Register
Home > Movies & TV > The Best Cable Television Prank Calls

The Best Cable Television Prank Calls

By CRACKED Staff October 18, 2006 8,956 views
article image
In the past, prank calls were strictly masturbatory, a joke told for the sake of yourself and the stranger you called to humiliate. Fortunately, a national stage has emerged for those men and women who delight in ridiculing complete strangers via telephone: cable television. TV producers, too unoriginal or cheap to generate actual content, have increasingly turned to call-in segments to fill airtime. Through these shows, the telephone is now a mouthpiece to every television set in the United States.

It’s the perfect stage for a prank. Not only can prank callers display their craft, they and everybody else can see the reaction of the victim in real time. Here are six of our favorite television prank calls and the elicited notable responses they elicited on national television.


6. Women with horses



The prank: With a few different crank calls interrupting this C-SPAN segment on viewer’s favorite Web sites, this clip serves as a valuable case study in technique. The first caller shows how not to prank. His joke is convoluted and confusing, leaving the viewer puzzled instead of laughing. But the second call is clear and direct: His favorite site is womenwithhorses.com. It’s simple but references bestiality, what more do you need?

The reaction: Remember that teacher in grade school that had absolutely no control over the kids and whose classes always devolved into a Hobbesian state of nature of endless spit-ball fights and fake fart noise contests. By the end of the year, the teacher was completely defeated and stopped even attempting to discipline you, instead somberly saying things like, “I am just so disappointed with you guys.” When the C-SPAN anchor says, “Thanks for the call, we appreciate it,” he sounds just like what that teacher would have sounded like if she had to fail at her job on national television.

5. Thank you for taking my call dot com.



The prank: During the blackout of 2004, a prank caller posing as a representative from the New York Transit authority calls in to Ted Koppel’s live broadcast to inform a national television audience what’s going on down in the powerless subway tunnels. By maintaining a calm and serious tone, the caller is able to drop the name of his website (thankyoufortakingmycall.com) at least a dozen times and casually mention that Beauty and the Beast are down in the subway too without getting cut off.

The reaction: It’s tough to tell what Koppel’s doing here. It could be that he doesn’t listen to what people are actually saying to him, and simply reacts to the tone in which they speak. It could be that Ted Koppel is so old that he just accepts everything with the words “dot com” at the end because he stopped trying to understand technology once they invented the automatic transmission. Or it could be that Koppel knew he was being pranked the entire time, and rather than cutting the guy off, just decided to completely fuck with the callers head by not acknowledging that anything out of the ordinary was going on. Give the caller enough rope to hang himself, so to speak, like the cagey old coot that he is. If this is the case, Koppel scores his check mate when the guy says, “Ted I don’t think you hear me,” and Koppell tells him he heard him fine. If Koppel is just old than that part is just really sad. Either way, based on this clip, we can say with confidence that Ted Koppell is either a genius or a lunatic and that there is no in-between.

4. Brian Lamb doesn’t take shit from nobody



The prank: A caller on the Republican line asks C-SPAN's Brian Lamb when he lost his virginity. When Lamb, apparently baffled by the question, asks the caller what he means, the caller responds in a very-matter-of-fact manner by asking, "When did you get fucked?"
The reaction: Apparently Mr. Lamb doesn’t deal in euphemisms. He’s puzzled by terms like virginity, but when you shoot him straight and ask him when he first got fucked, well then he knows what you’re talking about, and he’ll even thank you for your frank phone call.

Recommended for Your Pleasure

3 Comments

Wow a list full of videos that have been removed by user. I kind of wish Cracked would just do cleanups every so often and take these down, and on lists where it's only partial, remove the entries without a working vid.

8/13/2009 12:31:14 AM
Kindahuge

For the record, TWO of these calls are mine! I made the ThankYouForTakingMyCall.com call after the NYC power blackout and I also made the Battlestar Galactica (a.k.a. Robot War) call to C-Span.

I won't get Mad if you get Cracked.

3/20/2009 3:11:40 PM
creflo

I remember the Sanders clip, been looking for it for a long while..Thanks, Cracked!

3/4/2008 7:53:27 AM
O

More on Movies & TV

Cracked stuff on
Recent Videos

Copyright © 2005 - 2009 Cracked Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. CRACKED, CRACKED.COM and the "CRACKED" logo are trademarks owned by Cracked Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.