Pranks and the Viral Canon: On Top-Creator Content from YouTube to TikTok

Since the early 2000s, digital pranks—or filmed practical jokes—have earned a reputation for platform-based popularity. But how prominent are such pranks amongst other “viral” genres? And what might they reveal, more generally, about viral video as a cultural form? In this essay, I address these broad questions from a specific perspective: I consider the digital prank in the context of two datasets of video content by top-ranked English-language creators on TikTok and YouTube, 2020-2023 and 2012-2023, respectively. I find that digital pranks have been less prominent within this context than potentially expected, but that they have also reflected more general tendencies shared across the videos collected, like fixations on visual pleasure, materiality, and experimentation. I also engage in a more methodological discussion, considering complications that emerge when addressing platform-based media from this type of interpretive and generalizing perspective. I suggest that a (digital) humanistic approach to popular digital content can expand the types of new media canons available for analysis.