‘JOKERS’ GO XL
New movie has challenges not possible on TV
More than 200 episodes into their hidden-camera prank show, the stars of “Impractical Jokers” aren’t kidding around.
The New York comedy troupe of Joe Gatto, Sal Vulcano, Brian Quinn and James Murray now takes its unique brand of humor to the big screen with “Impractical Jokers: The Movie” — and introduces crazy challenges that weren’t previously possible.
“It gives you what you’re expecting from us with the hidden-camera challenges, but the difference is that it’s actually on a large scale,” Gatto told the Daily News this week.
“Throughout the series, we’ve had plenty of ideas that have been too big for the television, meaning the time constraints of the halfhour, the budget constraints of the idea just being too big. So now, with the movie, we literally went to that list of stuff that we’ve been sitting on and were able to pull off, out of these 10 challenges, I would say seven, eight of them came from that original list.”
Like their long-running truTV series, the movie — which hits theaters Friday — sees the stars compete in unscripted, embarrassing tasks one at a time, with the other three Jokers feeding them queues to carry out in front of real, unsuspecting people.
The film also features a zany, scripted backstory in which Paula Abdul is hosting a party in Miami and invites the Jokers to come, but only sends three tickets to the funny foursome.
The Jokers embark on a road trip to Florida and along the way take part in wild assignments, such as Gatto, in grotesque makeup, emerging from a cave and telling a shocked tour group he’d been trapped there for three decades.
Whoever completes the fewest challenges doesn’t get to go to Abdul’s party.
Since the movie refers back to the comedians being friends in high school on Staten Island during the 1990s, the Jokers felt Abdul was the perfect choice for the role and wrote the script with the “Straight Up” singer in mind.
“We were thinking of what the aesthetic was, what the sound was, and she was at some of the heights of her career back then,” Vulcano told The News. “She was pretty ubiquitous. We thought, well, we were all pretty in love with her back then, so wouldn’t it be cool? We toyed with the idea of a band, or hip hop, but once her name was mentioned, we were like, ‘No, no, no, this is it. It’s got to be Paula.’ Pop felt right.”
In addition to their TV series, which premiered in 2011, the Jokers perform live comedy shows together under the name The Tenderloins.
Those gigs feature incredible energy from their fans, Vulcano explained, and the Jokers hope the movie elicits a similar response.
“People come dressed as us. They’re chanting stuff from the [TV] show,” Vulcano said of the live events. “It’s just this wild thing.”
Gatto, Vulcano, Quinn and Murray have been friends for three decades and have been performing together for 20 years and never expected their series to reach this level of success.
Gatto joked: “We were happy to get Episode 2.”