The Death of the Prank Call

“You’re not 72, you’re 15 pretending to be 72… you prat!” barked DJ Pete Price down the receiver of my busted Sony Ericsson mobile. It was 2011 and I had prank-called the Radio City agony aunt, doing an impression of my grandad (RIP) Malcolm’s Hull accent, which my older brother was recording via an online stream downstairs. I was almost instantly rumbled, and the subsequent conversation was broadcast live to the city of Liverpool. 

“This is my voice!” I moaned in a passionate defense, keeping an incensed Price going for just over a minute and doing my best to give the impression his yelling had ruined the day of a sweet old man named Malcolm. I instantly uploaded the call to YouTube under a pseudonym (@scousepaul1) to leave a false trail, paranoid I might get into trouble. The clip has, to date, clocked up 113,000 views, while one of the the top rated comments reads: “Malcolm suffered a massive heart attack following this call to which he never recovered.” 

Eleven years on, the prank call feels more and more like a pop culture relic. We now live in a world where people use texts and Zoom to communicate with one another, with a study from BankMyCell showing many millennials and Gen Z users actively avoid taking phone calls, 75 percent doing so because they’re “too time-consuming”. Seemingly a whole generation of Gen Zers only really take phone calls from their parents, using Instagram voice notes and memes to connect with friends. Doing a prank call just doesn’t carry the same thrill, or instantaneity of web-powered platforms. 

 If a caller pretending to be someone else does make the news, these days it tends to be in the context of fraud and scamming, with criminals using deep fake CEO vocals to extort money from banks. “I don’t think I’ve been prank called in decades,” says Scott Wark, a lecturer in media studies at the University of Kent, when asked about their dwindling cultural capital. “When I think of nuisance calls now, I think of spam callers trying to scam me out of money. I don’t think prank calls per se are necessarily going to come back.” 

To truly understand how prank calls went from something everyone did during sleepovers (think Bart Simpson calling up Moe’s Tavern and asking for Mr. Hugh Jass) to an outdated concept people with receding hairlines reminisce about, it’s important to explore their rise. One of the first ever documented prank calls dates back to 1876, when someone impersonated a dead person and asked a local undertaker to lend them a coffin. As the 20th century dawned, the prank call consolidated itself as something bored teenagers did to test the boundaries of decency, and in popular culture it became known as something that might get you murdered (1965 horror I Saw What You Did features two kids who accidentally prank call a serial killer, sparking chaos). Adam Sandler found his voice as a comedian doing prank calls (filmed by Judd Apatow, no less) complaining to local delis about digestion issues, while a Canadian man successfully prank called Queen Elizabeth II back in 1995. In a pre-social media world, few things felt more subversive. 

According to Phil Lapsley, an engineer and the author of Exploding The Phone, a book that traces the evolution of phone technology and peoples’ efforts to subvert it, the rise of the prank call can be attributed to simplicity. “In the old days, prank calls were truly anonymous: There was no such thing as caller ID until the 1980s or so, which gave pranksters a huge advantage,” he explains over email.

 By 2003, even socialist revolutionaries were getting stitched up, with Hugo Chávez prank called by two Miami-based radio DJs impersonating Fidel Castro; a performance so accurate it resulted in secret information being shared. “I think explaining the rise of prank calls is pretty straightforward: they represent a desire to have fun at someone else’s expense,” Wark says of the prank call’s historical popularity. “Prank calls undermine conventional ways of communicating: When one side of the prank subverts communication in some way, they draw attention to how artificial our social conventions can be.”

On British shores, one of the things that cemented prank calls as a cultural phenomenon was E4’s Fonejacker, a BAFTA-winning comedy sketch show created by Ed Tracy and Kayvan Novak (better known now as Nandor in What We Do In The Shadows). It featured actors doing prank calls on unsuspecting members of the public and ran for two seasons between May 2006 to October 2008. 

Whether he was pretending to be the drummer at an orgy and ringing a baffled hotel supervisor to request a room suitable for a group of moon-worshiping horny hippies, or playing a rambling posho enquiring about how he might film his wedding night as a porno, David Whitney was a key part of the Fonejacker cast. 

“After you had pranked someone on Fonejacker, you had to ring them back and get them to sign release forms or it wouldn’t make the TV,” the actor and comedian reflects. “So many people told us to fuck off. As I understand from Ed [Tracy], we lost most of the best stuff.” Whitney says the low budget show’s success came as a “massive surprise”, and he speculates that it reflected an era where doing prank calls was seen as a “rite of passage” among young people.

“It was a crueller time [back then] in many ways, but I don’t remember being less happier for it,” he adds. “It all sounds so juvenile now, but as kids I remember we used to make up something silly and call Childline. Everyone at school bonded by doing prank calls. The more taboo [they were], the better.” 

Yet once prank calls became more difficult to pull off, their value eroded. “Nowadays caller ID is ubiquitous, and we tend to ignore calls entirely from unknown numbers,” Lapsley wrote. “This makes pranking options seem much more limited, though I’m sure not zero as, if you are willing to spoof a caller ID, then a whole new world opens up to you.” 

The 2010s also ushered in a more empathetic culture than the cut-throat 1990s and 2000s, meaning the idea of prank calling, say, a pizza delivery guy on minimum wage during a recession was perceived (quite rightly) as twisted. “The dark side of the prank call is that it preys on our fears that anyone might be able to reach us in the private sphere of our home,” Wark says of the psychology behind prank calls and how it has evolved. “There’s a whole trope in movies from the 80s and 90s of people answering a phone call and being told they’re being watched. Prank calls play on this feeling of being surveilled, but this crosses over into what we might define as trolling or even harassment or abuse in 2023.” 

These comments make me reconsider whether my own prank call to Pete Price might have crossed an ethical line. Was it something I’d have done if I were a teenager in today’s more “Be Kind” era of British society, where imitating an OAP would perhaps be branded ageist? Fonejacker’s Whitney assures me I have nothing to be ashamed of. Convinced the prank call isn’t dead quite yet, he says: “For now the prank call maybe feels like a throwback to the past, but I’m sure the public will take it to their hearts again. It’s such a perfect device for comedy, so it’s inevitable it will be reinvented by someone.”

But what will this reinvention actually look like? Rather than human beings, Wark suggests machines might pull prank call-esque stunts in the future. He concludes: “If we're thinking about future dangers posed by deep fakes or other generative, AI-powered forms of telecommunication [like ChatGPT], I think the issue won't be the return of pranking, but the emergence of new forms of trolling, harassment, or abuse that responds to the new capabilities of these technologies.

“What makes these new technologies potentially dangerous or scary is the sense that we're not being contacted by a person or a group of persons that's trying to make fun of us or creep us out, but that it’s a machine that might be communicating with us. I'm not sure what kind of pranks that will make possible, but we'll find out very soon.”