Impractical Jokers will bring live comedy to Gilford July 26

GILFORD — Famed pranksters Impractical Jokers will perform at Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion in Gilford on Friday, July 26.

“This is our fifth national tour, so the way the show works, it’s a live standup comedy show,” James “Murr” Murray said in an interview. “The guys and I are onstage the whole time, we tell stories from the TV show, what it’s like making the show, some of the best punishments and things you don’t know. We shot hidden camera challenges just for the live show that you cannot see anywhere else.”

This time around, the tour will be much more interactive, Murr said, and he and his comedy troupe of Brian "Q" Quinn and Salvatore "Sal" Vulcano will incorporate aspects never seen before on their longstanding television show.

“The best part of this tour in particular is it’s the first tour ever where we actually punish Sal live onstage during the show,” he said. “In Gilford, what we’re going to do is, unbeknownst to the audience, Sal has been wearing the electrocution shock collars under his clothes the whole show and we bring a kid up from the crowd and Sal has to tell the story of his Jaden Smith tattoo while the kid gets to shock him at his or her leisure — it’s so much fun. It’s the first time we’re doing a punishment like that live onstage.”

Impractical Jokers is based around the concept of performing pranks on one another in public settings. Part of the premise of the show is that a joker unable to complete a challenge is punished by the other members of the cast. Murr has experienced his fair share of punishments over the years.

“I still have my ferret skydiving tattoo on my thigh. When I travel to Gilford on July 26, I’ll be flying into town to that airport nearby, and I’ll show my driver's license at TSA,” he said. “To this day, my driver's license still has no eyebrows from the TV show. I look like a super villain, it’s crazy, I look like a 'see something say something.'”

But the jokers never expected the show to be the smash-hit it has proved to be over time. At the start of their careers, they were lucky to sell one or two tickets to a show.

“We did it before Impractical Jokers, which started 14 years ago at this point. We did a show in New York City about two years before jokers, and two people bought tickets to see our show — two,” Murr said. “The tickets were $5 each, the theater cost us $65 to rent so we lost $55 on the night, we split it a couple ways. And then a few years back we sold out Madison Square Garden which, for a New Yorker, is a dream come true ... It’s such an iconic venue. We just sold out our seventh night at Radio City Music Hall about a month ago and it was wild.”

Murr said the show’s appeal to the entire family has been one of the most rewarding aspects of his career, and the group crafts their live shows to appeal to that population as much as they can. They expect to see a lot of local families in attendance at their performance.

“Impractical Jokers is the show that the entire family can agree on,” he said. “At dinnertime, what’s going to be on in the background? Everyone is fighting over what show they want to watch yet this is the show that improbably became the background TV show for families.”

Down the road, the jokers hope to film another movie to release in theaters. Their first cinema debut was short changed because of the outbreak of COVID-19, Murr explained. 

“I would love to shoot another Impractical Jokers movie,” he said. “Our first movie got cut short, the movie came out like nine days before COVID hit, so we were the last movie in many theaters across the country before they shut down. I would love to get a proper go at it.”

Over more than a decade, the jokers have experienced oddities that would surprise the most imaginative people, including receiving the highest honor offered by the State of Kentucky — becoming Kentucky Colonels.

“It has not changed my life in any real way,” he said. “My marriage is still my marriage, I earned no greater respect from my wife by being a Kentucky Colonel. I think that legally I can murder someone in Kentucky, I’m not sure, I haven’t tested it out. Maybe I can arrest people, I’m not sure. We’ll maybe get a 10% friends and family discount in restaurants in Kentucky — I don’t know what the benefits are.”

And Murr described a moment he said served as a perfect metaphor for the group's careers. To recognize their 100th TV episode, they set out to perform a tightrope stunt in downtown Manhattan streamed live. Six stories up in the air, each joker would attempt a crossing of the tightrope, and those who completed the feat would be awarded $100,000 to donate to a charity of their choosing. Thousands of people showed up, police shut down the adjacent streets and Murr described it as an amazing moment. But not long after that episode aired, he had another interaction that brought him back down to Earth.

“Two weeks later, Joe [Gatto] and I were coming out of the subway,” he said. “These two girls and their two boyfriends come up to us and the girl stops her boyfriend and goes, ‘Babe, babe oh my god, do you see who it is?’ The boyfriend goes, ‘Oh who are these guys?’ And she goes, ‘It’s the Impossible Pranksters on every Wednesday on Comedy Central.' She got every detail of our show wrong: it’s not the Impossible Pranksters, we are on Thursdays not Wednesdays, and we were on TrueTV back then not Comedy Central. So for every great thing that happens, there’s something that pulls you right back down to Earth.

“We’re so excited to come, it’s going to be a great night for you and your family, get your tickets at impracticaljokerslive.com — it’s going to be hysterical,” he said.