Pointless Pranks: Self Soundboard

Why do I do the things I do? It's been made abundantly clear over and over again in my life that I have poor taste in everything.

That said, one of my most egregious offenses in the realm of taste is my taste in pranks. Generally speaking the greatest and most clever pranks are the ones that require the least amount of work and have the greatest result. Unfortunately, if you are interested in pranks like those I suggest you leave this page immediately and head somewhere like here. I say that not out contempt for you, the reader, but out of shame for my brand of satisfaction.

You see, for some reason I am hard-wired to take utter joy in completing pointless extensive work to achieve goals that have little to no value. That said, I present to you my latest waste of time. Weeks in planning, months in execution, hours in coding and editing, and I give to you one of the most pointless works I have ever made:

The J.D. Amato Sound Board
(http://www.justdreamingaway.com/jd_sound_board.html)

Back in the early nineties soundboards were top-notch comedy. It was cutting edge technology meets the frontier of the classic prank. You could take on Schwarzenegger, Pesci, DeVito, Judge Judy... if they were famous and had at least a movie's worth of dialogue, you could take on their persona for your prank calls to the local McDonald's. Though hilariously fun, years went by and their novelty faded as the age of geocities crumbled beneath the meteor of modern technology. They have become as antiquated and banal as the excuse that your little brother or sister had hacked your AOL Instant Messanger and was actually the one who asked the most popular girl in the school out on a date. That is to say, they no longer work.

Keeping that in mind, four months ago I forced Zach Weintraub and Rob Malone to record audio for this project while on set during the illustrious but yet to be released film "Puppy Whistle". After months of waiting for the audio to surface in their jungle of hard-drives I received the audio, cut it up into bite sized pieces, and then spent tedious stupid hours coding my dumb soundboard (completely unaware that services existed that would have made this several month long process happen instantaneously). I then forced Nandan Rao to use his otherwise class-filled time to film me using this pointless piece of programming to call my relatively unamused friends (see video below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud4Q1ab3UtA

When all was said and done I followed through with this dumb process for one reason and one reason only: the prank was pointless. I was personally calling friends and then personally operating a soundboard of my own voice. The joy of traditional celebrity soundboards is that either the victim believes they are talking to a celebrity or that the pranker now has an otherwise un-achievable cast of characters at their disposal. For my prank, the victim had literally no reason to assume that anything was suspicious and using the soundboard only served to hinder my ability to communicate. Furthermore, there was no discernible advantage or conceit attached to the soundboard other than that it was slightly more difficult, boring, and obnoxious to talk to me. Quite simply, my intentions were stupid and I set out without even the slightest inkling that I would discover anything from the project. However, this was wrong:

1) I learned that for the most part people want to be friendly and engage in social interactions. I will never forget the moment that I convinced Blake using a repeating soundboard to come hang out. I don't think I've ever convinced anyone to come hang out after they first said "no". Furthermore, I don't actually call Oviatt that often and his absolute willingness to hold a conversation with me was incredibly nice. That said, in both instances when it became painfully clear that I was using a soundboard I got a definite sinking feeling in my stomach when the tone in both of their voices turned from jovial friendliness to saddeened disappointment. In both cases this was the sound of them realizing that I was not trying to be friendly and instead just using them for some dumb project. It was like I had just uncovered a tiny bit of friendliness and then thrown it too the wolves for a cheap laugh.

2) In retrospect I tried to figure out what I thought was funny about this project or why it was so enjoyable to use the soundboard and make the calls (or even why people seemed so upset when they realized what was going on). Then it became clear. The only sense of "deceit" that came from the project was the very basic premise of "we know something you don't know". More specifically, the only twist to these phone conversations is that one side of the conversation had a secret. The joy we experienced while making the calls was not the joy of comedy or the delight of creativity, it was the self indulgent joy of having a secret.

I'm not proud of this project, I don't even know why I went through so much effort to follow it through to the end. I watered down a clever prank to the point that it was more water than prank. The only thing I gained from this experience was a useless soundboard, a relatively mean video, and a lot of wasted hours. That said I apologize to the parties involved and promise not to use the soundboard ever again.

However, when asking myself if I regret doing this, the answer seems to be a conscious heavy "Hell no". And what's weird is when a paragraph ago I said that I wasn't proud...well...that's sort of a lie. I am proud, but I don't know why. Maybe it's because I have horrible taste?

Yeah, that's probably it.

Stay Bright.