Tinseltown is up to some tricks! Though Hollywood can be a serious business, celebrities often share their light-hearted sides — and what better way to prove their comedic nuance than with practical jokes at the expense of others?
The Kardashian-Jenner family have pulled a number of pranks on each other over the years, but perhaps none more iconic than Scott Disick’s Todd Kraines gag, in which he pretends to be a friend of the family on phone calls with Kris Jenner. The Flip It Like Disick alum’s high-pitched “imitation” of Kraines — and the momager’s reaction — never failed to leave the family in hysterics.
While Disick’s prank calls are legendary in the Kardashian family and in the Kardashian fandom, Jenner once received an entirely different call based on an entirely different (and much more serious) prank.
While playing “Truth or Dare” with Kourtney Kardashian, Kendall Jenner called their mom and pretended that she just found out she was pregnant. Kris, who believed her daughter immediately, even told her second-youngest that she dreamt about Kendall’s supposed pregnancy the night before. (Kim Kardashian, on the other hand, had a much stronger reaction to the model’s alleged news when Kendall played the same prank several years prior on Khloé Kardashian’s short-lived talk show, Kocktails With Khloé, getting upset and stressed about the situation.)
Meanwhile, no celebrity prank would be complete without the masters: Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres.
DeGeneres, for her part, has been playfully scaring stars for decades on her eponymous talk show: Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, Diddy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Anne Hathaway and many more have all fell victim to her pop-out surprises. When she’s not frightening her A-list guests, the Finding Dory star has them go out and embarrass themselves in front of unsuspecting people. (“Dennis Quaid is here!” is a classic.)
Kutcher, whose MTV series Punk’d was a staple in the early 2000s, terrified countless celebrities throughout his stint as host, including Travis Barker, Mandy Moore, The Rock, Lindsay Lohan, Missy Elliott and many more. The most memorable, however, were his practical jokes on Justin Timberlake (who cried when he thought all of his belongings were being seized by the government) and Drake (who visibly panicked when he thought he was involved in an earthquake).
However, not all the stars were laughing. Kutcher didn’t air pranks that celebrities didn’t approve. David Spade and Miley Cyrus were Punk’d in two separate stunts, but neither allowed MTV to air the clips. Kutcher said he deleted any footage that stars didn’t want to be seen. “Any celebrity that asked us to destroy the tape, I destroyed the tape,” he told Esquire in January 2023. “Every single f–king last one.”
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Scroll down to see these and more of the best celebrity pranks over the years:
