Pranking

2006viral videoclassic

Published September 23, 2026

Pranking is the practice of playing practical jokes on unsuspecting targets for amusement, a tradition dating back over a century that jumped from novelty shops and prank call tapes to YouTube in the mid-2000s, spawning one of the platform's defining video genres.

prank memesyoutube viralparticipatory video memeshoax memeslate 2000s memes

Overview

Online pranks broke into a handful of recognizable formats. Hidden-camera setups place a rigged element in public space and film reactions, popularized by shows like Just For Laughs Gags1. Scare pranks stage a sudden shock with a partner or actor delivering the punchline, and prank call recordings, an inheritance from the 1980s Jerky Boys era, kept a foothold on YouTube through channels dedicated to phone gags. Relationship pranks between couples became their own category once PrankvsPrank launched in 20092.

By the early 2010s the format was so viral that ad agencies built entire campaigns around it. Stunt pranks staged by brands like Carlsberg and LG, plus studio-sponsored setups for horror films like The Last Exorcism and Carrie, collected tens of millions of views inside days3. The through line across all of these is the reveal moment, the beat where the mark realizes what is happening, which is what viewers actually rewind and share.

Origin & Background

Platform
Cassette tapes / YouTube (viral spread)
Date
2006

The prank-goods industry started in 1904 when Soren Sorensen Adams discovered a chemical at his dye company that made workers sneeze, packaged it as sneezing powder, and built a novelty empire around gags like the joy buzzer, with documented press pranks including a 1933 April Fool's front-page image of the Wisconsin State Capitol collapsing and the BBC's 1957 spaghetti-tree hoax4. Harry Allen Wolfgang Smith's 1953 book The Complete Practical Joker codified how to run these gags at home.

Recorded prank calls spread on cassette in the late 1970s, and The Jerky Boys turned the format into a commercial act by 1989, selling tapes and CDs of their crank calls to national audiences4.

How It Spread

Pranking moved to the web on the site Blackout's Box, which broadcast the earliest known streaming prank call in 19954. The genre took over YouTube once the platform matured. On July 23, 2006, ryckmmat's compilation "Prank Calls" pulled in more than 11 million views over its first seven years5. Just For Laughs Gags posted a public-toilet prank in May 2007 that hit 32.4 million views1. PrankvsPrank went live in November 2009 with a mannequin-head scare directed at the uploader's girlfriend, and the channel passed 455 million views and 3.1 million subscribers over the next four years2.

Andrew Hales opened his LAHWF channel in March 2012 with awkward-approach street pranks on a college campus, gaining around 98 million views inside a year6. Brand-sponsored pranks piled on top of the amateur wave. Saatchi & Saatchi's 2008 "Your Other You" email hoax for Toyota Matrix let people sign up their friends as prank targets, Carlsberg's 2011 stunt filled a movie theater with 148 actors dressed as outlaw bikers, and LG's 2012 elevator floor swap tricked riders into thinking the floor had dropped out.

The format peaked as a marketing tool in October 2013 with the Carrie "Telekinetic Coffee Shop Surprise," which used a stunt actress and remote-controlled props to fake a psychic meltdown in a New York cafe and gathered 26.7 million views inside 72 hours3.

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