractical Jokers, whose TV show on truTV is currently in its third season. We see their interaction through the hidden cameras placed around the hotel room. What the couple doesn’t see is that Sal, the Joker in question, is being prompted via an earpiece on what to do next. So he, as instructed, opens the closet for the couple. At this point a man dressed in a cat suit jumps out of the closet and proceeds to chasehim around the hotel room. “Not again, not again! I hate this f*cking thing!” screams the bellhop, as he, in a panic, jumps onto the couch, then onto the couple’s bed. He manages to snatch his shirt before running out of the room, still screaming. The couple looks on in complete, stunned disbelief.
Meanwhile, in another room, we see the remaining three Jokers—Q, Murr and Joe—laugh uproariously as they watch the action on a monitor. They’re laughing, in part, because of the situation: the unaware couple’s reaction at the absurdity of having a man in a cat suit terrify their bellhop. But they’re also laughing because Sal, their longtime friend and co-star, really didn’t expect a giant cat to chase him. Turns out, Sal is rather terrified of cats in general. “He was attacked by one when he was younger. His aunt or uncle had a cat that liked everyone except Sal. It used to go after him. He had, like, a vendetta against him,” explains Joe. This is the crux of their prank on Sal.
THE SLOW BURN
Joe: I’m a big of fan of the slow burn pranks. I had a ten-year prank on Sal. I used to sign him up for every mailing list and every magazine I’d come across. I used to call up infomercials and give his information. You don’t even realize how many you come in contact with, like the whole, “Give us your e-mail” in stores when you’re shopping. I was in a bar called Johnny Utah’s on the East side of Manhattan and a girl was walking around, like a shot girl trying to get people’s emails. Sal walked up to me while I was doing it. He looked over my shoulder—I didn’t realize he was there—and he asked me, “Why’d you put my name down?” And then he realized, and his mind was blown. He was like, “You’re the reason I’ve been getting all this information on mattresses!”
Much of Impractical Jokers follows a similar set up. Hidden cameras, anywhere from six to eighteen, are placed in a setting. Sometimes it’s a park, or a grocery store, or a restaurant, or a hotel room. Three of the pranksters are somewhere unseen, viewing the action on a monitor and prompting the fourth member through his earpiece. He engages with an unwitting participant. Maybe he has to touch his nose to someone’s body, or put his finger in their ear. Or maybe he’s pretending to be a hapless dentist’s assistant. If a prankster fails to perform his task, there’s a hefty, hilarious punishment. For instance, Murr is terrified of skydiving, so they made him do it in a bit that later became known as “cry diving.” It gets really awkward really fast, much to the enjoyment of the prompters—and the audience viewing at home. So successful is the show that it was just signed for a fourth season, with filming set for September. Then there’s the spinoff, Jokers Wild, premiering this fall on truTV.
The hidden camera genre has long been wildly successful. Candid Camera, created by Allen Funt in 1948, was the longest running show of its kind, ending in 2004. Modern takes on the genre include Punk’d, which featured celebrities being pranked by executive producer Ashton Kutcher, and Jackass, which made Johnny Knoxville a household name. Impractical Jokers differs from these shows because more often than not, their “marks” are just ways for the pranksters and comedians to pull one over on themselves. “A lot of prank shows for some reason are skewed a little bit mean, but we like confusion,” explains Sal. “When someone is confused it’s the best possible comedic response,” he adds. Fellow joker Joe echoes, “We’re the butt of the joke. We’re also nice guys with a good upbringing, and we don’t like to be dicks.”
THE TENDERLOINS ON JOKERS WILD
Joe: Jokers Wild is a sketch show, which brings us back to our roots. We’re the Tenderloin Comedy Troupe, formed in ’99. TruTV gave us a second show where we’re doing this full-blown sketch show. It’s just us being us in a surreal, uber reality where we embrace everything. We play ourselves; we don’t play characters. We’re starting with six episodes; hopefully they’ll buy more.
Sal: We met in high school in 1990 and we’ve been doing The Tenderloins for fifteen years. That was all based on sketch and improv. Jokers Wild is a little bit of a return to that. It’s going to be sketch comedy. The catch about it is that we’re playing ourselves in all our sketches. It’s going to be a hybrid sketch-slash-remote pieces. What we’ll do is switch in and out from reality to sketch.
Murr: Jokers Wild is going to be The Tenderloins at their best.
Sal Vulcano, Joe Gatto, James “Murr” Murray and Brian “Q” Quinn met when they were attending Monsignor Farrell High School in Staten Island, NY. “It was an all-boys school, so there wasn’t a lot to do there besides bust chops and joke around,” recalls Q. Pranks were commonplace, and sometimes carefully coordinated. “The first prank I remember us doing,” says Murr, “was in religion class as freshmen in high school. As our teacher, Mrs. Fidducia, walked through the aisle, Joe would secretly put his nose on her. She would have no clue. Now twenty years later we turned it into ‘nosing’ on Impractical Jokers, which we’ve done several times.” And then there was Vermin Day, “when everyone would bring in an animal and release it in the school at the same time,” says Q. This penchant for pranking and joking and comedy led the four friends to form the improv comedy troupe The Tenderloins. While on an NBC competition special, It’s Your Show, the troupe won the $100,000 grand prize for their comedic sketch. The Tenderloins then tried to develop two scripted comedy shows before arriving at the hidden camera format and the success of Impractical Jokers. For the troupe, the hidden camera made sense, as they’d constantly been pranking one another since high school anyway.
“We used camera phones and put together our own tape and our scissor reels. That was how we sold the show,” remembers Joe. The first episode of the show aired on December 15, 2011, and over 32 million viewers watched the first season. With that much exposure, it’s easy to assume that the guys are becoming recognizable and, thus, some “marks” might be in on the prank. Not so, assure the guys and the show’s Executive Producer, Pete McPartland.
As showrunner, it’s Pete’s responsibility to have the set up and location be as conducive to authenticity as possible. So how exactly does one go about hiding up to eighteen cameras? “We often joke that we have to bend over backwards to hide a camera when it is right next to a very visible security camera,” he says. “If you were to walk in, you would think there’s an electrician running a wire,” reveals Pete about the discreet set up. Every detail is as covert as possible. Pete explains, “Everything needs to be completely tucked away so that no one realizes there is something being shot there. The people walking on the floor cannot have any visible walkie-talkies, or visible headphones. We have people who are posing as employees, so they would be wearing shirts that make it look like they’re working at the store. Or someone at a restaurant would be wearing a suit, pretending to be a host, but he’s really a producer and the disguise justifies his earpiece. In terms of executing our shoots, it’s 50% technical, 50% a nuanced producing of an authentic public experience.”
IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE, IF I WASN’T DOING COMEDY I’D BE…
Joe: I would love to do high-end sales, like helicopters or yachts or something like that. To sell a jet to somebody might be kind of cool, you know what I mean?
Q: Firefighting.
Sal: I have a finance degree and I worked a nine-to-five job at Prudential Securities. Five years out of college I was doing comedy on the side; I knew finance wasn’t for me and I moved to bartending so I could have the flexibility to do the comedy. I then became the manager of the bar and ended up buying it and I did that for ten years. I think I’ve always done comedy for free and I’ll do it until the day I die. I can’t really see myself doing anything else—I just really can’t. I’m probably really lucky to have comedy.
Murr: In an alternate universe I’d be an architect. I just love design.
If someone is suspected of being a fan or of being in on the prank, the group will delay shooting until another unsuspecting mark comes along. As for hiding the cameras, they’ve come up with a cabinet-like structure that “doesn’t ever look out of place, wherever we put it,” says Pete. That’s their number one hiding place. Still, sometimes a camera is spotted. “You know who notices the cameras the most? Little kids,” reveals Pete. He adds, “Even if someone walks in and they might have noticed the camera, once a joker engages with them, they don’t have time to think about it. They’re too busy watching the joker perform his embarrassing tasks and they become too engaged with him to observe their surroundings and figure out what’s going on. They’re more focused on ‘Who is this guy?’ and ‘Why is he trying to touch his nose to my shoulder?’ or whatever the task may be.”
As for what tasks lie ahead for the good-natured pranksters for the second half of season three, the guys reveal a few promising tidbits. “It’s not really the challenges that you’re going to see evolve that much, it’s the punishments,” hints Q. “What happens is every season so far the punishments have gotten bigger and bigger and now we’re locked in a revenge trip,” he adds. “There will be some more celebrity guests. Look for the ultimate season finale punishment that’s going to blow your mind,” says Murr, who also serves as a producer for the show. Pressed for more, he lets us know it’s directed toward Sal, and involves all of his greatest fears including, you guessed it, cats. And if you ever find yourself wondering if you’re being pranked, just heed Pete’s tip: “If you walk into a place with unusually bright lights and no music playing, they might be shooting a hidden camera show!”
HOW WOULD THE TENDERLOINS PRANK A PHOTOGRAPHER?
Joe: We would probably just keep our eyes closed. It’d be like, “1-2-3” and we’d close our eyes.
Sal: So, it’ll be like the camera coincidentally caught us all blinking.
Q: Well, I almost pranked you guys by oversleeping this morning, but it might be fun to put the classic ink around the viewfinder.
DREAM MARKS
Joe: Will Smith. He’s a hero of mine and I also think he would take it in stride and be a lot of fun.
Sal: Hopefully I’ll prank someone who becomes my wife. But more so, someone who wouldn’t try to karate chop me in the trachea.
Murr: The President would be amazing. If you could pull off pranking the President without getting shot by Homeland Security, that’d be pretty sweet. But you know, I’ve always wanted to do a prank on a plane.
WOULD YOU RATHER PRANK A POLITICIAN, AN ATHLETE OR A REALITY TV STAR?
Sal: Definitely not a reality TV star. Maybe if it were a really famous athlete it’d be good, but probably not because they’re usually big people. I’ll say politician because they’re pranking us all the time.
Murr: I’d say a politician because they’re so damn serious. They take everything so seriously and always think about the ramifications on their campaign. So anyone who takes things that seriously is great to screw with.
COMEDY ICONS
Joe: Mel Brooks, hands down. Mel Brooks movies were my thing. I was big on that kind of comedy, like Leslie Nielsen and Naked Gun and stuff like that.
Q: There’s so many. I think Richard Pryor. But I like Abbot and Costello, too. There’s just so many.
Sal: This is a tough one for me because I don’t like to give just one answer. We’ll say Andy Kaufman, Bill Cosby and Eddie Murphy. But also, I can’t stray away from Leslie Nielsen.
Murr: Bill Burr, Eddie Murphy, Mel Brooks. The Zucker Brothers, who created the Airplane movies. Those were huge influences on me. Leslie Nielsen was a huge influence on me. I think Kevin Hart is excellent, too.
NINJA HEROES
Joe: I’ve watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon so many times. The Last Dragon is one of my favorite movies ever. It’s a comedy, a take on reverse racism, where there’s a black kung-fu guy in Harlem.
Q: Well, in the Pink Panther his assistant would dress as a ninja and come after him. There’s that, but I never really got into ninjas, which is ridiculous because ninjas are awesome. Can I say Storm Shadow from GI Joe? Does that count?
Sal: Outside of Bruce Lee, the Wu-Tang Clan borrows a lot from old karate movies and that’s where the Shaolin comes in. Staten Island is also called Shaolin, which comes from the Wu-Tang movies. RZA himself was heavily influenced by that, and in a way I look at the Wu-Tang Clan as a kung-fu influence. But I heard Joey mention The Last Dragon, which is a comedic take on the kung-fu movies and I love that. I was also into ninja video games growing up. Everybody wants to be a ninja.
Murr: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, of course. They have a new movie coming out soon.
WHERE TO EAT IN NEW YORK CITY
Q: I’m going with Lee’s Tavern on Staten Island, which makes some of the best pizza in the world. There’s also a place called Emilio’s Bellato on Houston. It has unbelievably good Italian food.
Sal: Ed’s Lobster Bar. Ed Macfarlane is a dear friend of mine and he’s also a native Staten Islander, but I’m not just saying it because of that. It’s the best lobster that you’ll ever have.
Murr: Becco on Restaurant Row on 46th Street. It’s an Italian restaurant and they have all-you-can-eat pasta. Every day they make three different pastas and no day’s ever the same. They bring it right off the pan and put it on your plate, it’s amazing.
IPHONE OR GALAXY?
Q: Galaxy. I have a Galaxy Note.
Sal: Galaxy Note 3.
Murr: iPhone.
MICHAEL JACKSON OR PRINCE?
Q: Michael Jackson.
Sal: I saw Prince at the Garden a couple of years ago and he was amazing. But the old school Michael Jackson stuff is like—uhhh, I don’t know what to choose!
Murr: Michael Jackson.
WHY DOES JOE KEEPING DANCING, EVEN IF HE’S TERRIBLE?
Q: He’s never going to stop. He’s got happy feet, baby.
Murr: Joe’s not a good dancer, he’s just confident. So, he’s a confidently bad dancer and that’s why he dances, because he’s funny as hell. He owns it. He owns how bad it is.
WHEN PRANKS GO WRONG
Murr: Sometimes we do pranks that are good on paper but not good in reality. For example, we were working in a supermarket and Sal was behind the checkout counter ringing up customers. This woman goes through the whole process and she hands Sal her credit card. So I said to Sal, “Take out your cell phone and take a picture of her credit card before you swipe it.” She went ballistic! She called 911 and the police came. The police finally calmed her down and talked her out of the store; when they came back in, they asked if they could take pictures with us because they were fans of the show.
Sal: Once in a while you’ll get some collateral damage on people—it’s probably me who does it the most. I really got under a guy’s skin when I cut him in line. We had to cut people at the TKTS Booth in Times Square. These people were in line for hours, and everyone hates a line cutter. The point was to find somewhere where people are on line for a really good reason. They line up to get the tickets on a first-come-first-served basis. There was this older guy who seemed like a war vet, and he called over security. When security came, instead of admitting defeat and walking out, I said, “I don’t know what he’s talking about, I’m with him. I’m part of his family.” And the guy looked at me and said, “No, you’re not,” and I said, “Sure I am, tell him. Tell him I’m with you.” It just got so under his skin. He said, “What, is there something wrong with you?” and I said, “No, uncle.” Then he just moved the other way and tried to choke me. It went from zero to sixty. When they found out they laughed, but in that moment, it was scary.
THE ONGOING CAT SUIT PRANK
Sal: I think it gets boring for the viewer, but from what I gather when we meet people is that people can’t get enough of it. Everyone asks me, “He’s not a cat so why are you running?” I’m telling you it’s not that I’m scared of the cat suit; the reason why I run is because when someone is chasing you, you run. It’s like an instinct. You just do it. They’ve done that three times already and I think they’re done with it. I really hope they are. Every single time they’ve scared me. They did it at a White Castle drive-thru, where the cat jumped through the window and it scared the shit out of me. They did it in a hotel when I was showing people their room and it was the last thing I expected. The other one was when I was in a cornfield.
I hate haunted houses, I hate being scared and I hate people grabbing at me. I’m afraid of going into haunted houses because I know it’s an actor and I’m always worried that I’m going to punch somebody. But, the guys know I hate haunted houses so they set up a haunted corn maze as a punishment for me. I had to follow a path and things kept jumping out at me. It was one of the things that blew me away the most in the three years that we’ve been doing the show.
We drove three hours upstate and I was blindfolded. When I got there, it was the most elaborate thing. It was something you can dream up in your head but couldn’t ever imagine. That’s one thing about the show—you have ideas and then you do them.It’s unbelievable how if you think of something a team of people will go and make it happen, but the corn maze was hysterical. They had little children just roaming around and staring at me while I was lost in the maze. I was like fifteen minutes in and alone, and a little kid would walk by. I’m thinking, “Where the fuck is this kid?” Because I knew all along that they had to have a parent or a chaperone nearby, and I’m looking for the parent and there’s no parent. I saw this little girl about 200 feet ahead of me and I had to follow a certain path to pass her. When I reached her I said to her, “I know you’re actors, but I’m telling you right now if you jump out at me when I’m passing I’m liable to punch you.” And then I ran past her and as I was running I kept looking back. Finally I was long past her and waiting for the parent, and as I’m doing it someone blows an air horn behind me in my ear. I screamed and fell down because it startled me. I jumped back up in half a second and she was gone. But I was about one hundred feet when she disappeared and I turn around to find her standing right behind me. I guess they grabbed her and brought her around. It was really funny, they did it really well. I told them that it was the best thing they’ve ever done to me.
At the very end I had to follow a string for a mile and it opened to a clearing in the dead center of a cornfield. I’m holding onto the string and it got ripped out of my hands; I had to find my way back. It wasn’t a maze anymore, it was a cornfield, so there was no path and I had to push through the corn. At that point I’m thinking about what to do and the cat just ran out and charged at me. It chased me through the entire field. You know in the movies when people are running and they’re rolling as they’re running? It’s so true—I actually tumbled. The cat was ten feet behind me running as fast as I was; I was charging full speed and kept falling because I was going through the corn.
THEIR PERSONAL LIMITS
Murr: My limit is the same two things in every episode. If it’s a beautiful woman, I can’t prank her. I get clammy and nervous. Same if it’s an older person. I was raised to be polite to your elders, and the guys know that, so they’ll send me to an old-timer and have me do something. I lose it every time. And I would never kill a man, unless he deserved it. If it were a criminal, I would have to have the case history and see that he’s been proven guilty in a court of law by a jury of his peers. If they did, then I’d kill a man.
Q: I never murdered anybody. I don’t want to be mean to anybody and I don’t want to make anyone feel stupid. I don’t mind being a little edgy or making a little sexual innuendo, I just don’t want anyone to feel stupid or dumb.
MURR VS. SHARKS
Murr: Skydiving and sharks are my number one fears. I have an irrational fear of getting eaten by a shark—to the point where I wear a shark repellant sonar bracelet. You put it around your ankle and it sends out sonic rays.
PRANKS OFF CAMERA: THE TURD CONGO
Murr: We do this thing where whenever we go to a hotel, Joe will check in as Sal fifteen minutes before Sal arrives. He goes into Sal’s room and cranks the heat up to 110 degrees and does a number two in the bathroom and leaves it. Ten minutes later Sal arrives and walks into his room and it’s like the Serengeti: it’s the “turd Congo.” It’s hot as balls and there’s a number two in the toilet. It’s hysterically funny. We do it all the time. Sal’s so neurotic about it—that’s why we do it, because he’s so overly neurotic about it.
HOW DID THEY DO IT? THE HOTEL ROOM PRANK
Executive Producer, Pete McPartland: It was quite elaborate. We had to be there at check-in time and we had one room with a king size bed that was on camera (so we needed a couple, not a family). We had the hotel slow down the check-ins so that we could evaluate the people in line and we discreetly pulled a couple into the “express checkout” area. We had them check into the hotel with a real employee, then the employee handed a Joker, or “bellhop,” the key to their room. He hid the key and used another key to get them into the room that we had rigged.
Rigging the room was a challenge because it’s very hard to fit everything into a small space. And when people get to a hotel room, they’re interested and want to look into everything. Cameras also aren’t wireless—they need to be hardwired out of the room—so we had to put in our own fake molding into the floor to conceal the wiring. From a technical standpoint, that was the most satisfying prank.
We also spoke with the Impractical Jokers’ makeup artist. Read the story here.