Murr of 'Impractical Jokers': 'The joke's on us'
James Murray talks holding grudges, losing his eyebrows and why women love hit truTV show
Murr of 'Impractical Jokers': 'The joke's on us' James Murray talks holding grudges, losing his eyebrows and why women love hit truTV show Check out this story on greenbaypressgazette.com: https://gbpg.net/28nbf8O
Kendra Meinert, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin Published 7:36 a.m. CT June 9, 2016 | Updated 11:41 a.m. CT June 9, 2016
From left, James "Murr" Murray, Brian "Q" Quinn, Joe Gatto and Sal Vulcano are The Tenderloins and stars of "Impractical Jokers." They've been friends for 26 years.(Photo: Courtesy of "Impractical Jokers")
A reality TV show about four guys who dare each other to do embarrassing things in public while the hidden camera rolls on the unsuspecting public's reaction? Pranks like dipping their French fries in other people's food at the food court, asking a female shopper if she can see a stain on the crotch of their pants, sounding an air horn at the library?
It's not a stretch to guess something about that is going to resonate with male viewers who can relate to the sometimes juvenile, sometimes deliciously evil and elaborate hijinks of lifelong New York friends James "Murr" Murray, Brian "Q" Quinn, Sal Vulcano and Joe Gatto, who have turned truTV's "Impractical Jokers" into a running gag now in its fifth season.
But you might be surprised to learn a lot of the show's fans are women. When The Tenderloins, as the improv comedy foursome calls itself, comes to the Weidner Center on Saturday night for back-to-back shows to kick off its Santiago Sent Us Tour, it wouldn't be unusual if there's more women than men laughing at their self-imposed humiliation tactics.
Murray has a theory about why women are so wild about the "Jokers," too.
"I think the reason for that is that we seem like the kind of guy you can score. Like you can get us," Murray said in a phone interview. "The average woman looks at Brad Pitt in a movie and is like, 'Oh my God, he's gorgeous. I probably don't have much of a shot to get him nor will I ever meet him.' We're the kind of guy that at the end of the night you see in a bar and you're like, 'Yeah, he's good enough.' We're the kind of guy that you settle for."
That's coming from a man who had his nipples and belly button pierced as the cringe-worthy punishment cooked up by his buddies for losing the most challenges in an episode. Punishments, for the uninitiated, can be brutal. Vulcano watched his sister legally marry Murray. Gatto once had to announce to everyone in a public pool he was urinating in it. Quinn and Murray forced Gatto and Vulcano, who don't know how to play instruments, to open for Imagine Dragons in front of 14,000 people in New York.
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Since "Impractical Jokers" premiered in 2011, the four former classmates from Staten Island's Monsignor Farrell High School's class of 1994 have pulled some doozies on one another. The most recent Season 5 episode had Murray getting his head, eyebrows and facial hair shaved before going to get his driver's license photo taken. Speaking of missing eyebrows (it took two months for them to grow back), Murray revealed the all-new show coming to the Weidner includes a video of him wearing different kinds of eyebrows while his face was still naked.
You could think there's no room within the format of the show — not with all the laughing they do among themselves at the pranks they dream up — for the guys to hold a grudge over the pain and/or humiliation they pile on each other, but Murray says you'd be wrong.
"No, trust me, you can hold grudges. They threw me out of an airplane! They knew I'm afraid of heights and they threw me out of an airplane!" he said, laughing. "I'm still holding a grudge. I still wake up shivering at night. ... That day, I sent goodbye texts to my mom, my girlfriend at the time. And then a month ago, in front of a room full of 50 guys, they had two doctors give me two different prostate exams.
"But you'll be glad to know my prostate looks good," he adds.
The men aren't without limits to what they'll do — or say. The appeal of "Impractical Jokers" isn't as much about what they will do as what they won't, Murray said. He tells of being on set last week for a challenge in which he's working as a manager at Hooters. He has to go up to a table, lean into a guy to smell his shirt and then say, "You smell like my mom's boyfriend."
"And I couldn't say it. It was too weird. I literally looked at the one cameraman and said, 'I can't do this. It's too weird. You're making me into too much of a weirdo.' And I walked off set," he said. "The joke's on us. I think that keeps the show likable. It keeps us likable. We are real guys. We are real guys who have real problems and fears and lines that we will not cross. I think that's the secret of the show."
I feel like I can call you Murr. Does that happen a lot? People feel like you're a friend?
"It's a blessing and a curse. Usually when we got out to dinner, a fan will come up to the table and just like eat food off my plate. They feel like they know us."
You seem like the most earnest one of the four, so you're my favorite to have to do a challenge. Do you hear that a lot?
"I knew I liked you from the beginning. ... My parents raised me to be a gentleman. So I get very nervous in front of women. I would never disrespect a woman or an elder. I get very nervous and the guys know how to turn my screws on that."
What's it like when the four of you hit the road together on a tour bus?
"We've been best friends for 26 years, so we love and hate each other. (Laughs.) Put anybody in close proximity to each other for two weeks straight on the bus. Sal's snoring, I want to smother him to death in his sleep, because of his snoring on the bus. It drives me crazy that Q walks around with his bare feet out. It grosses me out having to look at his bare feet. But they're my friends so ..."
It's so easy to focus on your reactions and the reactions of the public that you forget you all have improv comedy backgrounds. How does that factor in?
"The show is really a stealth improv show. It's very hard to sell an improv show on TV, so what we did was we disguised our improv ability in the guise or in the format of a hidden camera show, so it seems like there's a format and structure to it, but really what's going on is we're just going out there and coming up with ideas on the spot and seeing how far we can go and seeing our own limits.
"It is a comedy show. We actually don't even really consider it a prank show. We consider it a comedy show. A hidden camera show where we're the butt of the joke."
A show with that kind of premise could easily become obnoxious. How do you keep it from not veering into that territory or getting crude?
"The four of us were raised to be gentlemen. Our parents watch the show. We hear from people a lot, 'Oh, I could be on the show. I'll do anything.' Well, that's not what the show is about. The show is not about what we do. The show is about what we won't do, because we were raised to be nice guys. We are not pranksters. We're not guys that will do anything for a laugh. We actually have breaking points and real fears and phobias and anxieties and neuroses, and we, unfortunately, know too much about each other.
"That's what keeps the show relatable and likable. I think people get nervous when they watch a typical prank show, because they feel bad for the public, because they were pranked and don't know. But on our show, we're the ones getting pranked. The public is just there to kind of laugh or witness our weirdness or stupidity. We're the ones who look crazy."
Is there pressure from Season 1 to the current season to always be upping the gamesmanship of the challenges, and if so, how do you do that without straying from the heart of the show?
"The heart of the show is our friendship. We'll never get away from that. I think that keeps us grounded really in the show. But I think for us, the challenge as comedians — this has been the No. 1 priority from the first episode — was to make sure the show was advancing or the format was progressing. I think the show needs to evolve as our audience evolves and grows and changes.
"We just did a year-long punishment on Sal, where he thought he was getting investigated by the Department of Homeland Security. Seriously. We called him down to a deposition and the whole nine yards. For 10 months, he was going through this court case, and this whole thing was fake. It was all just us ... (expletive) with him. And I love that. I love pushing the show in that direction, where the punishments have become really creative and imaginative, and now we're even crossing the boundary into our real lives."
The four of you could probably write a book on human nature someday. What have you learned about people from the show?
"I think what has surprised me is not how people react, it's how they don't react. How much you can get away with ... It astounds me every day."
(He tells the story in Season 1 of Q working at a White Castle. A guy hands him $20 to pay, but the rest of the Jokers instruct Q to just freeze with the money in his hand in the air. That went on for 7 minutes. The customer never said a word.)
"That blows me away that people don't react. We've never gotten punched. We've never gotten assaulted. It amazes me what you can get away with in this world. I think people are friendlier than you think.
"I've learned one other thing: the power of the lanyard. If you have a lanyard around your neck that looks semi-official, you can get away with murder."
kmeinert@pressgazettemedia.com and follow her on Twitter @KendraMeinert
What: truTV "Impractical Jokers" Santiago Sent Us Tour, starring The Tenderloins
When: 7 and 10 p.m. Saturday; first show is sold out
Where: Weidner Center, UWGB
Tickets: $52.50; $153 and $253 VIP; ticketstaronline.com, (800) 895-0071 and Resch Center box office
Read or Share this story: https://gbpg.net/28nbf8O
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