While most kids play pranks on their friends, few turn that mischief into lucrative entertainment careers like Staten Island natives Joe Gatto, Brian “Q” Quinn, James “Murr” Murray and Sal Vulcano did with truTV’s hilarious hidden-camera series Impractical Jokers, in which the high school pals compel each other to do and say outrageous things in public, and force the loser of these challenges to endure an extra-humiliating punishment. After eight seasons and 200-plus episodes—as well as a 2020 feature film and a recurring side gig starring on TBS’ game show The Misery Index—the foursome (known as The Tenderloins) have proven that the only thing funnier than making an ass of yourself on-camera is doing the same thing to your closest buddies.
In a pandemic-wracked 2020 that demands social distancing, however, the interaction-centric Impractical Jokers has become inherently difficult to produce. Fortunately, Joe, Q, Murr, and Sal have evolved with the times, developing Impractical Jokers: Dinner Party, a Facetime-y spin-off in which the comedians chat while eating a home-cooked meal of their choosing. Given the crew’s pranksterish claim to fame, the fact that Dinner Party replaces challenges with banter seems, on the face of it, a dicey proposition. Yet tailor-made for our current moment, it’s a testament to the natural and winning rapport of the New York quartet.
With Dinner Party returning for more quarantined get-togethers on Oct. 29 (replete with special guests, including Paula Abdul, Jillian Bell, Edie Falco, and Colin Jost), and The Misery Index also back for additional absurdity, it was the perfect time to sit down with the Jokers. On a Zoom call that functioned as our own unofficial episode of the series, we discussed their love of Dinner Party, COVID-19’s impact on filming the upcoming ninth season of Impractical Jokers, the most difficult punishments they’ve ever faced, and what the deal is with Murr and Sal’s seemingly contentious relationship—and if they’re going to mend it via a potential new show together.
[This interview has been edited for length]
Was it tough pitching Dinner Party, given that it features no challenges or punishments?
Q: The network hit us up for any ideas. They were like, is there anything you guys can do, and we were like, yeah, we’ll basically do a podcast from home. And they said, not enough! I think Gatto said, well, what we if ate while we did it? And they were like, great job! Pretty much that easy.
Murr: It was the food that pushed the network over the edge.
Joe: A big element of the show is the friendship and banter that we have. You get a good taste of that over the seasons, and by the eighth or ninth season of Jokers, we were able to fit in more and more conversation, and seeing us interact, as much as you’re seeing us do stuff in public. So I think this really tied into what was one of the strengths of our live show, and it’s just another format we’re used to, which is talking about anything and everything, and having a good time doing it. I think that’s really what we just honed in on, and that’s what made the show work, because it’s natural interaction among the four of us.
Murr: We were more surprised than anyone. When the show launched, we actually had a ton of fun filming it. And the show, I think, really stands on its own. It started as a product of its time, but it’s now become something bigger than that.
When the pandemic first hit, was there fear that Jokers—because it’s predicated on up-close-and-personal interactions with strangers—might be in trouble?
Joe: There goes everything! [laughs]
Sal: There kind of still is [laughs]. No, we figured it all out. We’re back now doing our thing, and filming. It’s under very specific, strict conditions, and the creative is through the filter of how we’re living now. So we’re not freely walking up to people on the streets anymore, or things like that. But I remember the last shoot day before we went into quarantine. We were like alright, we have to take a beat because apparently this is getting more serious. Let’s reconvene in two weeks. And then seven months later, we started again.
I remember when we all realized that this thing is going to affect our show in a way that’s profound because of exactly what you said—think about every element of our show. Every element that’s getting affected right now, it checks every box. We can’t be near people, we can’t speak with people, we have to cover up our face, and can’t go outside. So it’s like, wow, we have to ride this out and be prepared when there’s an opportunity to come back and do it in the best and safest possible way. It took that long. And so far, so good. I can’t actually believe the protocols we’ve set up. Right now, we lean into it a couple of times. We did a couple of Zoom things we’ve never done before. So we took inspiration from it and put it into the show.
Joe: We actually shot part of Season 9 before we shut down, and those challenges are mixed into the episodes throughout this first run that’s going to go out. You’ll see us fluctuate greatly between two challenges, in hair length and weight [laughs]. But in these episodes that are going to be coming out, filmed pre-pandemic, we are in a grocery store and supermarket, and those things are gone for now.
Murr: I think we all gained the pandemic twenty. [laughs]
Sal: Nick, I don’t know if you’ll be able to tell this, but if you do watch when the first one comes out, from challenge to challenge, I am an inch-and-a-half taller. [laughs]
Did you have to design COVID-safe challenges?
Q: I think our first concern was, what could we still do, rather than what else do we have to do. We knew that supermarkets and streets were out, and then the conversation started where, for example, we did this one bit, we’re on a balcony, and they’re below us. And the Zoom thing, which I've got to be honest, I was really dead-set against doing. I hated the idea; I didn’t see how it could work. We shot it, it turned out to be so funny that I think that, even when the world goes back to normal, we’ll do that bit again, because it turned out to be really good. We’re nimble. The show’s about us knuckleheads being knuckleheads to each other, you know what I mean? It’s just finding a way to do that like this. It wasn’t really that hard, right guys?
Joe: Yeah. You just lean into the stuff that naturally is friendly in the format. Whenever we do focus groups and things, it’s built in. Going out in the general public is really the one big thing that went away.
Q: I think the big thing was we had to reduce. Normally when you see us in a room with four people giving us opinions, that’s where you’ll see that get reduced down to one. But again, I don’t think it affected the comedy. I didn’t even notice once we started; I was like, oh, this is just the way it is. So we’re lucky.
Murr: Some of our most psychotic bits, like the Cranjis McBasketball challenge—where we’re calling out fake names that we’re trying not to laugh at—completely work, even now, because we’re inherently distanced from the people in the room, and everyone’s tested and far away from each other. The bit still works, it’s really fun.
When you meet fans on the street, do they act like they want to be part of the group?
Joe: The number one question we get all the time is, where are the other guys? [laughs]
Murr: I got it on my honeymoon! I said, they’re not here, man!
Sal: I think they tend to think we walk cross-arm.
Q: I’ve never been anywhere in my life, aside from my house, that people haven’t been all, “Where are the other guys?” I’ve been on a boat a mile off Key West, and someone’s come up with a fishing rod like, “Hey! Where’s Sal, Joe and Murr?” It’s everywhere. It’s great, though.
Sal: We’re like the Black Eyed Peas. They think we live together and sleep in bunk beds. [laughs]
You had some big guests on the first season of Dinner Party, including Jeff Daniels. Will there be more surprise appearances in Season 2?
Murr: I think every episode, almost.
Joe: It's way easier to get people right now, because they're in front of their computer. Honestly, they don’t have to go anywhere, they’re stuck looking to do fun stuff. The reach-out is a lot easier because people are less busy. And we always try to make it organic, with people that we know, that we would invite to dinner.
Sal: This year we have everyone from actors, directors, musicians, athletes, friends and so on and so forth. It’s a nice variety of people. But most of them, if not all of them, are actually friends of ours, which is what Joe was saying. So it’s like a double box you check. We get a friend there, but then it’s appealing because they’re in the public and they have something to say, and we can skew to conversation and it’s not really an interview. That’s what makes it a little different too. It’s more of a podcast-type of environment. We try to lean into that on-the-fly conversation as much as we can.
After 10 years of Impractical Jokers, has it become harder to make each other laugh—or to successfully prank?
Murr: I don’t think so. The last shoot day for Jokers before my wedding, we were crying at the Zoom challenge Q mentioned. And then two nights ago, we filmed another two episodes of Dinner Party, and I ended up with tears streaming down my face. I think it’s the same as always. You know, friends for 30 years—no one makes me laugh like those three guys.
Joe: The whole pranking aspect isn’t even how we approach it. Think about your friends in your life—have you stopped being friends with them, or can you still make them laugh when you hang out? That’s exactly what we do. It’s us being us. So it’s never work, really, if that makes sense.
Sal: If anything’s gotten a little more challenging, it’s not that we’re having to make each other laugh any further, but it is about the creative. Because the show has to evolve—it can’t be the same types of things every year, because then it will get redundant. I think one of the reasons we still stay laughing is that we focus really hard with our team at the beginning of every year to figure out how to approach these things differently. How to reinvent the wheel a little bit. That’s challenging, and that has had to evolve. But that’s the only way we’d want to do it. And that part—of finding what the breath of fresh air is every year—is actually a fun journey for us. We get so excited again, because in the beginning, I thought it was going to be really hard to do it.
Q: You didn’t even think we were going to get Season 2! [laughs]
Sal: At the end of Season 1, I was like, “Well, that’s that, fellas!” [laughs]
Q: The end of every season is spent convincing Sal that we can do another season. I’ve actually stolen this line from you Sal, because you never used it again after you used it in an interview You were like, I don’t know what we’re going to do in Season 3, they’re going to chase us with pitchforks and torches if we come back. They’re going to be so sick of us, there are already forty episodes of us! [laughs]
Sal: That part is actually one of my favorite parts, because everyone gets so excited. You go in there, you have your coffee, it’s day one, you rip a sheet of loose-leaf and you stare at each other. And then somewhere in that day, week, month, we’re jumping on tables, screaming, “That’s it!” That part is so much fun.
Joe: Some ideas start with the simplest dumb sentence out loud. One of my favorite punishments that these guys ever did to me was, one of them said in the room, “What if we made Joe a massage chair?” We started laughing at the dumb idea, and then we were laughing so hard, we’re like, if we’re laughing this hard, people are going to laugh this hard.
Q: Joe, a great example with you I always think of is, the pitch for your punishment was, let’s make Joe do 100 push-ups. That was it! That was the entire pitch, and everyone was like, let’s do it! And it turns out to be so funny.
Murr: The network was like, you don’t need to say anything else.
Are there any recurring challenges you’ve gotten too good at to repeat?
Murr: I don’t think we’ve gotten too good at a challenge. I think rather, we’ll collectively feel like we’ve exhausted the comedic potential of the idea. We used to do the clipping balloons on people’s back in the supermarket a lot, and back in the day we used to write things on cue cards and hold them up behind people’s back to read. But we reached the point where, inevitably, we’d twisted it in so many ways that we thought, we’ve done it as much as we can. Or, we do the bit two or three times, and it’s at its peak, and we feel like we can’t do it any better, so we don’t do it again. Like in Season 1, one of our favorite challenges was where we had to eat food off people’s plates at a buffet. The four of us collectively were like, this is so good, we can’t ever do it again. Why do something that won’t be as good as the original time?
Joe: I think we take an idea that can be simple, and we just make it evolve. For instance, we know that Sal is fun and easy to scare, and for a punishment, if you look at the progression of what we did to scare Sal, we literally started with just a corn maze with a red rope and there was one girl standing there to scare him. By the end of it, we had licensed out a virtual reality gaming company to make this game to scare him, to a full mansion that was completely planned out, and finally a zombie apocalypse. We really just take a simple idea and think, how do we do it bigger and better? I think we challenge ourselves that way.
Do you have favorite/least favorite punishments?
Sal: The genie for me. Everyone talks about the genie.
Q: I get the one where I had to paint the X on the kids’ paintings. That’s probably the one I hear about most. Oh, and the pregnancy one I hear about too, with the electrodes on my stomach.
Sal: I hear about the tram for you a lot.
Q: The Universal Studios tram is the worst thing I’ve ever done on the show. It transcended the show. I felt hated. I never really felt that before. Everybody on that tram just hated me. That was my worst thing on the show.
Murr: I get crydiving, I get Novocaine, and probably Danica McKellar the most.
Sal: It’s become so much harder to answer the question. I remember I used to have answers ready for this one, but now it’s just crazy. And a lot of times, people come to you with the simpler ones. We’ve gone as elaborate as staging a full-on underground zombie apocalypse—they did that to me—which is absolutely insane. But I’m surprised to hear about the one where I insult people for not giving a not-good-enough tip when I’m a delivery guy more than I hear about the zombie apocalypse. I think sometimes we just hit on something that is stomach-turning, and it can be as simple as telling people that their tip is shit. [laughs]
Joe: Bingo—you hit it on the head, buddy.
Sal: I hear “Bingo” a lot—people scream “Bingo” at me. So many less people have been in an underground zombie apocalypse [laughs]. But it’s funny, I wonder if, when I was running around in the sewage system, I started insulting the zombies about bad tips, it would have been better.
Q: I think your zombie apocalypse holds a secret to the show. I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about this, but we stage this huge zombie apocalypse, we get this underground area, dozens of actors, Sal’s niece is involved, and he’s got to crawl down into the sewers of New York City, and my favorite bit of that is, you walk past [staffer] Rob Emmer dressed as a Ninja Turtle, and for no reason at all, you go “Hey Rob” and he just points that way. That’s my favorite part of that whole thing, and I think that’s what makes our whole show tick.
Have any challenges or punishments led to actual hostility from strangers?
Q: Not really. On any given amount of curve, there are one or two people who get angry. But we strive really hard to make ourselves the butt of the joke, so people shouldn’t walk away from us angry. People should walk away from us confused, or being like, what the hell did we just witness? But I honestly think we feel we’re failing if we’re just pissing people off. It’s not funny, it doesn’t make anybody feel good. It does happen, because look, it’s New York City and who’s not in the mood for what. But I don’t think that’s a hallmark of what we deal with. It’s really just people looking at us like we’re idiots.
Have you had any particularly strange requests from fans?
Joe: Are you talking about, like, Indecent Proposal? [laughs] People do try to get Sal’s pants off all the time, because they want to see the Jaden Smith tattoo for real—especially after the movie, when he got the second one. I’m mostly happy I’m not Sal, because literally everybody is trying to just talk him out of his pants.
Q: Not for the right reasons.
Sal, your Jaden Smith tattoos are legendary. Have people shown you their tats of you four?
Q: It’s unbelievable.
Murr: All the time.
Sal: Fans can never be anticipated. They do have strange requests, but they also want us to autograph them, draw on them…
Joe: That’s the craziest thing. After a show, they’ll come up to us and be like, can you autograph me? And they’ll come to the show the next night—you remember this one, Sal? The girl came back the next night, and she had her arm signed with all our signatures, and it was a tattoo.
Sal: Without exaggeration, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s happened 100 times or more. It’s an absurd number. The barrier between fans and us doesn’t really exist; there’s no filter, because we’re on TV for almost a decade now, and we play ourselves, and they’ve seen us in every situation, so they feel like they know us. That’s a blessing, because they’re so bonded to the show—they’re so loyal. The show is a personal thing to them. So there’s no filter on crazy requests. Their display of affection and dedication to the show is unmatched with anything we could have anticipated. They dress up as us in costumes, they do school projects on us, we’re on their sheet cakes for birthdays, and personalized license plates. The things that we have seen, one after the other, is unbelievable.
Q: We were we at that casino one night where we’re all in this private little room in the back, having a little party going. We’re not big partiers, but we had a little party going on in the back room. And suddenly I go, “I’m going to bed!” and walked out of the room. The next night, the guys were like, what was that about, you just stood up and screamed. Well, there was this couple that was trying to get me to go back to their room with them, and they wouldn’t leave me alone. I was like, I can’t, I can’t, and I was trying to be polite, and then the woman—who was really sexy—kept touching me and stuff. So I just went, “I’m going to bed!”
Joe: It was such an odd exit. It was a casino in Florida.
Sal: We get wedding invitations every week.
Q: They’re just going for gifts, I know that scam.
Joe: Sal officiated my wedding, and I officiated Murr’s, so now that they know we can officiate weddings, people ask us to marry them all the time. I get tons of requests, and I’m sure Sal does as well.
Murr: I went into the office when they reopened it in July or August, and there were months of wedding invitations and fan mail, and I literally wrote back to hundreds of wedding invitations.
Q: You RSVP’d in the negative?
Murr: A lot of the weddings were in 2018, 2019. [laughs]
Murr and Sal, is the apparent beef between you two real? And if it is, can we finally bridge that divide today?
Q: Are you trying to ruin our career? Leave it, leave it!
Sal: Nick, many a good man before you has tried this.
Murr: Sal and I recently discussed me moving into his house for a year. [laughs]
Sal: No, that’s true. Let me give context on that. It was Murray asking me a hypothetical: If I would accept $5 million cash to let him live with me for one year. And I swear to god, my honest answer was, I’ll have to think on it. [laughs]
On the one hand, Murr is sort of like family to you, Sal [due to Murr marrying Sal’s sister in a Season 3 punishment]. And on the other hand, that’s another potential show.
Sal: Don’t you dare!
Joe: There’s an old Tenderloins joke, and I’m still not convinced it won’t happen at one point, where the four of us move into a house and do nothing but write and create comedy together, and we call it Sketch House. It’s been this thing that’s been laying out there for years. And it might be Retirement Home at this point, because we’re getting so old. [laughs]
Murr: It’s going to be Sketch Hospice.
Joe: In this challenge, someone has to unplug Murr.
Sal: It’d be like, we’re at the hospital today, and Sal, for your punishment, you have to unplug BEEEEEEEEEP. [laughs]
Joe: And I’m like, we meant the microwave, buddy!
Do you see Dinner Party continuing even after the pandemic subsides?
Joe: Sure, I would love that.
Q: We have so much fun doing Dinner Party.
Joe: It’s its own thing. I think Murray said it earlier: we didn’t expect it to let us use as much creative muscle as it has, and to have so much fun with the format, and to be able to eat in our pajamas in our own house. [laughs] It checks a lot of boxes for us. And I know it’s also been really well-received by fans online, and by friends whose opinions I trust. People really like the show, which also gives it a better shot at continuing.
Q: I think if Dinner Party ended, I’d be like, we should do that on our own. Just Facebook Live or something. I have fun doing it.
Sal: And Misery Index is such a blast too because we have to just go in and play a game. Jameela [Jamil] is the host, she’s one of our friends, so it’s another great experience. We go in and we hang out all day and have laughs. Our job on Misery Index is to riff, which just plays into what we’re already doing. We’re filming the third season in two weeks. It’s tough because people are so attached to Jokers that they sometimes feel that if we go someplace else, they’re losing Jokers. And in the past, we’ve had TV shows in 2014, 2015, where they went really well but people were nervous that we were transitioning to another show. I think now that we’ve been in so many other things, people are accepting that they can watch all of these things now.
Murr: Rick, the bottom line of what we’re saying is, there’s room for Jokers, there’s room for Dinner Party, there’s room for Misery Index, and there’s room for our reality show starring Sal and I being roommates for one year. Four shows.
Q: Correction: you, Sal and Rob Emmer. Even I would watch that.
Sal: Nick, you’d have to change your name to “Rick” before I did that. [laughs]
Murr: Did I say Rick? I meant Nick. You know what I meant.
