YMMV / Impractical Jokers

• Angst Dissonance: Many fans wouldn't find it hard to say/do certain things the Jokers refuse or consider to be going too far. There's also the fact that one punishment may involve being rude or being in an uncomfortable situation, while the next could involve a serious phobia being exploited (i.e. the punishment for "Catastrophe" had Sal being chained down and have cats piled on top of him, while the one from the previous episode, "The Parent Trap", was just Joe being condescending to people.) This logic was best described in a joke from "One Night At The Grand":
  Joe: Tune in next week when Q performs open-heart surgery!
• Badass Decay:
  • Joe is arguably more tame since he got married. One challenge (which happened shortly after his wedding) required him to insult his wife, which he flat out declined to do, while the old Joe would've been perfectly fine with insulting his metaphorical wife. Not only does he back out on subjects regarding his wife, but he also has a fear of sumo wrestlers. In his punishment, Joe prepared to wrestle with a sumo, but ran away in terror when the fight begins.
  • Q has been losing more episodes as of Season 5, which sticks out because prior to that, he had lost the fewest episodes of the four. Ironically, that honor now goes to Joe.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: During one of the White Castle challenges, Q, Murr and Joe had someone put on a full-sized cat costume to scare Sal (who hates cats) out of the store and chase him around the parking lot. It works, and "Benjamin Cat" goes on to become Sal's Sitcom Arch-Nemesis.
  • In one punishment, Sal has to walk through a sewer and encounters "Middle-Aged Karate Tortoise." This has absolutely nothing to do with the zombie apocalypse Sal is on his way to.
  • This punishment is easily the weirdest the guys have ever done.
• Crazy Is Cool: Q and Joe both have moments of this. It ends up winning them a lot of challenges, because they're so audacious.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The punishments started to go down this route by the end of season 2. One notable example is the punishment where Q posed as a playwright and had to give a synopsis to a fake play he wrote about Jamaica.
  Q: (Jamaican accent) Set in de islands down by de bay.
• Discredited Meme: Sal detests the image of his fatter-looking self from his youth because people tend to spam various Photoshop jokes of it at him.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Benjamin Cat, Sloppy Joe, and The Fat Crow were all popular and memorable enough to be brought back for multiple episodes.
  • Joey Fatone! He successfully filled in for Q twice, and has gone on to host several Impractical Jokers-related specials and events.
  • LARRY! Joe's imaginary friend has become rather popular despite never actually appearing.
  • Sal's father is sometimes brought in to watch his son's punishments. Q even explains that this is the best part of any punishment that Sal endures.
  • Dr. Frank for being a Sitcom Arch-Nemesis of sorts to Murr and having decent comedic timing.
• Estrogen Brigade: Despite the other Jokers making fun of his appearance, particularly in the earlier seasons, Q has a significant number of female fans. Lampshaded by Joe in "Brother of the Sisterhood":
  Joe: Women love Q.
  • For his part, Q has admitted to being bewildered that there are women who find him attractive, particularly when the women are teenage girls.
  Q: [when women tell him that they think he's hot] Have you seen me?
• Fans Prefer the New Her: Murr having to be oiled up like a bodybuilder and walk around in a speedo is intended as a Fan Disservice...except he's in much better shape than the show tries to frame, and the treatment he gets is used to enhance muscles on camera. So it ends up looking more like Fanservice.
• Fridge Logic: In one episode BOTH Joe and Murr lost...but only Murr got punished! Why didn't Joe get punished? The rules are if you lose the most challenges, you get punished, and it was a tie. So, logically they BOTH should have received punishments! However, it's worth mentioning that in the introduction to the punishment, it's clearly evident that Murr thinks that Joe is going to be the only one punished, which suggests that Sal and Q were likely misleading him into thinking this, and that he had no evident objection to it. Kind of hard to complain about unfair treatment if you were expecting to be the beneficiary of it.
  • Wild Mass Guessing: It was only a couple episodes after the one where Murr groped Joe's sister's butt for a gag, and considering that Joe's sister's husband wasn't pleased in the slightest, the guys probably did him a favor and let them beat on Murr the next time he lost, and seeing of Joe was the other one who lost, it would seem kind of illogical, even for the shows standards, to have his brother-in-law beat him up because he is angry for Murr groping his wife.
  • Then why didn't they wait for a Murr-only punishment to do that?!
    • Given that the "Water Torture" episode just made Sal the loser of the episode so they could come up with the punishment on the fly, it could be possible that a situation like that happened in reverse where Joe and Murr were originally gonna be punished together, but something happened (probably Joe's brother getting in like mentioned above) that couldn't be altered so they decided to just say "Welp; guess it's just Murr that's just getting punished, then!" Q also mentioned in the "Water Torture" episode "What are you talking about? We make the rules!" when questioned if they could do that. So yeah, Rule of Funny overrides all other rules in their logic.
    • The "Inside Jokes" airing of the episode revealed that the Jokers decided to punish only Murr because they wanted to exploit his fear of heights.
• Genius Bonus: In one game, Joe makes Sal say, "I use dimethylmercury instead of inorganic mercury salts when calibrating my nuclear magnetic resonance device, like I'm some kind of asshole." Anyone who knows how incredibly toxic dimethylmercury is (pretty much any exposure to even a tiny amount can easily be fatal) would agree that if Sal is using it for anything, he is an asshole.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The show has a huge following in the UK. Not only did they film an episode there, but the Brits also have their own version, appropriately titled Impractical Jokers UK.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In the Season 2 episode "Cyber Buddies", Murr's punishment involves hosting a computer cleanliness seminar. One of the files he comes across in the computer's recycle bin is named "Gross Baltimore People." When a woman tells Murr she's from Baltimore, he replies, "So you know what I'm talking about." While this was funny at the time, the Baltimore riots in 2015 made this moment somewhat cringeworthy.
  • In the Season 3 episode "Snow Way Out", Murr has to get a signature for a made-up holiday. He goes up to a woman and says he need to get a signature for "Bill the Cosby," then does an impression of Cosby. The woman ends up refusing to sign it, giving Murr the loss. Cosby would face a wave of rape allegations months after the episode aired, so it suddenly became very understandable why she wouldn't sign it.
  • In the Season 3 episode "B-I-N-G-NO", the guys make Murr climb into a popsicle cart, at which point Q goes over, shuts the cart, and takes it for a spin. It looked pretty funny... until an "Inside Jokes" special revealed that the cart had dry ice in it, giving Murr burns so severe that he needed to go to the hospital (granted, the Jokers didn't know this beforehand).
  • A challenge in the Season 6 episode "Vampire Weakened" has Q rename Joe's dog Mishkeen to Ice-Pops, claiming it was wearing its dead brother's collar. After the credits, it was revealed Mishkeen did die shortly after the filming.
  • And for Murr's punishment in "Ash Clown", a picture of Mishkeen was used to promote Murr's "pet cremation" business. Again, it aired after Mishkeen's death.
  • Q on an ATV was awesome until he fell off and busted two ribs. This caused him to heave in pain in an episode they taped shortly afterward from laughing too hard as he watched a punishment unfolding.
  • In "G.I. Jokers," Murr and Joe gave a presentation where they claimed all helicopters would be destroyed spectacularly by 2020. Less than a month into 2020, a helicopter crash killed 9 people, including basketball star Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna.
  • Any of the instances where Joe backs out of a challenge because of his marriage (such as refusing to kiss a stranger at the food court because his wife was standing right there next to her) come across as this after Joe announced that he and Bessy had separated on New Year's Eve 2021. Thankfully, they managed to reconcile in 2023.
• He Cleans Up Nicely: Q has kept his hair short since shaving his head to make Murr's wig, which has more or less put a stop to the other Jokers ragging on his appearance.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Danica McKellar meeting Murr is played for Cringe Comedy, and the end reveals that she was in on the prank and found it Actually Pretty Funny. She and Murr stayed in touch, and she invited him over to have dinner with her and her husband.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • When Joe pretends to read his own future in "Unmotivational Speaker", one of the things he predicts is that he will find love eventually. Come mid-Season 2, Joe became the first of the guys to get married.
    • Joe also mentions that none of the Jokers are married in "Human Pinata". As of 2022, only Q has never been married (Sal is married, but he keeps his wife firmly out of the spotlight).
    • During the wedding proposal segment of "Speech Impediment," Murr scoffs at the cost of an engagement ring and says that it's the reason why he's never getting married. In September of 2020, Murr tied the knot with the former Melyssa Davies.
  • The episode when Q is pretending to be a bouncer and is told to ask a woman if she believes in God. When she says yes, he's told to scoff and walk away, which he does. Q later confirmed on Twitter that he is an atheist in real life, though he wouldn't laugh at anyone's beliefs.
  • In the episode where Joe and Sal are the opening act to Imagine Dragons, Sal reads out a note where they dedicated this act "to the people of Pittsburgh", in front of the audience of Long Island. This is made more hilarious after Bruce Springsteen, during a 2016 show, gave a shout-out to none other than Pittsburgh in front of an audience in Cleveland.
  • In early Season 1, a challenge required the Jokers to convince people to get inside the trunk of a car. Sal was the only one to do it. Come Season 3, and he gets a punishment in which he must secretly get inside the trunk of a stranger's car, whose owner drives off with him. The stranger turned out to be a friend of Murr's who was in on the punishment.
  • When Murr had his head completely shaved, including his eyebrows, for a punishment, Q remarks how he would quit if he was the one receiving the punishment. Several seasons later, Q willingly gets his head (though not his eyebrows) shaved to create a wig that Murr has to wear for a punishment.
  • In a Joker Vs. Joker challenge, Joe pitches the sitcom "Tickle Me Timbers" and reads the name of its executive producer: Chuck Sharts. In a later challenge where the Jokers teach Krav Maga, Joe sharts during his turn.
  • In the first episode, a customer at Costco got so fed up with Q calling him "Mustache" that he resorted to calling Q "Clown". In a Season 4 punishment, Q was made to be a clown for a child's birthday party.
  • In Season 8, one name Sal has to read aloud is "Jarnathan Toothass", several years before a character actually named Jarnathan would appear in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
• Hollywood Pudgy:
  • Sal, Q, and especially Joe are often treated as though they are grotesquely obese, even though their actual weights range from stocky to mildly overweight (their weights have fluctuated over the years). This came to a head in the second episode of season 7, where Sal and Joe had to roleplay as an alien attacking a grossly overweight person, and it was up to the class they were teaching to pick which was which. Sal was chosen as the "grossly overweight" one (though this was probably because he was bigger than Joe at the time).
  • Not even the relatively trim and fit Murr is exempt from this, as shown when he confessed to gaining a few pounds in one episode.
• I Am Not Shazam: The show is called Impractical Jokers, but the official name of the Jokers' comedy troupe is the Tenderloins. That being said, they don't object to being referred to as the Impractical Jokers and use the appellation themselves.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Oh, sure, like the guys would really burn Murr's blanket ("Doomed") or get him in a deadly knife stunt ("Joke and Dagger").
• Memetic Mutation:
  • LARRY!^explanation Joe would sometimes call for Larry, who doesn't actually exist, for his challenges. Used in the intro of the show and an HBOMax commercial.
  • Good morrow sire! Welcome to the Castle of White!
    • Welcome to White Castle, bitch.
  • 'Tis confusion!
  • Hey, mustache!^explanation Q was challenged to make fun of a man's mustache. Used in the intro.
  • LET'S GET SEXY!
  • SCOOPSKI POTATOES!^explanation Joe handily wins the Season 2 potato scooping challenge by singing the phrase and dancing as he dishes out the potatoes to a table of amused diners.
  • I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU!^explanation Sal screams this to the other Jokers after they leave him on a departing trash barge while he's looking for his cell phone. This has been used in the intro since Season 3.
  • Welllllll...^explanation Used when a challenge is revealed to actually be a punishment; it is uttered in unison, in high-pitched voices, by the Jokers not being punished.
  • Cranjis McBasketball ^explanation A common challenge that occurs is referred to as Cranjis McBasketball, which involves the Jokers, as receptionists in a waiting area filled with people, calling for made-up and ridiculous names while trying not to laugh.
  • [Joker] did not do [stupid or deplorable action], making him tonight's biggest loser.^explanation The typical format for the summary of an episode's final challenge between it and the punishment, often associated in IJ spaces with Sal's terrible old photo. This has spread beyond the show's fandom and is sometimes applied to characters or people outside the show.
  • Benjamin Cat.^explanation A man in a giant cat suit who torments Sal whenever he appears.
  • The Q-Pay. ^explanation Murr had to wear Q's hair as a wig for the second half of Season 6.
  • Whose phone is ringing? MINE! MINE! Whose phone is ringing? MINE! It's MINE! Whose phone is ringing? MINE! MINE! My phone-ph-phone-phone-phone! My phone-ph-phone-phone-phone!^explanation The eponymous ringtone from the punishment of "Whose Phone is Ringing?" It can actually be purchased to make it your own ringtone.
  • Genie does as you wish! ^explanation A punishment involved Joe being cast as the genie in a play of Aladdin, in which he must use the line as a catchphrase while suspended on a wire and destroying the set.
  • "Sal couldn't defuse the bomb planted in the children's hospital, making him tonight's biggest loser."
  • Tamest Murr Punishment.^explanation Murr has a reputation as a Butt-Monkey whose punishments are typically harsher than the other three. A common fan joke exaggerates this to Murr being ordered to do things like commit a heinous crime, go into a deadly situation or other similarly extreme circumstances.
• Moment of Awesome: See here.
• Nightmare Fuel: Most punishments for the guys involve having to face their fears. Murr had to go skydiving and swim in a lake with sharks. Sal was chained up and cats were on him. Before it, Q was chained also and spiders were on him.
• One-Scene Wonder: Pretty much any time a customer reacts in a way no one saw coming. Notable examples include the kind old man who helped Murr learn the meaning of the word "douche," the crazy shirtless dude who frightened Q half to death while he was pretending to be a clerk, and a guy actually named Larry who caused much joy for the Jokers when they learned his name. Also, Murr's old downstairs neighbor and the woman who revealed that she loved colonics.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Before he was Young Sheldon, Iain Armitage was the kid in the hat who asked Murr for a pretzel during his turn in the hot dog cart challenge in "Look Out Below".
  • Darius Marder (the Oscar-nominated writer/director of Sound of Metal) appears in "Toasted" as the guy Sal and Murr ask to settle a debate about who had the more embarassing way of losing their virginity.
• Signature Scene: The White Castle sketch from the first episode.
• Squick: The rich minefield of Sal's germaphobia does not go unplumbed when he loses, such as being forced to dig through elephant feces for his car keys (which were never actually in there at all) and holding (fresh) dog poop for twenty seconds.
  • Worse is the punishment where he had to find his new phone in a trash barge; the first thing he said when he started going through it was, "Is that diarrhea?" and eventually, the barge left the dock and headed out to the river. The guys told him to call them when he found his phone and they'd come get him. After freaking out when he realized the ship was getting further and further out, he found his phone and called Joe... who sent him straight to voicemail.
  • How about when the guys snuck into Sal's house while he was away on vacation? Q and his cat Brooklyn rolled around in Sal's bed, Murr drank directly from a milk jug (spilling some of it on the floor) and used his fingers to double-dip into a jar of peanut butter, and Joe slept naked on his sofa, took a massive shit in the toilet, and rubbed his unwashed hands on everything in the bathroom, including Sal's toothbrush. Finally, all three stood naked in his window and pelvic thrusted, where all his neighbors could see. After, the stressed-out Sal (as part of a stress-relieving seminar, no less) declared that he had to move because he now probably had "Hepatitis A through Zed."
  • The punishment where Sal was forced to help a cow give birth. He gagged through the entire process, but composed himself long enough to pet the newborn calf and tell it that everybody loves it.
  • During his punishment as Flatfoot the Pirate, Sal had to drink breast milk which had been left out in the sun for hours. He promptly threw it up. Not helping is that earlier in the punishment, he had to lick a lollipop that previously been licked by all the children who made up his crew.
  • One toy Sal had to pitch to a focus group was Toilet Soldiers: an army base that could be built around a toilet, and soldier action figures. Sal's attempts to justify it were quashed by the group pointing out how unsanitary it would be for kids to be playing in such fashion. The commercial for the product validated their concerns by showing someone dunking the soldiers in the toilet water.
• The Woobie: All the guys qualify, especially during the punishments.
  • Murr in "Charity Case", "Art Attack", "The Truth Hurts", "Strip High Five", "Human Pinata", "Not Safe for Work", "Look Out Below", "Cyber Buddies", "Puncture Perfect", "The Blunder Years", "Doomed", "Dark Side of the Moon", and "Browbeaten".
  • Sal in "Pay it Forward", "Drawing a Blank", "Elephant in the Room", "Psychotic Not-line", "Sound Effexxx", "Scaredy Cat", "Down in the Dump", "Sweat the Small Things", "The Permanent Punishment", "B-I-N-G-NO", "Brother-in-Loss", "You're Cut Off", "Whose Phone is Ringing?" and "The Coward".
  • Q in "Birds and the Bees", "The Lost Boy", "Make Womb for Daddy", "Car Sick", "Bidder Loser", "Spider Man", and especially in "X-Man", one of the show's most sadistic impromptu punishments ever ( he refused to draw a big red "X" on onto a drawing in a children's art class, which turned him into the episode's big loser. Joe decided at that moment that his punishment was to do that to every drawing made by the class, which left Q-along with Sal, despite not being the one that has to do it-feeling beyond terrible and was enforced by the sound of Toccata and Fugue in D Minor playing as he did it).
  • Joe in "Uncool and the Gang", "Pseudo-Sumo", "Cruisin' for a Bruisin'" and "Take Me Out at the Ballgame".

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