My Shameful Past as a Youtube Prankster

BLOG VERSION FOR THOSE WHO PREFER READING:

It feels like once every few months this clip starts trending on reddit in  r/watchpeopledieinside.

One time It even was at the top of an Asian American subreddit as evidence that white people are fucking assholes, so I feel like I have some explaining to do…

The truth of the matter is I actually despise youtube prank shows. Feel like it’s the lowest form of comedy. But there was a time back in 2014, where I was making zero money from my videos and was only paying my bills was by tutoring Chinese people of all ages in oral english. It was easy money but excruciatingly boring.

So when a friend started a video production company and offered to pay me to create the first prank show in China, I obliged.

(channel later became Mamahuhu)

I wasn’t pumped about it, but there are worse ways to make money than simply messing with people on the street.

Every week I was responsible for churning out a prank video and I was pretty damn lazy about so would often resort to just copying pranks I saw online that looked the easiest and cheapest to make. Hence videos like the waving prank you just saw above or this invisible objects prank.

A lot of the pranks were just cringy and awkward and didn’t always leave people very happy…

Some of the pranks actually made me chuckle a bit like this windex one.

some of the pranks were just flat out weird like pretending to have found a live toad in my fast food.

and some of the pranks resulted in run-ins with the police. For example, Chinese slang for a blow job is “play the flute” so we would ask people on the street if they could play our flute, they would get disgusted, then we would take out an actual flute for them to play. HAHA FUNNY. Only problem was one lady we asked brought us to an actual whore house, and when we released the video the cops showed up at our office demanding to know the location of the whore house so they could shut it down. That video has now been erased from the internet.

Another time we were pretending to be body guards for random people on the street and accidentally filmed a Chinese SWAT van.

That resulted in us being thrown in the back of a paddy wagon and brought to the police department, where we had to prove to them we weren’t American spies.

My friend even pretended to be a Zombie on the Chinese subway…during the height of the ebola virus scare.

 Ya he got arrested and ended up going to jail for 5 days for inciting a riot.

Overall though, I can’t say I really enjoyed making these videos and I’m glad that phase of my life is over. If I was doing these pranks in the US it would have been a little less uncomfortable, but because we were in China, it just looked like two white guys fucking with Chinese people, which I guess it was.