On doing ‘being a crank caller’: A look into the crank call community of practice

The prank phone call, also known as a crank call, represents what Goffman calls a fabricated frame – a communicative context in which one participant approaches the interaction as play, while the other participant treats it as reality. In this article, I make the case that a large number of prank call practitioners and avid fans constitute a crank call community of practice. Like Garfinkel's 1960s breaching experiments, crank callers selectively violate tacitly accepted social norms to expose the relationships people have with the everyday workings of society they regard as normal. The community places great importance on maintaining fabricated frames throughout the entirety of crank call interactions, requiring that callers not recognize their breaches and refrain from providing contextualization cues, such as laughter, that might shatter fabricated frames. To illustrate the sort of practices that the community encourages novice callers to emulate, I analyze one call by an established community member. This caller not only avoids contextualization cues that would shatter the fabricated frame, but also exploits contextualization cues’ inferencing power, both in his own use of them and in his intentional misinterpretation of the call recipient's cues, highlighting the extent to which these cues are normally taken for granted.