Everyone loves innocent jokes. . . The emphasis is on “innocent. “Unfortunately, not every single trick or joke achieves an especially funny result, even for the pranksters themselves, and many iconic examples of this can be discovered on the big pages. screen and the small screen. We’ve made the decision to count only our favorite fictional examples, so don’t expect to see the real-life victims of Johnny Knoxville or Sacha Baron Cohen among our picks for the most disastrous pranks in videos and TV shows.
In the iconic climax of Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, bratty Chris Hargenson (Nancy Allen) plots to humiliate Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) by pouring pig blood on her head during prom. Unbeknownst to her, the candy student is telekinetic. And the stunt unleashes a rage inside her that culminates in an all-out bloodbath in the school’s best gymnasium with very few survivors.
It begins when Cory (Ben Savage) and Shawn (Rider Strong) take Rachel’s (Maitland Ward) car to her and Angela’s (Trina McGree) bedroom. They and Jack (Matthew Lawrence) retaliate by beating up Cory, Shawn, and Topanga (Danielle). Fishel) to their chairs, dousing them with honey and letting a bear go crazy on them. Cory and Shawn’s rejoinder, in the form of the posting of an enlarged and revealing photo of Rachel at the student union, hurts her to tears and simply ruins the dates between those characters in the cast of Boy Meets World.
After helping D-Day (Bruce McGill) and Bluto (John Belushi) kidnap a horse belonging to House Omega member Neidermeyer, Flounder (Stephen Furst) is convinced to shoot the animal, unaware that they only put blanks in the gun. When Flounder is triggered, the sound causes the horse to have a fatal center attack, resulting in one of the darkest jokes in National Lampoon’s Animal House, which means something.
To get revenge on Harry (Jeff Daniels) after learning that he spent the day with Mary behind his back, Lloyd (Jim Carrey) puts a hefty dose of laxative in his coffee before returning to Mary. This leads seamlessly to the crudest scene in Dumb and Dumber in which Harry ends up violently flushing his trash into Mary’s toilet, which only then discovers it’s broken.
In the 1982 horror film, The House on Sorority Row, seven school students try to play a prank on their housekeeper, Mrs. Slater (Lois Kelso Hunt), by stealing her cane and forcing her to retrieve it herself. her pool while she holds her at gunpoint. When the older woman retaliates through the unexpected Vicki (Eileen Davidson), she shoots her, making her the target of a killer who uses her cane as a murder weapon.
The entire ending of New Girl, in which Nick (Jake Johnson) and Jess (Zooey Deschanel) are forced out of the loft, an elaborate farce through Winston (Lamorne Morris). Although the couple managed to find a new position to live, the gang sees this joke as an example of when “Prank Sinatra” takes his sense of humor too far.
In a late ’90s slasher called Urban Legend, a wave of murders related to popular myths reminds Natalie (Alicia Witt) of a game she used to play with her best friend from school, Michelle (Natasha Gregson Wagner). They turn on the headlights and chase the first car to make them turn on their headlights, resulting in the death of the driver of the other car.
Dwight (Rainn Wilson) is the victim of Jim’s (John Krasinski) most productive banter on The Office, but the one who’s turned a bit on Andy (Ed Helms) in retaliation for his annoying new ringtone. In the show’s third season, Jim hides the former Stamford Branch salesman’s cell phone on the ceiling and calls him repeatedly, causing him to get angry and overreact by punching holes in the wall.
In an April Fool’s Day episode of one of the most productive animated series of all time, Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants, Squidward (Rodger Bumpass) makes the decision to get revenge on his eponymous colleague (Tom Kenny) just for enjoying one of his favorite vacations. by placing an elaborate Rube Goldberg-style trap in the Krusty Krab. However, the cantankerous octopus joke only causes physical and emotional pain to SpongeBob and causes him to complain from bystanders, forcing him to apologize.
A classic example of the dark, competitive humor of FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in season two, when the gang plots revenge on a business developer who tries to claim ownership of part of Paddy’s. One of their acts of revenge is to throw a flaming bag filled with feces onto their rival’s property, knowing that at that moment a fuel leak occurs, causing an explosion inside.
After Melvin (Mark Torgl) is tricked into dressing in a pink tutu and kissing a sheep he thinks is his crush, Julie (Cindy Manion), the embarrassed gym caretaker runs out of a window and falls into a vat of poisonous waste. It can be argued that he had a positive outcome, as the twist of fate turned him into a grotesque but tough vigilante known as the Toxic Avenger.
In Norm Macdonald’s 1998 cult film, Dirty Work, revenge artists Mitch (Macdonald) and Sam (Artie Lange) attempt to make a guest’s noisy neighbor’s mansion literally smell fishy. When the owner returns with others to conclude an illegal business transaction, the customer smells it, which the dealer takes as a sign that they are trapped, leading to a bloody off-screen massacre.
One of the scariest segments of the classic 2007 horror film Trick’ R Treat shows Rhonda (Samm Todd) hysterical through other cheaters posing as the vengeful spirits of young men killed deep in a local quarry years earlier. Will we, the pranksters, die when the true spirits of the murdered youths emerge to attack them?
Bart Simpson (Nancy Cartwright) is one of pop culture’s greatest mythical pranksters, but one of his biggest bombshells occurred in an episode of The Simpsons’ April Fools joke, as fate would have it. He shakes a can of Duff so hard that, when Homer (Dan Castellaneta) opens it, the ceiling of his space literally explodes.
One horror movie villain we feel some sympathy for is Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder), whose brutal series of homicides in the Hatchet franchise stems from vengeful retaliation for the ruthless Halloween prank that inadvertently led to his death. When the grotesquely deformed guy finds himself trapped in his space, which is set ablaze by cheaters, his father (also played by Hodder) uses a trapdoor to enter and rescue him, but instead kills him with the tool.
In season 3 of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will (Will Smith) and Carlton (Alfonso Ribiero) convince Geoffrey (Joseph Marcell) that he has won a $26 million jackpot, to which he enthusiastically responds by resigning from his position as a live calling servant. This forces the cousins to reveal his trick (performed by having him play a tape of last week’s lottery replay and buying a ticket with the matching numbers), to which he responds by almost strangling them to death.
In many wonderful horror movies, the triggering incident or entire plot revolves around a failed prank and the most devastating example is 2020’s The Lodge. The main revelation of the Christmas horror movie is that Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh) manage to convince their father’s girlfriend, Grace (Riley Keough), that they’re all in purgatory, but they can’t make her understand that. This was the case with a prank, which led to the volatile survivor of the cult shooting his father (Richard Armitage) thinking that he too had joined them in the afterlife upon returning to the cabin.
To get revenge on his father, Martin (John Mahoney), for scaring him earlier, Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) sneaks up on him disguised as a killer clown. The gag works too well, leading to a shocked Martin ending up in the hospital with a central attack.
It probably came as no surprise to South Park enthusiasts that a series of retaliatory pranks between Scott Tenorman (voiced by Tothrough Morton) and Eric Cartman (Trey Parker) led to excessive circumstances, but the way they happened was incredibly absurd. After Scott tries to trick Cartman into eating his hair, Cartman gets revenge by tricking Scott into eating his own parents.
The classic 2009 horror-comedy Zombieland features one of Bill Murray’s most memorable cameos, especially for how tragic it turns out to be when he tries to sneak into Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg). Because the comedy legend’s disguise as a walking corpse is so convincing that Columbus ends up shooting. He was in the chest, ending his life for real.
In one of the Friends episodes set on Thanksgiving, a flashback shows a moment when Joey (Matt LeBlanc) placed his head on the dinner entrée and couldn’t remove it. He explains to Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) that he put the turkey in the top position in hopes of scaring Chandler (Matthew Perry).
The 2001 mystery Joy Ride stars Paul Walker, Steve Zahn, and Leelee Sobieski as three hikers who are chased by a sadistic trucker known as Rusty Nail (voiced by Ted Levine), but still have no one to blame for this ordeal. Walker and Zahn’s characters, Lewis and Fuller, played a prank on Rusty Nail, posing as a woman on CB radio and luring her into a racist businessman’s motel room, which he obviously didn’t find funny.
One of the darkest school videos of the ’90s is Jawbreaker, in which a group of popular young people (Rose McGowan, Julie Benz, and Rebecca Gayheart) invite their fourth member, Liz (Charlott Ayanna), to a birthday dinner. pre-kidnapping her and throwing her in the trunk of a car. However, they are the ones who end up being surprised to notice that, along the way, he choked on the titular candy.
When he learns he’s moving out at the end of his first week of school, Max Keeble’s Big Move main character (Alex Linz) makes the decision to get revenge on his bullies, not just with a prank, but with a series of elaborate, raucous jokes. Unfortunately, when his father quits his job, allowing his family to stay at home, all of Max’s torturers come to him at the same time. At least his friends arrive and help him save himself from a gruesome fate. .
The 1981 horror film, The Burning, follows a former summer camp guard named Cropsy, who seeks murderous revenge years after falling victim to a prank performed by a camper organization. An attempt to scare Cropsy by hitting a flaming, insect-infested skull. Near his bed it works great, resulting in an inferno that engulfs his cabin and leaves him horribly disfigured.
Home Alone’s Dennis the Menace and Kevin McCallister might be the most famous naughty kids, but pop culture’s real and scariest troublemaker might be Junior (Michael Oliver) from 1990s Problem Child and its sequel the following year. chaos by throwing the family cat at his grandfather (which ends him up in the hospital) and spinning the propane from his new neighbor’s gas grill enough to cause an explosion.
On Disney Channel’s The Famous Jett Jackson, Jett (Lee Thompson Young), Kayla (Kerry Duff) and J. B. (Ryan Sommer Baum) play with a functional flying saucer from the Silverstone set that ends up flying over Booker (Andrew Tarbet). The trio never intended to play a prank on him, seizing the opportunity when the officer is visibly surprised by the sight. However, they succeed when Booker spreads the word and causes a city-wide uproar that ends up costing him his job.
Desperate to find a way to build a relationship with young Ben (Cole Sprouse), Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) shows him some of the tactics she and her siblings used to mess with in their youth, like putting saran around the bathroom. However, Rachel finds herself in the doghouse when Ben’s jokes begin to disappoint his father, Ross (David Schwimmer), and his mother, Carol (Jane Sibbet).
In the Season 2 finale of New Girl, Schmidt (Max Greenfield) needs to sabotage Cece’s (Hannah Simone) marriage to Shivrang (Satya Bhabha) and recruits “Prank Sinatra,” Winston, who conspires to release a live badger into the ground. . celebrating from the internal vents in the hallway. Unfortunately, he and Nick never get that far in the plan as they get stuck in the vents with the shaving brush after it comes loose from its box.
In the 2017 thriller, Don’t Hang Up, Sam (Gregg Sulkin) and Brady (Garret Culkin) convince a woman over the phone that there’s an intruder in their home and unknowingly reveal the fact only after she drops the phone. Hearing someone he believes to be the intruder, he shoots her before discovering it is his own daughter entering the house. This incident makes Sam and Brady the target of a ruthless killer who punishes pranksters like them.
As a component of the Dunder-Mifflin Scranton branch’s haunted Halloween space attraction, Michael (Steve Carell) hangs from the ceiling with a fake noose around his neck, sure to traumatize his young guests. The bloodless opening also proved moot in real life and has since been removed from the episode titled “Koi Pond”, anywhere The Office can be streamed.
The 2009 slasher slasher instigating the Sorority Row incident (a reimagining of 1982’s The House on Sorority Row) is a prank to punish Garrett (Matt O’Leary) for tricking Megan (Audrina Patridge) into convincing him that he killed her. However, he ends up killing her for real by mortally wounding her with a tire crowbar.
This deserves to go unsaid, but you need to be careful who you prank and how you play them. If you don’t do it with us, just look at those video and TV prank examples for reference.
Jason Wiese writes stories for CinemaBlend. Su craft is the result of years of dreaming of a career as a filmmaker, of embarking on a career as a “professional cinephile,” of reading journalism at Lindenwood University in St. Petersburg. John’s and a year of journalism. Charles, MO (where he served as cultural editor for his student-run print and online publications), and a brief stint reverting to watching videos for fun. He would later continue this activity as a film critic on TikTok (@wiesewisdom), where he posts videos twice a week. Look for his call in almost every single article about Batman.
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