Ashton Kutcher Says Comedians Were the Worst Sports on ‘Punk’d’

On the first season of Punk’d, Tracy Morgan gets into it with a tow truck driver who’s trying to drag his car all the way to Barstow. A pissed-off Morgan retaliates by staging a sit-in inside the tow truck before -- surprise! -- a bear hug from Ashton Kutcher lets the comic know he’s been pranked. 

As it turns out, Morgan was an exception to a Punk’d rule: When it came to taking a joke, no one had thinner skin than people who were funny for a living. “Everybody had a sense of humor about it,” Kutcher said this week on the Chicks in the Office podcast. “And you know who had the least sense of humor about it was comedians.”

Which surprised Kutcher, who assumed comics would be down for, you know, comedy. “But comedians, they like to be in on the joke, right? They don't like to be the joke.” 

For the most part, other celebrities were good sports, says Kutcher. And unlike today’s Tiktok world, in which unsuspecting people can become the victim of viral pranks without their permission, Kutcher’s targets ultimately agreed to their public humiliation. “When I did the show, every single person that got punked signed a waiver and said ‘yes, you can air this,’” he says. “And I destroyed tapes on anybody who said ‘you can’t.’” 

Kutcher isn’t naming names, but he admits that comedians accounted for a larger-than-average percentage of those destroyed tapes. The number of aggrieved funny people got so bad that “after a while, we just stopped doing comedians.” 

Platforms like Tiktok have everyday Joes looking over their shoulders these days, making pranks nearly impossible to pull off. In the glory days of Punk’d, “nobody was expecting it, right? Nobody saw it coming,” says Kutcher. “And now I think everybody's a little bit more on guard because they know there's always a camera rolling. And so I think it would be much harder to do that show.” 

And nearly impossible to do with comedians, despite Kutcher’s argument that “dude, it's funny.” That's because of a universal truth about people in the comedy game: “They want to be the one making fun of you.” True that, Ashton Kutcher, we loved you in “Killers.”