July 9, 2026

The Tube Bar Tapes: A Short History of the Prank Call

From: lurk-more

Before Bart Simpson asked for Amanda Huggenkiss, two guys in New Jersey were calling a bar owner named Red until he threatened to kill them, and trading the tapes. The prank call is folk art — right up until the day it stops being a call and starts being a SWAT team at the wrong door.

The Tube Bar Tapes: A Short History of the Prank Call

The Fires Series — Episode 85

The prank call is the folk art of trolling — anonymous, oral, endlessly copied, and for most of its history completely uncommercial. It is worth separating from its technical cousin. Phone phreaking is the hacker’s game: exploiting the telephone system itself, the 2600-hertz tone, the blue box, the network as a puzzle. The prank call is the opposite skill entirely — it’s social engineering as comedy, a voice and a premise and a mark on the other end of the line. One breaks the machine; the other breaks the person answering it.

And for a while, the artifact was the cassette.

Red, and the men who called him

In the late 1970s two men in Jersey City — John Elmo and Jim Davidson — began calling the Tube Bar, a working-class tavern run by a gravel-voiced ex-boxer named Louis “Red” Deutsch. They’d ask Red to page a customer with a name that only became obscene when he bellowed it across the bar: names built so the joke detonated in Red’s own mouth. Red caught on fast, and his escalating, magnificently profane threats to find and kill the callers became the actual content. The recordings — the “Red Tapes” — were dubbed and traded hand to hand for years before the internet existed to carry them.

Their fingerprints are everywhere. The Tube Bar tapes are widely credited as the template for Bart Simpson’s calls to Moe’s Tavern — the same engine, the paged name that shames the man reading it aloud. What was traded on cassette became, a decade later, a national broadcast running gag.

One honest note the tapes force: Red Deutsch never signed up to be the bit. He was the target, not the troll — an old man doing his job, made famous by two strangers he never met. The prank was funny; it was also, from where Red stood, a decade of harassment. Hold both.

The tradition goes pro, then goes weird

In the 1990s the Jerky Boys — Johnny Brennan and Kamal Ahmed — took the form platinum, releasing albums of character-driven calls where invented personas (the belligerent tough guy, the oblivious old man) wrong-footed real tradesmen and businesses. Prank calling briefly had a place on the Billboard charts.

At the other end of the spectrum sits Longmont Potion Castle, an anonymous artist who has released decades of surreal, absurdist prank calls that abandon the setup-punchline entirely for a kind of Dadaist telephone theater — the mark left groping to understand a conversation that has no floor. It is the avant-garde wing of the form, and its anonymity is, as with the best hacks, part of the work.

Where the line is

Radio found the form and, being a commercial medium aimed at strangers, kept finding the edge of it. Morning-show prank calls have drawn FCC action for airing people’s voices without consent — and, once, something far worse. In December 2012 two Australian DJs called a London hospital posing as the Queen and Prince of Wales, seeking information about the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge. The nurse who transferred the call, Jacintha Saldanha, died by suicide days later. The prank cost nothing to make and a life to land. The record does not settle a simple line of blame, and this series won’t pretend it does — but the episode marks exactly where a “harmless bit” stops being harmless.

And then there is the terminal mutation: swatting. Somewhere along the line the prank call learned to weaponize the emergency system — a false report of a hostage situation or a shooting, phoned in to send an armed police team to a target’s home. In December 2017 a swatting call over a trivial Call of Duty wager sent officers to a Wichita address; a man named Andrew Finch, who had nothing to do with the dispute, was shot dead on his own porch. The caller was later sentenced to twenty years.

That is the whole thesis of the FAQ in three phone calls. Red Deutsch’s tormentors made an old man swear for the tape: cruel around the edges, but a bit. The hospital hoax pointed the same tool at a private person doing her job. Swatting points it at a stranger’s front door with live weapons behind it. Same technology, same “it’s just a call” alibi — and a moral distance between them as wide as the one between a joke and a killing.

The prank call is trolling you can hear breathing. Which is exactly why it’s the clearest place to learn where the breathing stops.

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