I’ve had thoughts about this for a while but never really gotten down to writing about it until a recent case happened, where a Japanese YouTuber was arrested for obstruction of official duty when he and his wife decided to pull a prank on the police in order to increase their viewership.
The said man approached a cop pretending to ask for directions while his wife films the act a distance away. While the police explained the route to the man, the latter nonchalantly pulls out his phone from his pants pocket and in the process “drops” a packet of suspicious-looking white powder. As the police watches the man bend down to pick it up, he dashes off resulting in a chase by the police in suspicion of the man’s possession of illegal stimulant drugs, when the packet in question was actually filled with white sugar.
This YouTube prank thing has gotten out of hand. I think it’s more ethical to post something as a prank that is not actually a prank. But what got me shaking my head at YouTube pranksters first was videos of guys going on the streets pulling down people’s pants or asking girls for sex, and when they are about to get beaten up for it, they would say, “it’s a prank” or “it’s a social experiment.”
Social experiment
The term has been abused by people trying to do stuff beyond moral grounds. It gives them an escape path when things don’t work out. Scale it down a huge notch, it’s like how a guy asks a girl to be his girlfriend and when the response is negative, he goes, “Hahaha, I was just kidding.”
Prank or social experiment, it doesn’t give you the right to pull my pants down in public. This reminds me of my uni days when occasionally, you would see people behaving oddly around campus such as carrying a giant cardboard mobile phone and talking through it as though it were working; walking up a tiny slope and calling for others to help them down, etc. For the unsuspecting crowd, these people may seem crazy, but they are usually psychology major students doing their social experiments. But I’ve never been bothered by that since they’re carrying out valid research for a paper.
The Internet has opened up a whole new way for people to make money, and digital advertising has made it possible for anyone to be self-employed. Increase in page views or video views translates to increase in ad revenue, which has led to the trend that as long as page view numbers increase, individual blog owners or YouTubers don’t care how it’s done. We’ve seen celebrities involved in scandals who sometimes created those scandals themselves in order to increase page views on their blogs. Sometimes, they deliberately post provocative statements just to get people to flame them on their pages. It doesn’t matter to them if the comments are negative because it brings in the money.
If I cared more about money, I might’ve written more controversial topics in more confrontational ways. If someday you see me do that, you know why.
I think the term “social experiment ” has been used too loosely, and seem to be often used interchangeably with the term “pranks”.
For example, 9gag ‘s subway prank (here’s the link, if u haven’t watch: https://youtu.be/S3drxwSDr9o) borders on ethics and safety concern.
Social experiments or pranks should never be used for exploitation (in this case, view counts, at the expense of the unsuspecting passengers).
These passengers should just sue them and get compensation.
I think the fine line between the two is that pranks are just going for the laughs while social experiments seek to observe how people behave under certain controlled circumstances.
This is the first time I see it and I’m not such a huge fan of the Brazilian train prank either. But what one culture finds unacceptable can be very amusing to another. Same reason why I never understood why comedians in Japan like to talk about boobs, poop and penises to garner laughter. To us, it’s very childish; something only elementary school kids find amusing, but it’s funny to the Japanese people to joke with things that are very out-there, like behaving oddly or making funny sounds and faces. Likewise, while we find English stand-up comedy hilarious especially those that poke fun at real life stuff in roundabout ways where you have to read between the lines, Japanese people don’t find that funny at all. I get a lot of “What’s so funny about that?”
And that brings me to the question, is one’s sense of humor innate or nurtured?
Young children naturally see poop, fart and behaviours seen by adults as disgusting/dirty as funny. However, over the growing up years, they learnt that laughing about such things is not appropriate, so, they stopped.
It’s like watching Stephen chow’s movies in the 90s, when you were a kid, his movies were fun and funny. But if you watch again as an adult, it’s no longer funny. It could be silly/offensive/ even sad to you.
So, I think what’s funny should be relatable & relevant to your particular stage in life or what u have experienced. That’s why it’s much harder for comedies to have mass appeal.
I like your Stephen Chow example. It’s true that children enjoy slapstick comedies more than adults do, and like you said, I guess comedians doing slapstick humor are simply targeting children instead of adults. But apart from age, “what you have experienced” would relate to the different cultures. While we didn’t particular think the zombie train prank was funny, perhaps Brazilians enjoy it.
During my time at a post-production company in Singapore, a bunch of us were very entertained by Australian stand-up comedian Jim Jefferies. Jefferies is a little crude in his jokes with f- and c-words scattered here and there. At that time, a then-lesbian Myanmarese colleague, L (not for “lesbian”), really hated it when she saw him. She literally cringed. Her reason was, “He is too vulgar. I don’t like vulgar jokes.”
However, some time later, we saw her laughing really hard at a video she was watching. It was a stand-up by bisexual comedian Margaret Cho, and if you’ve seen her, you would know that she is even more crude than Jefferies. Not only does she use profanities, she also explicitly describes the act of sex in her jokes. Most of us didn’t enjoy Margaret Cho too much but when you realize her audience was largely from the LGBTQ community, it begins to make sense. Her jokes are targeted at the community which is why they find it amusing. So it turns out, L wasn’t really offended by Jefferies’ profanities; it was just that his jokes aren’t her kind of jokes.