TVSquad

Practical jokes are funny, to a certain extent. Until someone loses an eye or something.

This clip is from an episode of Ellen last week. Taylor Swift was the guest so Ellen decided to sneak up on her as she went into her dressing room's bathroom. It doesn't look like a set-up, as Swift looks truly shocked, so my question is this: what if Swift had broken her ankle or slipped and hit her head on the toilet? She comes really close. What an embarrassing way to die that would have been. Yeah, really funny Ellen, you killed America's sweetheart in the toilet!

Swift's heels look about 9" tall.

As far as we can tell, here are the responsibilities for hosting Deal Or No Deal:

1. Repeat the painfully obvious rules of the game over and over and over.

2. Loudly announce the names of pretty ladies holding suitcases.

3. Pretend that a game requiring absolutely no skills whatsoever requires skills when choosing numbers in a logically devoid random order.

4. Convince fully-grown adults that you're not pretend-talking on the phone to a villainous, money-hungry banker.

5. Never ever touch the palm of another human being.

"This is man is an impostor. Do not do business with him. This is not Dwight Schrute." --Dwight to Jim

NBC has released a sneak peek of The Office's season finale called "Good-bye Toby." After Thursday night's stellar episode, I'm psyched for the finale even though I tend to be underwhelmed by one-hour Office episodes. How about you? Ready for next Thursday?

In the scene, Jim reprograms Dwight's phone to forward to his own. Dwight reacts...well, exactly how you'd expect him to. It's pretty hilarious. I love the Jim-Pam-Dwight dynamic. And I love any time Jim pulls a prank on Dwight. My favorite prank had to be when Jim sent Dwight a fax from "future Dwight" telling him not to drink the coffee.

I put the video after the jump. I also put the two-minute recap of last Thursday's show just in case you missed it. The Office's one-hour season finale is Thursday May 15th at 9 p.m. ET / PT.

We all know B.J. Novak as Ryan Howard on The Office (he's also a writer and associate producer on the series). However, long before that, he was sharpening his comedic skills on the unsuspecting patrons of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Give Me My Remote has the scoop, straight from Novak's MySpace: while in high school B.J. and his brother decided to swipe the cassettes used for audio tours at the museum and replace them with their own tour, complete with Chinese music and everything (the tapes were for the Chinese art exhibit). The boys recruited fifteen of their friends to sneakily replace the regular cassettes with the new ones, thus giving museum goers a tour unlike any other.

You can download the Novaks' audio tour via iTunes by clicking here. Trust me, it's worth it. This is one of the funniest things I've heard in a long time.

I always get depressed this time of the year because I know that along with the summer months come the end of all my favorite TV shows. In some cases, they go away forever and I am forced to replace them with lesser quality summer shows. This season, however, I received some truly happy news. Wedding Crashers has been canceled!

I am so over the so-called prank shows that pull the most harmless candy ass pranks. Shows like Wedding Crashers, Punk'd and Girls Behaving Badly are the modern version of Candid Camera. The difference is that Candid Camera did it first and in the early days of TV, it was truly groundbreaking. It is sad that fifty years later someone still thinks that practical jokes make for edgy TV.

Ashton Kutcher's prank show on MTV is coming to an end after eight seasons, according to Variety. MTV plans to air the entire final season during one day -- April 7th -- with back-to-back new episodes. The network is calling it a sneak preview, where it will air all eight episodes before the official premiere date of the last season of Punk'd. The episodes will also air weekly starting April 10 at 9 pm.

This season, Punk'd reportedly pranks Lost's Evangeline Lilly, Hilary Swank, Nelly Furtado, Magic Johnson, and... Ashton Kutcher. Hopefully that'll be the series finale, where Ashton gets his due for "punking" other celebs for so many years (the Justin Timberlake episode was legendary).

Cracked has yet another collection of YouTube clips for your amusement, this time focusing on prank calls made to various news programs. A majority of these calls were made to C-SPAN, which is apparently the cable network of choice for bored pranksters looking for an excuse to say "penis" on television.

I don't know if these are necessarily the "best" prank calls, probably just the best that could be found on YouTube. None of them are especially clever, and the newsmen don't seem especially rattled by the callers. Call me a prank snob, but I prefer my phone gags to have a little more panache. However, the call handled by Ted Koppel is somewhat intriguing, as Koppel refuses to play ball with a man trying to promote his Web site. The man calling to C-SPAN to talk about a war against robots from Battlestar Galactica is mildly amusing, but I give him points for being the most original out of the bunch.

The prank-calling puppets of Crank Yankers are coming to MTV2. The show originally premiered on Comedy Central in 2002 and is produced by Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla. Regulars include Wanda Sykes, Jim Florentine, Dane Cook, Sarah Silverman, and Tracy Morgan. One of the producers of the show has a great quote, he says, "With all the trouble in the world, it's comforting to know that MTV2 understands how vital crank phone calls made by puppets are to this nation."

I admit to watching this show occasionally but I honestly didn't notice that it was off the air. Is this good news to anybody?

I was plodding around the Interweb last night and I noticed that there were some conspicuous blank spaces on my favorite blogs. Apparently, YouTube brought their servers down last night to do some upgrades and maintenance, and they decided to play a joke on the people that visited the site directly, rather than access their movies through embed-laden blog posts: they put a message up saying "All your video are belong to us." It was a take-off on the poorly-translated and oft-repeated phrase "All your base are belong to us," from the late '80s video game Zero Wing. Later in the evening they added a line saying "No, we haven't been hacked. Get a sense of humor."

Oh, those wacky engineers. Always leavin' them laughing, aren't they? Anyway, some new features are supposedly debuting today, including personal channels and the ability to post videos directly to a blog, so go over to the main YouTube site and check it out.

[via Pop Candy]