Am I the only one who hates ambush comedy?

[Spoke]

I think it bothers me because it is a grown-up version of elementary school bullying. It’s like getting everybody in the class (or in this case the movie audience) to point and laugh at the victim.

[Operation_Ripper]

I loathe it, but I still crack up at that maze prank.

[Sitnam]

There is nothing funny about a man or woman going through their everyday life and being accosted by some stupid jerk. And the worst is when they’re tricked into being good samaritans for the sake of a laugh.

[gonzomax]

Close. Tim Allen performed in Ann Arbor for a HBO special and we were there. Long before Tool Time.

[Rilchiam]

@Kizarvexius

I do not react well to being put on the spot. In a heated verbal confrontation, my brain switches off. I can’t think matters through logically, I lose the ability to express myself in a coherant manner, and I often have little choice but to stand there helplessly and take whatever abuse is thrown at me. Being placed in some Tom Green or Borat situation would probably sent me over the edge into a homicidal rage. Pranks played on friends or on “deserving” targets are fine by me, but if you rely on humiliating innocents for your “humor”, you deserve to be tarred and feathered.

That’s how I feel about the original Candid Camera. People in this thread have defended it, but their memories don’t seem to match mine. What I recall is a recurring theme of “Ha ha, that person does what they’re told, no matter how illogical the orders. Ha ha, s/he won’t stand up for hirself.” I recall one where a woman in a laundromat was frantically trying to keep pace with the instructions from a PA system – red goes in this basket, blue in that basket – and finally stormed out in a huff. And a guy who was trying to open a door that was out of reach of the buzzer he had to press to unlock it, also per the orders of an unseen announcer. And a guy who was taking a road test for his driver’s license; I forget the details, but I remember thinking, “Dude, if you’re dealing with the DMV, or at least think you are, you’re not going to question anything!” I just don’t see the humor.

That said, the Jerky Boys make me bust a gut. I think that has more to do with that being phone pranks, so the prankees aren’t really being asked to do anything. Two in particular stand out with me. They’re both Kamal doing his Middle Eastern guy voice.

In “Pizza Lawyer,” he calls what I think is a legal aid office, wailing incoherently about delivering a pizza and getting beat up by the customer, then getting fired when he went back to work. The woman taking the call is not shy about telling him he’s trying her patience, while refusing to get sucked into his drama. “You can’t start crying on the phone on me!..I have already asked you three or four times to pull yourself together…” “But he punched me! I cannot t’ink!” “Well, when you can think you can call back.” Worth her weight in gold to any call center, I’d say.

Then in “Terrorist Pizza,” he calls a pizzeria, claiming his family got food poisoning from their pizza. He’s just short of hysterical: “My friend, this is not good bizznezz! I’m gonna - I’m gonna bomb that place!” (You so could not do this today.) Then when the guy offers him a coupon, he screeches, “My wife’s t’rowing up, my daughter’s t’rwoing up – and you give me COUPON?!” Good point, actually: if the first pizza was toxic, why would you think they wanted another one?

Anyway, I don’t have a problem with the Jerky Boys, for two reasons. First, you don’t have to see the reactions of the prankees. Second, out of who knows how many calls they actually made, they never released any where the prankee reacted badly. I’m sure it happened, but no one was immortalized losing their own sh-t; it was more often the prankers who went off the rails, and the humor was in the callee trying to process it.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@Rilchiam

That’s how I feel about the original Candid Camera. People in this thread have defended it, but their memories don’t seem to match mine. What I recall is a recurring theme of “Ha ha, that person does what they’re told, no matter how illogical the orders. Ha ha, s/he won’t stand up for hirself.”

I found an interesting article about these types of shows. One paragraph is particularly interesting:

Critics may mock hidden-camera shows as the lowest rung of reality schlock, but the daddy of them all—Allen Funt’s Candid Camera—began with noble intentions. Funt believed that by secretly filming, he could reveal how average people respond to societal pressures and conflicts. “The worst thing, and I see it over and over, is how easily people can be led by any kind of authority figure,” Funt once said. “We need to develop ways to teach our children how to resist unjust or ridiculous authority.” According to NYU professor Anna McCarthy’s essay on Candid Camera in the forthcoming anthology Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, Funt’s work was much admired by social scientists of the 1950s and '60s. One of his biggest fans was Stanley Milgram, engineer of the notorious “obedience” experiment, in which people were ordered to administer electric shocks to strangers. McCarthy notes that the film of Milgram’s experiment often produced hysterical laughter in viewers, suggesting another similarity between those ethically tenuous experiments and today’s hidden-camera shows.

[cookeze]

“The worst thing, and I see it over and over, is how easily people can be led by any kind of authority figure,” Funt once said. “We need to develop ways to teach our children how to resist unjust or ridiculous authority.”

Right. Just what we need—Hollywood deciding that we need to be educated whether we want it or not.

Plus there’s a bonus—you can get rich doing it.

Of course I don’t believe it. Funt is just trying to justify what he’s doing. Random people on the street aren’t there for you to play your little games on. Unless you are a con man, I suppose.