Unemployed, All Null ‘n Void

The Inspired Unemployed are back! Hang on, who exactly are The Inspired Unemployed? We’re up to the second season of their prank show (Impractical) Jokers, and pretty much all we know about them is that they’re ex-tradies who like to pissfart around. So basically regular tradies then.

Sure, if you dig up the online coverage of their show, you’ll find out a (little) bit more about the four members of the group. It’s mostly the usual stuff – they’re mates, they started doing clips online, a couple of them are the driving force, you know the story. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

The four members of The Inspired Unemployed are, on their own show at least, basically interchangeable. Dom, Falcon, Jack and Liam are four different guys who are four versions of the same guy. There’s never really any sense that one of them might be better (or worse) at a challenge than any of the others. There’s maybe a faint vibe that Falcon might be more willing to push things, but that’s probably just because he’s called Falcon.

Part of that comes back to how the show works and oh yeah, we should probably mention the show itself here:

It’s a prank show.

With that out of the way, back to why they’re all identical. All four of them do the same prank (two main pranks per episode), with the set-up being that while one’s out dealing with the public the other three are backstage in an office close by watching and giving orders that the front-of-house guy has to follow. Are these orders embarrassing and humiliating? Well yeah, but usually the joke is on them rather than the public so it’s not like we’ve traveled back in time to Balls of Steel Australia or anything.

So if they were in any serious way different people, you wouldn’t have a challenge. Some would be better at certain things than others; it wouldn’t be a fair fight. Which it needs to be, because in each episode the third and final segment is the punishment round, where the person who said no the most in the first two segments has to act like a dickhead in front of a crowd (or possibly a dangerous individual) for our amusement.

The trade off for a workable format is that we’re just watching four versions of the same person week after week. That person is a fairly likable person by Australian television standards, but still. If you said they were like early Hamish & Andy only a bit blander, we wouldn’t disagree.

That puts all the emphasis on the pranks – acting like a dickhead in front of the customers at Mitre 10, acting like a dickhead in front of a life drawing class, acting like a dickhead in front of a Trump Rally*. There’s no “oh no, how will Falcon (a person we know specifically can’t handle this kind of thing) deal with this kind of thing”. Instead it’s just “yeah, it’d suck to have to do that”.

It’s hardly a fatal flaw, but as we’ve got a whole second season of this kind of thing it is kind of noticeable. Though realistically, the prank is on us for expecting any kind of character growth in a fucking prank show.

.

*that’s been held back for season three