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Comedy has always been about cruelty to some extent – after all, the pratfall, the pie-in-the-face and the insult are three of the oldest and most reliable laugh-getters of all time, and they all involve robbing someone of their dignity for the amusement of others. But the notion of the prank as entertainment doesn’t have quite the same history; while funny stories that involved tricks played on others have been common enough through the history of literature, theater and filmmaking, it wasn’t until Allen Funt created the TV series Candid Camera for the fledgling ABC network in 1948 that someone struck upon the idea of tricking someone into making a fool of themselves purely for the purposes of getting a laugh. Since then, the prank as folk art form has been firmly established. Ashton Kutcher dressed up Candid Camera in a trucker hat and an ironic 70s rock band T-shirt, called it Punk’d , and made it a hit all over again