What You Didn't Know About Impractical Jokers

Everyone loves a good laugh, especially when it comes at someone else's expense, so it should come as absolutely no surprise that TruTv's Impractical Jokers has been delighting irreverent humor enthusiasts since its debut in 2011. It's only human nature to find it hard to look away when a hilarious trainwreck is unraveling around you, and in between all the belly laughs, it's very easy to miss all kinds of key details about this long-running hit show. Whether you're a longtime aficionado or a more recent convert to the series, there are plenty of potentially surprising facts left to learn about Impractical Jokers, and we've taken a loving look back at the show's history to dig up some of the most interesting stuff most people don't know.

Goofing off is awesome, but you need to find an audience if you are going make a living at it. So, in 1999 Murr, Q, Sal, and Joe formed a comedy troupe called The Tenderloins. In 2007, the four friends entered a comedy competition on NBC called It's Your Show. Hosted by Carson Daly, It's Your Show featured amateur video producers, competing weekly for cash prizes. Their entry, "Time Thugs," an infomercial spoof about a time machine that can fix your past, helped nab them the top prize of $100,000. The guys took the cash and invested it in themselves, because charity begins at home, putting together a pilot of what would eventually become Impractical Jokers.

Like so many awesome ideas, the inspiration for said pilot came from kicking back and hanging out with pals. As Murray told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "We were hanging out one night in my apartment playing video games, and we were talking about a hidden camera show, and we had an idea. On all those shows, the comedian is pranking the public. What if we did it the opposite way. What if the joke is on us? It's an upside-down hidden camera show where we're the butt of our own jokes."

But for those who like comedy but not pranks (even if the pranks are directed toward the prankster), they still tour together as the Tenderloins, and even have their own YouTube channel featuring short comedy sketches and clips from their stage shows.

Born within nine months of each other on Staten Island, the IJ gang all had normal lives and typical aspirations before become mega-famous prank stars. Back in high school, Vulcano nerded out with the chess club and jocked it up in intramural basketball, football and bowling — he even got his finance degree from St. John's University. According to the rest of the guys, he has the hardest time following through on a dare — maybe it has something to do with his chess background?

Before graduating from Georgetown with a BA in English, Murray's high school interests included bowling and dramatics. Murr was also a member of something called "The Retreat Team." Was that possibly some sort of advanced preparation for the bogus campaign to get Murray elected to Congress? You can't prove it wasn't.

Another bowling enthusiast, Gatto Jr. was also a member of the math team, who received his accounting degree from Long Island University. So which Joker gives him the biggest run for his money? According to Gatto, it's Quinn. "Q [is my biggest competition]. Sal and Murr are just so easy. Q's like a wild card because sometimes, he won't do something that you thought he would do, and then he does stuff that you thought he wouldn't do," he told In Touch Weekly.

Speaking of Quinn, he kicked it with the marching band and the film club, and was also a New York City fireman. He took a leave of absence from the department after the first season, before leaving for good to pursue a career in pranking his friends full-time. That's certainly preferable to pranking fellow firemen, especially when duty calls.

Even though the show has the word "jokers" in the title, The Tenderloins have discussed several times (most notably in a lengthy interview with Complex) how they don't consider Impractical Jokers a reality show or even necessarily a prank show. It's a real sticking point for them, because when it comes to dealing with businesses like White Castle, for example, the guys want to ensure they know the joke is on them, not the customers (otherwise, it'd be much more difficult to get permits to shoot on the premises). We see four dudes causing havoc in public and immediately think Jackass, but the guys are quick to point out that they're always the butt of the joke, instead of unsuspecting members of the public.

"It's neither [a prank or a reality show]," Sal said. "It's just about us, and it's just about us having a platform to be funny and do comedy, really." Joe explained further: "Nothing's been really done to [the public], they're more an instrument of embarrassment."

Impractical Jokers is a 30-minute show, so naturally only a certain amount of content can be used per episode. This doesn't mean, however, that the infamous punishments are over as mercifully quickly as they appear to be. Sal regaled Comedy Central UK with a tale of pretending to be a psychic medium for "65 minutes ... trying to read a crowd of 200 people. It was cut to three minutes on TV, but I was there for one hour and it was rough."

Punishments have also become so elaborate, they can last for months on end. In an interview with Den Of Geek, Murr gleefully discussed how Sal had been pranked for eight months straight, thinking something in his life was real when it wasn't. "The punishments are tailored specifically for the loser and they've gotten out of control," Murr explained. "We're now planning punishments months in advance. We did one to Sal ... he had no idea and he thought that something was real in his life that wasn't real. We finally revealed ... that the past eight months, this thing that was going on in his life was all fake. He literally screamed out, 'What's real in my life?'"

If you didn't just read that in Sal's shrill "I will NEVAH forgive you!" voice, for shame.

When Impractical Jokers started out, it was literally just the guys in control of every aspect of the show. After the success of the first two seasons, they could afford to hire some writers to work with them in creating the jokes, brainstorming ideas for challenges, and so on. But that doesn't mean the foursome are all of a sudden hands-off. Murr described the show as "an improv show in disguise," suggesting about 60 to 70 percent of it is made up on the fly. Joe still oversees all the editing, too, ensuring The Tenderloins' stamp remains firmly on the Impractical Jokers product no matter how big they get.

They aren't always able to get their way, however. It was revealed on Tell 'Em Steve Dave that Q petitioned for, er, a map of Staten Island to be placed behind him during the opening credits. Yeah, he knows funny, all right.

Can't get enough of Impractical Jokers? If you think the crew would be fun to hang with, you have a chance to put that theory to the test, as the guys have actually invited fans to vacation with them, and on a luxury cruise ship, no less.

A big part of the Impractical Jokers draw is their regular-joe personas and their devious, yet good-natured, sense of humor. There's something about watching real-life friends act like friends that's genuinely appealing. So imagine being able to enjoy the pranksters unleashed on a boat. That's what fans who set sail with them on the inaugural voyage in 2016 experienced. The four days of nautical hilarity included musical guests and additional super-funny celebrities like Lisa Lampanelli, Gilbert Gottfried, and Michael Ian Black. The whole thing seems kind of crazy and unorthodox, but as those familiar with the IJ team would realize, crazy and unorthodox is exactly what you'd expect from them. Especially when you surround them with enough alcohol to fuel an entire cruise line. Finally, something practical.

The cultural significance of Impractical Jokers got its due, at least for a brief while, when the Museum of Impractical History opened. The kitschy display was a homage to all things prank. As Raymond Dooley of truTV explained to Nerd Reactor, "Instead of waiting for the Smithsonian, MoMA, or the Getty Center to finally launch a wing dedicated to the art of daring your best friends to embarrass themselves in public (seriously, what's taking so long?), we decided to create the Museum of Impractical History ourselves to celebrate four successful seasons of the show and to give something back to the viewers who've been so supportive."

Unfortunately for lovers of gags and pranks, the museum was only opened for few days during Comic-Con. That right there might have been the biggest prank of them all.

The Impractical Jokers' Q has been doing the Tell 'Em Steve Dave podcast with Comic Book Men's Walt Flanagan and Bryan Johnson for years, starting originally as a sound guy and working his way up. Around Thanksgiving 2016, during one of the show's popular "Overkill" installments, Q told a creepy story about how he'd purchased the skull of the so-called Prussian Kissing Devil (essentially a real human skull you pay money to so it'll solve your problems) over the break while en route to his family home.

After extolling the virtues of the skull's supposed magical powers, Q discovered that Reddit users weren't too happy with him–both for lying about this story and for generally being, among other things, arrogant, out-of-touch, and not funny. (Simi may have a text message proving otherwise.) This led to a massive fan revolt, with Q standing trial on TESD in a so-called "trial by fire ants." ("Ants" here are fans of the show, not real fire ants, thankfully.) The trial itself took two episodes to get through, with Walt defending Q, Bry as the judge, and Git 'Em Steve Dave (a bugbear for fans was Q's alleged bad treatment of the show's autistic component) prosecuting.

The trial itself was predictably hilarious, but it was how they announced the verdict–in the last four minutes of a 90-minute episode called The Verdict, as an aside from Bry, who told Q, "Oh, you're good, you're still on the show"–that sold this as one of the coolest and weirdest moments in TESD history. And it was all about Q, much to the chagrin of those already planning his #Funeralz.