Comedy/Spoken » Spoken Comedy » Prank Calls

A staple of harassment virtually since the advent of the telephone, Prank Calls rarely made their way onto comedy records until the 1990s, when tapes of the Jerky Boys -- a pair of New York City malcontents who made a career out of haranguing unsuspecting victims -- proved so popular with college students and high-school kids that they actually even made their own feature film, spawning a cottage industry of prank records. While occasionally returning to the mild, "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?"-type humor of yesteryear, the majority of prank call compilations are quite vulgar and combative; other records of note include John Musacha's The Musacha Tapes and the legendary Tube Bar collection, a series of calls placed to a salty old bartender named Red which later served as the inspiration for similar hijinks on the hit TV series The Simpsons.