Branks wrote:

I just saw that show for the first time on Comedy Central. It is funny as hell. Any of you seen it?

I watched 15 minutes of the premiere episode. I think Hell would be a lot funnier.

Crank Yankers was drop dead boring. I seriously doubt they've improved on the first episode; it didn't look like they had anywhere to go with the concept. The idea of puppets acting out prank calls sounded novel, but it turned out to actually hurt the humor instead of help it. Worse, the callers had no idea how to make their calls funny--they somehow screwed up the formula for keeping the skit alive. It's obvious from hearing most of the people at the other end that they know they're dealing with a prank call, only they find it boring too. If a show's going to be classless, it should at least be humorous. Crank Yankers failed to deliver on that, bigtime.

Lummox JR

Myabe cause you dont have as good of sense of humor than I? I think it was funny, esspecially how the old man is like cant hear worth crap. The Beginning of the show is dumb though.

YOU ARE ALL WRONG!!

Bubba the love sponge is the best prank calling thingy ever!! Jerky Boys jerks boys compared to Bubba!

I suggest downloading some of his work ^_^

Branks wrote:

Myabe cause you dont have as good of sense of humor than I?

Heh--the opposite could be true too. Or we could simply have different senses of humor that don't compare.

I think it was funny, esspecially how the old man is like cant hear worth crap. The Beginning of the show is dumb though.

Here's a breakdown of the sketches I saw:

• Man pretending to be with Wu Tang tries to book a bed & breakfast for the group. He plays this too straight, instead of going for the increasingly outrageous like a good prank call would. It's all too easy to identify with the woman trying to exit the conversation gracefully.
• Old guy calls chicken place to complain about beaks. This is improbably ludicrous and the manager knows it, but she's apologetic as she should be. Once he goes on to complaining about finding even more beaks in the same bucket (he couldn't have gotten more creative than that?), it's obvious he's full of crap and once again the callee is the hero by being every bit as courteous as she was trained.
• Guy with silly voice calls "Robert Dick" to talk about adding him to a book of people with funny names. Now seriously, is Bob the funniest first name that could go with that? The attempt at getting a gag out of that is half-baked and just doesn't come off, and Bob obviously feels the same way. But he lets the idiot at the other end keep talking just to see how much dumber it's gonna get.
• Guy calls a phone sex line on behalf of his deaf friend. This was perhaps part of a good concept but it just didn't work.
  
  I think I'm actually missing one in there, but it wasn't worth remembering. Basically these guys aren't thinking through their prank calls fully and they're not using good improvisational skills to get the most out of a joke. A funny prank call is as much improv as planning; the caller has to know how to take the joke up a notch without prompting a hangup, but also how to make it funny to begin with. Most of the sketches I saw failed on both, or at best they started with good altitude and then nose-dived. The only decent improv in there came from the callers' ability to keep their targets on the phone--but this usually meant they started to sound a bit reasonable, which is the bane of a good call. (Or, a prank call might have the caller sounding more and more like they're being reasonable, or "getting it", until they unleash a surprise with just the right timing. That's another good way to do it.)
  
  Bottom line: It's not so much that prank calls have been done before, but that they've been done much better.
  
  Lummox JR

Scoobert wrote:

I feal thats it was funny, so im sure the statment above would go. Just like i think brttish comedy is sooo funny. but i know a ton of people who hate it. And i hate "kids in the hall" which is canadian humor. As you can see many people like many diffrent things. So its ok to say why you dont like it but its also ok for me to say it cracked me up most of the time i watched it.

So remeber, one mans trash is another mans treasure.

All the same, I do think there's a distinction between "funny" and "not funny" even among different types of humor. I know there's high humor and low humor, some that goes for laughs based on a gross-out factor or surprise, some that's dry and ironic, some that's mercilessly sarcastic, some that's just stupid but in a fun, endearing way (like Airplane!). But I've seen comics in the past who could only be described as bad no matter what your sense of humor, and some jokes just aren't funny no matter who tells them or how.

My problem with Crank Yankers was basically that it worked very very poorly with the material it had. These people really have no skill whatsoever in handling prank calls, so way too many opportunities for a better laugh were missed along the way. There came a point in every call where it just broke down into a mere conversation, where one person was slightly irrational and the other was humoring them. They all had the stink of a joke that deflated too soon; when I think of what a more talented improv artist could have done with the beaks-in-the-chicken sketch, it's just shameful how thoroughly it was botched. That kind of thing was all through the show.

Lummox JR

OK=To say you dont like
Not OK= To say theres something wrong with someone who does