Meet Chris James, Youtube's Prank Phone Call King

Read to the end of for some amazing sci-fi movie re-enactments

Jul 20, 2023

Hi! Sorry it’s been a couple weeks since I last posted. It’s a combination of a lot of life events, but I’m excited to get back to writing, because this one’s a good one. As ever — I am not going to charge for this substack ever, but paying for a subscription allows me to do it more regularly and I would like to do that! Either way, thanks for reading.

I didn’t realize that loving prank phone calls was a controversial opinion until I tried sharing that love enthusiastically. Some people truly, viscerally, despise them, think of them as cruel, as mocking, as savage. I, personally thing that prank phone calls, both listening to them and receiving them, is a delight, though it’s hard to actually explain why. I guess I think of the phone as an instrument of banality. I rarely use it, except in the course of some responsibility I’m unhappy I have to engage in, like calling an airline or arguing with my ISP. My history of going to extreme length to make phone calls interesting as possible is, at this point, well documented.

But to me, a prank phone call is like a little one-act play being put on solely for the benefit of the caller and the recipient. Sure, they can sometimes be annoying, or touch on something that the recipient is sensitive to, but generally the more absurd they are, the funnier they are to me. What I wouldn’t give to be the recipient of something as disorienting as a good prank phone call every so often. For me, the delight of a prank is always less about the reaction of the other person and more about the absurdity of the call’s premise.

I say all of this as prologue to introducing my current favorite in the game, Chris James. Chris, or ‘Prank Stallone’ as he’s known on and off his YouTube channel, is a comedian from Vancouver, who started has a YouTube channel called Not Even A Show, which features him pranking primarily conservative talk radio hosts. Chris began the show (sorry, not a show) after burning out on touring life and looking for something new. And despite having a gift for prank phone calls (he can remain stone faced through the silliest of conversations), he says they were just a means to an end.

“I mostly wanted to get content to edit. I was interested in doing like comedy editing,” Chris told me over a Zoom call that he entered under the name ‘Pete Clinton,’ a character he regularly portrays on his YouTube channel. “I was a big fan of Vic Berger And DJ Douggpound who would do editing for Tim and Eric and stuff. And I just found the idea of editing something making it funny or taking footage and then using editing to to increase how funny it is, was really, really interesting to me.”

The only problem was that Chris had nothing to edit. And then he stumbled upon the call-in show of professional baseball player turned far-right crank Curt Schilling. “So I started phoning him and realized it was very easy to get on the air with him and get under his skin. And then it branched off from there where I just literally was calling other shows, and saying, Hey, do you like Curt Schilling? And then if they if they said, Yes, I liked Curt Schilling, then I would prank them.”

The editing allows Chris to linger on bizarre turns of phrase, to turn mouth sounds into little symphonies, and to use shows with video components to hilarious effect. With judiciously deployed sound a visual effects he manages to make the most banal, staid moments of a call funnier. And as the show has matured, Chris developed a stable of characters he would use to call people - characers like Officer Steve, a police officer who calls in to talk shows and tries to boss them around because he’s a cop; Daryl Craft, a cancelled comedian whose “anti-woke” routine is making a bunch of fart noises and mewling about pooping in his diaper; the aforementioned Pete Clinton, AKA “Patriot Pete,” who bullies hosts for not being as patriotic as he is; and Butch, a dimwitted Trump fan, who often opened calls after the inauguration of Joe Biden with the phrase “is Trump is lose?”

As his stable of characters has grown, he has enlisted a farm team of fellow prank callers like comedian Brendon Walsh, and prank phone call legend Longmont Potion Castle, others just a loose collection of fans and friends who like to get in on the action, a group he lovingly calls “The Prank Stars.”

Chris’s pranks have also gotten more ambitious and more avant garde. He now frequently poses as a conservative media outlet to invite guests on video internet chat shows like “Dancing Around the Issues,” where he will dance for five minutes and then say “thanks for coming on,” or “The Weekly Buzz,” an ostensible news show that keeps getting interrupted by Chris swatting at a nonexistent fly in his studio. The truly shocking part of the gambit for me is just how easy it is for him to get actual politicians and important people to agree to appear.

“It is easier than it should be,” Chris says. “I've gotten better now at how you book people, you know how to sound legitimate, like what they respond well to, you know? And what I'll do is I tell them, ‘hey, the guests who we've had on before’ and then I just use people I've pranked like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jordan Peterson, Roger Stone, you know, and I'm not lying. These people have been on my show, so I'm not telling them a lie.”

Along with his stable of accomplices, Chris has a group of pundits he calls fairly regularly. He will call Sebastian Gorka and as him why his head is so big, or call Rudy Giuliani to ask him about the fact that he married his second cousin in 1968. One of his favorite tactics is to hone in on something so trivial, so innocuous, that just through repetition it becomes a joke. One of his main adversaries over the course of the show has been a pundit named JJ McCartney, who was so incensed by Chris saying “nice shirt” to him during a call that he spent years calling in and telling long aimless stories that wrap up with a mention of a shirt, frequently sending McCartney into a rage.

“If we call enough times can we create this trigger in this person with this entirely innocuous concept, and just by repetition, but the reason that I love repetition in this context for when you're like prank phone calling, you know, shows or whatever, is that it immediately alerts them to the fact that it is us doing it,” says Chris. “As soon as Rudy hears the cousin thing, he thinks, ‘ah, they’ve fucking done it again! They've gone past my call screener again, and they've gotten on the air!’”

Lately, his favorite target is a conservative talk show host who flies the “Don’t Tread on Me” gadsden flag in his studio, and Chris, a concerned viewer, will call up to warn him that there’s a snake behind him. The calls all begin in impersonation of a sympathetic listener, with a long wind up about some right wing grievance or another, and then at the last minute, it will take a sharp left turn into a warning about snakes. The repetition is hilarious. The incredible fury of the host (who has now threatened to sic a black hat hacker on him to drain his bank account and ruin his life) is hilarious. I may be a simple man, but this is one of the highlights of my week.

As the show has grown the metanarrative of the channel. There’s always something bizarre happening in the world of Not Even A Show, with a revolving cast of characters (usually played by Chris in a wig) performing hostile takeovers of the show, threatening one another, and selling out to corporations. There are theme song for his characters and songs about the foibles of the people he calls. This season has seen Chris banished to the tiny ethereal plane for making too many short jokes, and eventually he was replaced entirely by the AI voice acting of Big Homie Fuckabee (a cartoon avatar that looks and sounds suspiciously like former Arkansas governor and presidental candidate Mike Huckabee).

It is Chris’s penchant for using AI generated voices in his pranking that garnered him his biggest audience yet, even though it wasn’t an audience he necessarily wanted. In May, he decided to call Alex Jones using some lines he generated in the voice of Tucker Carlson. Jones made it a big public spectacle of it, challenging Chris to appear on his show, threatening legal action, and unleashing his legion of bloodthirsty fans. It generated a massive amount of attention for the channel, but it was largely the wrong kind.

“He wanted me to come on the show, he wanted to like control the narrative more,” says Chris, “I don't think it was good attention for him and made him look like an idiot, I think to even his audience, you know, I don't I think a lot of them responded, like, Hey, you're making too big of a deal of this. For about a day or two, maybe I would say it was pretty stressful. Like when people were sending me DMs, with pretty graphic threats against me and stuff, and it's never fun.”

Part of the blowback from his call to Jones also came from people on Chris’s side of the ideological spectrum, people who believed that his pranks give these people permission to feel aggrieved and legitimize their paranoia that everyone is out to get them. It brought up an interesting dichotomy in Chris’s thought process, which is that while he makes a living in part off of these videos, he doesn’t actually want to reach as many people as he did with the Alex Jones prank. “part of why my channel I think, is…my audience isn't big enough that it's giving them an audience, that it's raising their profile in any significant way,” he says. “If it ever started getting to that point, if I had some big channel that was giving them all this exposure, then I would be doing a bad thing, I think, in even letting people know who they are.”

Thus far, no lawsuit has followed this prank, and the attention has died down, but it did lead to a little burnout. Chris took a month or so off from pranking and, at the time, vowed not to make any more prank calls using AI generated voices. However, on his first episode back he reversed that decision, calling Jordan Peterson with the AI voice of Ben Shapiro to ask for advice on buying a child-sized suit.

While there is definitely a political aspect to these calls in as much as he has chosen only far-right figures to bug, but when you get right down to it, there’s very little political content in them. Chris isn’t trying to make some deep ideological point, he’s not arguing with hosts, he’s not trying to change any minds. In the end, he’s just trying to have fun, be ridiculous, to make these guys look like the dopes that they are. “I think that it's kind of fun to like — these notorious, horrible, evil, sometimes powerful people — you see their name, and instead of just getting boiled over with rage, you think about Rudy Giuliani, you read some article about him, and you're like, ‘oh, he fucked his cousin.’ You know what I mean?” says Chris. “It sort of disarms them a little bit, or to you, to the people watching it just gives them something to sort of laugh at about these people.”

You can find Chris’s show on YouTube, and you can watch bonus episodes and listen to the Not Even A Show podcast by signing up for his Patreon. He also streams on Twitch, and has a podcast with Bryan Quinby about different types of guys. It’s called Guys.

There’s a creator on TikTok named Acutely Kyrias that is doing fantastic reenactments of movies like The Thing, Robocop, and Jurrassic Park using only cardboard, cellophane, and tape. She even foleys most of the sound effects, and they come out looking incredible.