The Right Is Trying to Claim ‘Impractical Jokers’ in the Culture War
According to the online right, 176 years of American feminism are rendered moot by America’s most popular prank show.
Impractical Jokers is unique among massively successful comedy shows in that it’s a prank show that, somehow, manages not to offend anyone or get itself banned from the houses of high-school-aged boys across the country as a series like Jackass did before it. Unlike self-branded online “pranksters” and right-wing trolls who like to dress in women’s clothing and pretend to be transgender, Impractical Jokers doesn’t attack, humiliate, denigrate or dehumanize anyone they prank — well, anyone besides Murr, of course.
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However, one punishment challenge completed by Q (of course) in 2016 recently went viral among the impractical assholes of right-wing Twitter. In the segment “Q Versus Women’s Rights,” the comic was forced to attend a panel of feminist thinkers and disagree with everything they said, which excited the sizable community of comedy lovers who have been waging Q’s war on women’s rights for years:
Somehow absent from the conservative circle jerk over the segment is the fact that this was a punishment for Q, not for the feminist women who seemed to catch on to the joke within moments of him opening his faux-misogynist mouth. In fact, in the intro to “Q Versus Women’s Rights” that right-wingers edited out to make it seem like the feminists were the victims of the prank, Q exclaims when the rest of the Impractical Jokers reveals his punishment, “I knew it was going to be something horrible!”
“This is going to hit a nerve with a lot of people,” Sal Vulcano says of the punishment challenge. “He is going to be grilled in there!”
Joe Gatto exclaimed, “Q’s going to be an asshole on this panel, there's no way to say it!”
“The ironic thing is, Q doesn’t believe any of this stuff,” added Murr of Q’s misogynistic character.
Context, sadly, has never mattered to conservative comedy fans, and tens of thousands of right-wingers flocked to the viral post to pretend that the prank is on feminists and feminism itself. Ultimately, however, the joke is on them: