Then the prankster calls over and over again in the next 15 minutes, “and if they answer let go a blood curdling scream.” “Telephone pranks serve as a means of releasing hostility and frustration with a minimum risk of retaliation.” In one variation, the caller warns them not to answer the phone for 15 minutes “because if they do, the telephone repairman will receive a fatal shock,” as one survey respondent told Harris. In another common genre of phone prank, the caller pretends to be from the telephone company and tries to get the answerer to do something, like blow in the phone to “fix” it. “Pranksters become aware of the power of words in unusual or different contexts.” “There is also a certain amount of linguistic delight in discovery,” Harris writes. “Do you have pop?” “Yes.” “Send him home Mom wants him.”
Perhaps the most well-known is the “catch question,” à la “Is your refrigerator running?” A few others: There are several classic forms this can take. “Telephone pranks serve … as a means of releasing hostility and frustration with a minimum risk of retaliation,” Dresser writes.
The calls are almost always made in groups, her survey found, so there’s a bonding element, and “the caller becomes the center of attention among his peers.”ĭresser, Jorgensen, and Harris all note that a prank call also serves as a sort of low-stakes rebellion, a chance to embarrass the adults that usually have power over them. In her 1973 paper “Telephone Pranks ,” the folklorist Norine Dresser writes that the pranks “serve several social needs” for kids that age. The few studies on prank calls that exist estimate that the pastime is most popular among kids from ages 11 to 14 or 15. In each case the denouement was highly farcical, and the reputed corpses are now hunting in a lively manner for that telephonistįrom then to now, most people have tended to make prank calls during a brief window of adolescence.
A Grave Joke on Undertakers.-Some malicious wag at Providence, R.I., has been playing a grave practical joke on the undertakers there, by summoning them over the telephone to bring freezers, candlesticks and coffins for persons alleged to be dead.
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