Gadgetary advances be damned, phone pranks endure in both old- and new-school iterations and seem to be intertwined with the human drive to communicate.
The Atlantic publishes a thinkpiece on the history and uncertain future of the artform.
“Do People Still Make Prank Phone Calls?”
By Julie Beck
The Atlantic
April 1, 2016
Only a rube or possibly an alien would pick up an unknown phone call, hear the question “Is your refrigerator running?” and answer in the affirmative. And so only the luckiest of amateur mischief-makers would get the satisfaction of getting to drop the “Well, you better go catch it!” before cackling away into the sunset.
And yet, amazingly, this doesn”t seem to be the oldest trick in the book when it comes to telephone pranks. In her 1976 paper “Telephone Pranks: A Thriving Pastime,” Trudier Harris reports that people “over 50 years old” remembered the old refrigerator gag, which, if they pulled it as teens, means it could”ve been around in the 1930s or earlier.
But other corny jokes were also around before the “˜30s, according to another paper, ones like:
“This is May.”
“May who?”
“May-onnaise.”
Most middle-class families had home phones by the 1920s or so, according to Claude Fischer, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. And in the early days of the residential telephone, it was taken very seriously, as a tool for serious business, and so “children could trick unsuspecting adults fairly easily,” writes Marilyn Jorgensen in her paper “A Social-Interactional Analysis of Phone Pranks.” Read more.
The packed midtown television studio of The Bill Cunningham Show was pimped out in the fake wood paneling and industrial gray paint of a Jersey office park. On its stage sat a geeky white guy, his hair moussed in a dated faux-hawk. He was furious.