bad trip real pranks

• Action/Adventure
• Children's/Family
• Documentary/Reality
• Amazon Prime Video

More From Decider

Bill Maher Compares Nickelodeon To Neverland Ranch After Watching 'Quiet...

Woody Allen in Exile: 'Coup De Chance' Finally Arrives On Streaming, Where...

Donald Trump Once Invited 'The View's Joy Behar To Be On 'The Apprentice'...

'Bob Hearts Abishola's Billy Gardell Tells ‘Live’ About His Bariatric...

'The Golden Bachelor' Stars Gerry Turner And Theresa Nist Divorcing Three...

'The View' Reacts To O.J. Simpson's Death: "The Tragedy Was The...

'The View' Forced To Evacuate Their Studio Before Wednesday's Show After...

'X-Men '97' Gives Gambit a Hero Moment You'll Never Forget

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to copy URL

How Much of ‘Bad Trip’ Is Real? How Eric Andre Pulled Off Those Epic Pranks

Where to stream:.

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Trolls Band Together’ on Peacock, A Threequel Stuffed With Visual Tomfoolery and Cutesy Karaoke

Stream it or skip it: ‘disenchantment’ part 5 on netflix, as matt groening’s epic fantasy comes to an end, 11 best new shows on netflix: september 2023's top upcoming series to watch, will there be a 'disenchantment' part 6.

Believe it: Eric Andre ‘s Netflix movie Bad Trip is about as real as prank movies get. Those who watch The Eric André Show already know that the absurdist comedian has no qualms about wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting general public. But for Bad Trip , André teamed up with producer Jeff Tremaine—best known as the director of the Jackass franchise—to create an actual story connected to his wild pranks.

In the film, André stars as a car wash employee named Chris who has a chance encounter with his crush from high school, Maria (played by Bones actor Michaela Conlin). Maria tells Chris to visit her in New York, so Chris enlists his best friend Bud (comedian Lil Rel Howery ) to embark on a road trip. The two friends borrow a car from Chris’s sister, Trina (played by Tiffany Haddish ), not knowing that she has recently broken out of prison.

That story is fictional, but the absurd things these characters do on their “road trip” are real things that the Bad Trip production did to real people.

How much of Bad Trip is real?

Every reaction to a prank you see in Bad Trip is real. In an interview with Decider , Andre explained that while there are actors who work with the production to help pull off his pranks on real people, you never see their reactions on screen. “Our whole thing is that there’s not a single fake reaction in the movie,” André said. “We never had people pretend they were in shock or anything. We had like an ethos about it. Because even if there’s one fake reaction in the movie, it jeopardizes all the rest of them.”

That said, André did not really cut off his hand in a blender or get into a horrific car accident, as you see his character experience in the film. Those are carefully planned pranks intended to fool the public involving professional stunt performers, fake blood, and gorilla suits. Read more about how André pulled off the stunts below.

Are the people in Bad Trip actors?

Very few of the people you see on screen—besides Andre, Howery, Tiffany Haddish as Trina, and Michaela Conlin as Maria—are actors. As the end-credits scene reveals, that Army guy who gave André solid life advice and then took a hit of his vape was real. The worker who thought he was helping Tiffany Haddish escape from prison was real. The bisexual waitress who doled out love advice was real. The guy with the dreadlocks and tie-dye shirt who helped André with the car crash was real, too—though Andre told Decider that he fooled Iron Man director Jon Favreau with that one.

“Even the guy in that scene—the guy with the dreadlocks and the peace sign that was really helping us out? I showed the movie to Jon Favreau, an early cut of it and he goes, ‘Dude, I thought even that guy was an actor until the end credits, where you show all the reveals!'” André said. “So that’s what I want to stress and reiterate: We go to these great lengths because we want every single reaction to be authentic. You feel the authenticity and the reactions.”

Eric André and Lil Rel Howery really got chased out of a barbershop in Bad Trip:

Yes. Andre explained to Decider how that prank went down:

It was one of the first days we were filming and crews were still getting on their feet. [We got sent to] the wrong barbershop. So our hidden camera ops were in another barbershop a few doors down. We got sent to the wrong place! That’s why there’s only the exterior shot, unfortunately. But you caught the tail end of it—basically, we went in there, Rel and I, and our penises are stuck in the Chinese finger trap. We entered this like, really hood barbershop, we went to the guy and I said, “Hey sir, sorry to bother you…” And he’s like giving a guy a haircut! He’s giving the guy a fade! [Laughs.] “Excuse me sir, we got our dick caught in a Chinese finger trap. Can we borrow those scissors and you can cut us out of this thing?” And the guy was just like, “Aw, hell no!” And he had like murder rage in his eyes and he looked for a gun. He told us later that he left his gun at home and he usually doesn’t. Thank God. Looked for the gun, grabbed his knife, and then chased us out. Then you can kind of see the rest. And I was stuck in this dick trap contraption, so I can’t run! So I’m like, “Ahh!” Me and Rel are like going in opposite directions. It was like Laurel and Hardy.

The “dick trap contraption,” however, was not André and Howery’s real penises, but prosthetics. That didn’t make the fear any less real, however. In an interview for the press notes, producer Jeff Tremaine said, “You know, this guy ran out with a knife, and it’s not very easy to run away when you’re connected by prosthetic penises.”

Tiffany Haddish really fooled a city worker into helping her escape from prison:

Obviously, Tiffany Haddish did not really escape from prison, but the Bad Trip production really did trick that city worker into thinking that she had.

“One of the best reactions in the whole thing is when Tiffany escapes off the prison bus,” producer Jeff Tremaine said in an interview for the press notes. “A guy is cleaning graffiti off a wall as this prison bus pulls up. The guard gets out, walks past him, and all of a sudden Tiffany drops out of the bottom of the bus and starts talking to the guy. And the guy, looking out for her, tells her ‘You gotta go. You gotta get out of here.’ I had no idea that she would be so good at the hidden camera game. She’s just a natural at taking people for a ride.”

Eric André lured real people to a new zoo opening for the gorilla prank:

Andre pulled back the curtain on how he pulled off the bit where he was attacked and violated by a gorilla for Decider. He said:

We would do stuff like put stuff on Craigslist, like, “New zoo just opened up, free admission, bring a friend and you’ll get free food!” We would entice people like that. When you film in a location, you have to get permission for the location because it’s a private place of business. But we’re not pranking anybody that’s in on it. Nobody that’s in on it is in the frame. We’re not cutting to a reaction of a zoo worker like “Oh my god!” So, we had the Zoo master who worked there corralling the people we were pranking into the “prank cage,” as it was in that zoo. When you’re shooting in a private location, six hours out of that 12 hour day is the art department and the camera department setting up their hides and their cameras—robo-cams, little backpack cameras, little tiny GoPros hidden in fake bushes. It’s like a CIA operation. You have the art department building fake trees and fake animal cages. The camera department is rigging these like hidden cameras. So, to be able to do that you need to get permission from whatever location you’re pranking. However, you don’t show the people. Anybody that’s in on it is not featured in the image.

Bad Trip used a stunt driver to stage a real car crash:

Andre also walked Decider through how he faked the car crash, which involved tricking a group of people in Atlanta who thought they were on an Art Walk. He said:

Our stunt coordinator, who’s a precision driver, did the car stunt: drove the car, flipped the car—I think it’s called the sidewinder—flipped it, boom! The car crashed. He got out, we made sure he was safe. Then as makeup is putting fake blood and scratches all over Rel and I, we ran into the flipped car, got in position. That group of people that we were pranking, they thought they were on an “Art Walk of Atlanta,” like a graffiti Street Art Walk. So one of my producers is pretending they’re a street art curator, like a block and a half, two blocks away. He has his earphones in like an iPhone earbud, but that’s really his communication. So the other producers are right, like, “Alright, Charlie flipped the car. Alright, Rel and Eric are in place. Cue the art group.” So then he’s like, “Ah, that brings me to my next part. Here’s a piece of graffiti that blah blah blah… Oh, my God, a horrible car accident!” [ Laughs .] “Oh my god, that car just crashed!” Then he ran over, then everybody else in the group is like, “What?” Then they ran over. And then, you know, Rel and I start crawling out of like, shattered glass all in a daze.

The Bad Trip musical number took weeks of rehearsal, and two separate shoots:

In an interview for the Bad Trip press notes, Andre and director Kitao Sakurai explained that the film’s musical number was filmed in two public locations: Once in Atlanta, and once at a mall in Los Angeles.

“The first time it was too much of a ‘guerilla style’ thing,” Andre said, “and we realized we needed to shoot it really beautifully and cinematically — as cinematic as a hidden camera movie can be, and make it feel like Singing in the Rain. The version that made it into the movie is the cannibalized version of both the old shoot and the new shoot.”

André even took dancing lessons.  “I was rehearsing at the mall weeks before we shot, going over the location, and even secretly going to dance studios,” says Andre. “All that work paid off because, by the time we filmed, I felt actually good about my dancing which is typically very embarrassing for me.”

Eric André really did dangle from a roof for the Bad Trip finale… with an added precaution:

In an interview for the film’s press notes, director Kitao Sakurai explained that Haddish was secretly holding a camouflaged safety cable that was secured to the rooftop, in order to make sure André didn’t really fall. “We didn’t fake it or cheat it,” Sakurai said. “Everything you’re seeing is legitimately real. The fact that people fully believed that this crazy dangerous thing was happening and that they decided to get involved, that they decided to take it upon themselves to try and get Tiffany to pull Eric up onto the roof, was incredible.”

André added that the production did have a few of their own people in the crowd to encourage the reactions. “The people on the street were so engaged with what she was doing that they didn’t really notice that we had a guy down there, passing them a megaphone to help them negotiate.”

So there you have it! Hearing all the work that goes into making a movie like Bad Trip , it’s no wonder that it took five years to make. And be sure to stick around for the Bad Trip credits, which features footage of the moment that André and his team revealed to the people they were pranking that they’re on a hidden camera show. It’s all in good fun.

Watch Bad Trip on Netflix

Does 'Yellowstone' Return Tonight? 'Yellowstone' Season 5, Part 2 Premiere Date, Kevin Costner Updates, And More

'Dune: Part Two' Comes to Digital, But When Will 'Dune 2' Stream on Max?

Are 'Chicago Med,' 'Chicago Fire' and 'Chicago P.D.' New Tonight? Here's When 'One Chicago' Returns to NBC With New Episodes

Is 'Grey's Anatomy' New Tonight? Here's When The Next Episode of 'Grey's Anatomy' Is On ABC And Hulu 

'Bob Hearts Abishola's Billy Gardell Tells ‘Live’ About His Bariatric Surgery and 170 Lb Weight Loss: "I Went From A Young Jackie Gleason To An Old Paul Newman"

Does Mariko Die in 'Shōgun'? Anna Sawai Explains the One Big Difference Between the Book and Episode 9 "Crimson Sky"

Where 'Eric Andre' Ends and Eric Andre Begins

With his new prank film Bad Trip , the comedian takes his art form to new heights. But who is he when he's not terrorizing unsuspecting marks for the camera?

“I’m losing my mind,” Eric Andre tells me as we greet each other over Zoom in early February. Alone in his living room, hunched uncomfortably above his webcam, he’s not the manic, human Tasmanian devil I’m expecting to see on the other end of the Zoom call. “I'm just in the fucking purgatory of promoting the movie,” he says.

It’s Groundhog Day, and our call had already started on a weird note. Before he answered, I was sitting here in Brooklyn for our scheduled appointment time, two thousand miles away from his home in LA, waiting in anticipation for him to appear. Something was wrong, though–Andre was nowhere to be found.

When I finally get Andre on the line (turns out he’d taken an unexpected mid-afternoon nap), he seems uncharacteristically reserved. Shifting restlessly from room to room, position to position, at-times sitting cross-legged in front of the camera, on his stomach, his side, or even standing in his kitchen as I try in vain to keep our interview on the rails, this guy appears almost nothing like the “Eric Andre” he plays on TV. And yet, the stories he tells me about his life and career are nonetheless every bit as chaotic and unhinged as you’d expect.

We’re speaking shortly following the announcement that his long-lost passion project, Bad Trip , will finally be reaching audiences by way of a Netflix release on March 26. Its original SXSW premiere, like with so many others, had been cancelled when all of life shut down in the early months of the pandemic. Its theatrical run, of course, got the ax, too. “I demanded, I wanted it to come out. I demanded I want to have that red carpet moment for all the pain...It was painstaking.”

“It'll be seven and a half years,” he tells me now. “I think October of 2013 is when we started talking about making it.” This film, which marries traditional narrative comedy with pranks that actually advance the plot, is like the culmination of his entire career–his reality-defying pranks in The Eric Andre Show , his comedic acting in series like Man Seeking Woman and 2 Broke Girls , even his recent stand-up special, Legalize Everything , in which Andre finally reveals his comedic voice outside the guise of his exhibitionist madman character–it’s all present in Bad Trip .

Teaming up with Jeff Tremaine of Jackass fame, Andre set out to hide a prank movie inside a Hollywood comedy. Centered around Andre and co-stars Lil Rel Howery and Tiffany Haddish, Bad Trip is a buddy comedy where the buddy part is fiction...and the comedy is Jackass . Somehow, if you can believe it, it works. It really, really works.

But probably not for the reasons you’d expect. If you’re a fan of The Eric Andre Show , you already know that most of Andre’s humor comes from his ability to be, well, a professional nuisance. Tormenting unsuspecting civilians on his piping hot talk show set (he keeps it hot to keep his guests on their toes), to cramped subway cars, salad bars, and in the middle of running traffic, The Eric Andre Show tends to push people to their social limits–all for a laugh, of course. In Bad Trip , it’s a little bit inverted. Andre and his co-stars, more often than not, are the ones thrown into nightmarishly compromising positions. He doesn’t die, thankfully. But he comes pretty damn close.

“This character is not the same character from The Eric Andre Show ,” he tells me, his eyes lighting up when he talks about the work. “This character has to be likable, and we realized early on, none of my actions can be intentionally destructive. So every situation I walk into, I can't just be like, ‘Fuck you, I'm breaking shit, I'm naked, woo, woo.’ Everything has to be this Chris Farley, Tommy Boy , accidental hapless boob. I have to be just a golden retriever puppy that's just knocking dishes around, you know what I mean?”

It wasn’t as easy as just letting a golden retriever loose on the Eric Andre set, though. Bad Trip required a complete reevaluation of the shtick–which took years to pull off. “ The Eric Andre Show is 11 minutes. Each episode, it's a quarter hour show. So I can be as completely psychotic and deranged and dysfunctional as any personality has ever been on television. Movies, features–for something with a 90-minute runtime or longer, it has different rules, there's different principles–the protagonist or protagonists have to be grounded, they have to be likable, you have to root for them, you have to identify with them, and it needs a narrative structure to get across that much footage or else the audience checks out and they're not invested.”

He tells me that part of the key to that code was Jackass mastermind Jeff Tremaine, who acted as kind of a godfather to the crew–not to mention fellow prank gods Nathan Fielder and Sacha Baron Cohen, both of whom pitched in during the creative process as well. “[Tremaine] had to harness the comedic style and spirit of The Eric Andre Show , but make it function as a movie. And it was a lot of work. He was molding clay, because I was fighting it a lot. I was trying to, because I really wanted my comedy to be authentic. I was almost cocky in a naive way. I thought the rules of movies don't apply.”

It’s sort of disorienting to process the irony that, for Eric Andre to really transcend in the prank artform that he has been almost single-handedly bringing into the modern day, he had to become the voice of reason, the “straight man” of his pranks. Like, in Bad Trip , when Andre hops into the gorilla pen at the zoo and gets sodomized by a dude in a gorilla suit in front of a crowd of unwitting (and totally real) zoo patrons, he’s no longer Taz–he’s Daffy Duck. He’s calling for help. And, if you can believe it, people come rushing to help. We want to help the guy.

If Andre Show is a litmus test for how quickly people will run from clear and present danger (like, a man in a cheese helmet spewing Kraft cheese), Bad Trip is the opposite, always showing the lengths at which a person will go to help a stranger. In nearly all the film’s many pranks, there’s a standout bystander, a memorable, and impossibly generous, performance from someone who has no idea they’re in a movie.

Towards the big finale, Howery and Andre crash their car and waddle out of the wreck, disoriented, fighting with each other. The car goes up in flames–and people come running to help. “Everybody ran over,” Andre recalls. “And then we start crawling out and arguing with each other, as these people are putting this fresh car accident together. They're like, ‘Oh my God, somebody call 911.’” Entering the fray is a gentleman with dreadlocks who gives one of the most convincingly sympathetic–and human–performances in recent memory. Except he’s not performing. “That guy with the dreads was probably the best mark in the movie. He's so invested and on the hook and good natured. I showed Jon Favreau a cut of the movie and he was like, ‘I thought that guy was an actor all the way to the end’...I go, ‘No, that guy was real.’ That guy was like Dr. Phil. He looked like Migos. Rel was like, ‘He looks like Migos and he acts like Dr. Phil.’”

Of course, not everybody is uncommonly kind to Andre I ask him if he’s ever actually thought he might be killed, and, though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m baffled to hear him go through the multiple occasions in which his life was on the line. Two of the most recent of these close-calls (to my knowledge) can be seen in Bad Trip , making the movie qualify as somewhat of a snuff film, I guess. The second one happens briefly during a clip reel in the end credits, where we see a bar patron nearly crack Andre’s skull open with a bottle of Jim Beam after Andre projectile vomits all over the entire establishment.

The earlier one is already a fairly-well known stunt, if you can even call it that. Midway through the film, Andre and Howery wake up, to their surprise, with their penises stuck together in a finger trap. Running all over the streets (and golf courses) of Atlanta searching for help, the genitally-conjoined idiots end up at, in Andre’s words, a “hood-ass barbershop,” where the joke promptly ends. “The guy in the barbershop tried to murder us, and he was like, ‘You're lucky I didn't have my gun on me today.’ And yes we were.” Their penises may have been fake. But the knife in that barber’s hand was very, very real.

Get 87 Years of Award-Winning Journalism, Every Day

.css-1c25brm{background:#ff3a30;background-color:#ff3a30;-webkit-background-size:100% 200%;background-size:100% 200%;border:0.0625rem solid #ff3a30;border-radius:2rem;color:#000;display:inline-block;font-family:lausanne,lausanne-upcase-roboto,lausanne-upcase-local,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.875rem;letter-spacing:0.045rem;line-height:1.3;padding:0.625rem 1.25rem;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;text-decoration-color:#ff3a30;text-decoration-thickness:.0625rem;text-transform:uppercase;text-underline-offset:0.25rem;-webkit-transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;white-space:pre-line;width:auto;word-break:break-word;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1c25brm{padding:0.5rem 0.7rem 0.3125rem;}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.css-1c25brm{padding:0.6rem 1.125rem 0.3125rem;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1c25brm{padding:0.6rem 1.125rem 0.3125rem;}}.css-1c25brm:focus-visible{outline-color:body-cta-btn-link-focus;}.css-1c25brm:hover{color:#000;text-decoration-color:border-link-body-hover;-webkit-background-position:100% 100%;background-position:100% 100%;background-color:#ffffff;border:0.0625rem solid #ff3a30;} join esquire select.

“I would say the gnarliest was the Alex Jones RNC Trump rally,” he tells me, reminiscing about being caught in a MAGA clusterfuck back in 2016, when he took his Eric Andre crew to the Republican National Convention–and promptly had his press pass revoked. With his baggy grey suit, gigantic boom-mounted microphone, and nonsense jokes about Myspace and nihilism, he wasn’t exactly a welcome presence there. “It's an open carry state. It was literally a Bikers for Trump rally. Alex Jones was speaking, and I was surrounded by the alt-right so everyone was packing, and I was being a nuisance in a mosh pit of alt-right jabronis.”

He admits that his life was threatened there, though downplays the danger, saying “I'm from Florida, so being in a mosh pit of alt-right jabroans is like just going to any metal show...This is just like a hardcore show at a fucking shitty Fort Lauderdale venue.”

Having seen this side of America up close, Andre says he wasn’t surprised by the insurrectionist riot at the Capitol on January 6.

“I'm not surprised by any American racism or jingoism,” he tells me. “This country is very racist and violent. I'm not surprised by any of it. That's the history of the country.”

Andre mentions his anxiety off and on a few times in our conversation. When I tell him that, because of his Andre Show persona, if I saw him at a restaurant, I’d run the other way, he relates that people sometimes do seem to be afraid of Eric Andre–the real one, not just the talk show host. “I took a SoulCycle class and the woman in there actually came up to me after the class and she was like, ‘I was so fucking nervous the whole time. I was just looking at you like, fuck, I don't want to be in a prank.’ And I was like, ‘No, I'm just exercising.’”

He tells me that pranking is “very anxiety-provoking.”

“So, meditation helps with my anxiety a lot,” he says. “I always battle with anxiety. I think everybody does, though. You know what I mean?” I ask him if his comedy is a form of relief for anxiety too, and he says, “Yeah. I think so. For sure.”

Since everything about Andre is self-deprecating, it’s hard to tell if he’s ever being serious. When we spoke before, he was promoting his role as one of the evil hyenas in the upcoming Lion King remake, at that time rounding the bases toward another season of his Adult Swim show, with Bad Trip looming in the background. Listening back on that call, Andre sounds positively ecstatic. Now, like all of us, he seems, well, uncertain about his artistic future.

While he admits to me that he’s been writing, he won’t let on too much. “It’s not even just a contractual obligation, it's more like, superstitious. I don't like talking about it.” Writing or not, it seems Andre’s been devoting the bulk of his isolation time doing what everyone else is doing: just trying to keep it together. “I took Spanish lessons, I'm taking singing lessons, I took a yakitori grilling lesson. I've been making cocktails, buying all these cocktail books. Cooking, I got a Traeger. I got a sauna. I'm living a Joe Rogan life. I'm doing psychedelics, sweating bullets in a sauna, and smoking meats.”

Our conversation, which started in a lull, ends in an even stranger place. During the pandemic, Andre has been biding his time getting into cocktails and mixology. Not, like, rum and coke mixology (though he does insist there’s “nothing wrong with a Cuba Libre”). He’s immersed himself in piles of mixology literature, showing me book after book as he sits in front of his giant liquor display. Riffing on some of the sillier concoctions he’s discovered in his travels, Andre says, “The ingredients are like, ‘A hit of acid, Plan B, snoot of Adderall, and a hit of whiskey.”

I say, “I think people who don't really understand absurd comedy always think that comedians are just on drugs. Like, ‘You must get high and just goof around!’ It seems like that's not really your approach, though, is it?” And Andre responds, saying that, “maybe,” drugs affect his work in an “indirect way,” but that “typically, drugs are recreation. I'm not eating mushrooms or acid and writing. I'm like, going to Joshua Tree and eating mushrooms.”

I probably should have asked him to elaborate, but it seems like his patience for these kinds of questions has all but worn out. That’s all in the rear-view. Whereas at first I was able to keep him with me by asking about his comedy, his pranks, his new movie, now I feel like I’m getting sucked into his gravitational pull. I’m in Eric Andre World. Drifting away, my pile of questions floating behind, I wonder where he’s about to bring us.

“I really want to huff xenon,” He says, straight-faced. “That's my new frontier.”

“What is xenon?” I ask.

“Xenon is an element on the Periodic Table of Elements. But if you huff it, if you huff the gas, it's like a super nitrous. It's like the greatest champagne of whippets. Very rare, very expensive.”

“What experience does it give to you?”

“Euphoria," he says. "Heavenly bliss.”

@media(max-width: 73.75rem){.css-1ktbcds:before{margin-right:0.4375rem;color:#FF3A30;content:'_';display:inline-block;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1ktbcds:before{margin-right:0.5625rem;color:#FF3A30;content:'_';display:inline-block;}} Movies

The Ending of ‘Civil War’ Should Scare You

Wagner Moura Is Chasing the Truth

The 64 Best Documentaries of All Time

The 27 Greatest Western Films Ever Made

‘Civil War’ Is Almost Here to Fill You with Dread

Give Me ‘The Crow’ or Give Me Death

The Best Horror Movies of 2024 (So Far)

The 50 Best Movies to Stream on Netflix Right Now

Robert Downey Jr. Marvels at His Run as Iron Man

The Essential Robert Downey Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. on Overcoming Drug Addiction

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Movie Interviews

Eric andre's 'bad trip' is unlike a lot of prank comedies you might have seen.

Sam Sanders

Sam Sanders, host of NPR's It's Been A Minute , talks with comedian Eric Andre about making a prank movie while Black, pranking mostly people of color, and how it differs from, say, Johnny Knoxville.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

The comedian Eric Andre released a new film on Netflix last month. It's called "Bad Trip." It has hit No. 1 on the Netflix charts a few times since its release. "Bad Trip" is a buddy road trip film meets rom-com meets hidden camera prank show featuring Eric and the actors Tiffany Haddish and Lil Rel Howery. But unlike a lot of prank comedies you might have seen before, there is a big difference with this one. NPR's Sam Sanders spoke with Eric Andre about it on his podcast, It's Been A Minute, and we're going to share an excerpt of their chat here. Here's Sam.

SAM SANDERS, BYLINE: I spent a whole lot of time talking with Eric Andre about the nuts and bolts of making a prank film. How do you hide the cameras? Apparently in coffee cups. How do you lure unsuspecting people into the prank? Free food usually works. Were you ever scared for your safety? Yes, Eric Andre was, especially after someone pulled a knife on him during filming. You know, I asked all those questions, but I think I was most into talking with Eric about how this prank movie is different than most other prank films because here, most of the people on screen are Black.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

SANDERS: So talking about these pranks were knives are pulled, et cetera...

ERIC ANDRE: Yes.

SANDERS: ...Did you have to have any extra safety precautions around the potential for those things? Because you - y'all aren't Johnny Knoxville. Y'all are Black people out in the world doing this stuff.

ANDRE: (Laughter) We - after the knife incident, we beefed up our security. We did have a security guard during that, but we leveled it up a lot after that...

SANDERS: OK.

ANDRE: ...Because that was a nightmare. So...

SANDERS: Yeah.

ANDRE: ...Yeah. And my safe word was popcorn, but I kept forgetting my safe word in those violent moments.

SANDERS: (Laughter).

ANDRE: I kept saying goose bumps for some reason. My mind just rerecorded goose bumps over popcorn. So I'd be yelling at security, goose bumps, goose bumps, goose bumps. And they'd be like, huh? And I'd go [expletive] popcorn.

SANDERS: (Laughter) Dude. Do you think it was riskier doing the pranks that you're doing with a team of people of color as opposed to, like, literally Johnny Knoxville and the white folks doing it?

ANDRE: Yeah. It can be. I mean - you know, it's funny. I even talked to Knoxville about this. Knoxville had a prank that he did back in the day in "Jackass" where he was in an orange prison jumpsuit with handcuffs and legcuffs, and he went into a hardware store. And he was like, can you saw these handcuffs off of me? What do you got? And cops came and, like, almost arrested him. And I was just like thinking like, yeah, if me and Rel did that [expletive], we'd be dead. (Unintelligible, laughter).

SANDERS: You'd be dead. They would shoot you on sight. They would shoot you on sight.

ANDRE: Shoot me on sight.

So there was things like that where it was like - I mean, we had Tiffany in an orange jumpsuit. But you know what? That was a very contained - like, except for the graffiti removal guy, we locked down the street for her own safety.

SANDERS: Oh, really?

ANDRE: So we weren't letting, like, pedestrians on that street. We, like, kind of trapped that, unbeknownst to him.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BAD TRIP")

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (As self) Better take your ass off. You better take off. You better [expletive]. You better run.

TIFFANY HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) Man, I'm going to get my car, and I'm going to go to Mexico. And I'm going to just start all over, man.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (As self) Get those clothes off, and get the [expletive] out of here.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) Can I borrow your vest?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (As self) I can't give you my vest.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) You my lookout. I never forget a face.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (As self) Go.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) Thank you for helping me escape.

ANDRE: Hidden camera means...

SANDERS: That poor guy.

ANDRE: Hidden camera means hidden crew, so we kind of, like, isolated that guy without his knowledge so that Tiffany would be safe in the orange jumpsuit.

SANDERS: I love that guy.

ANDRE: Yeah.

SANDERS: He was a frickin' good sport.

ANDRE: Oh, my God. He's amazing.

SANDERS: On top of, like, the team doing these pranks being Black and brown, I noticed a lot of the, like, civilians and bystanders involved and on the sidelines and wrapped up in these pranks, they're also people of color.

SANDERS: Was that intentional?

ANDRE: Not directly intentional. A lot of - we filmed the majority of the movie in Atlanta, you know, and around Georgia.

SANDERS: Well, that explains a lot.

ANDRE: So there's just a lot of Black people in Atlanta. But also, it's a Black cast in compromised situations - our characters are always in compromised situations, and it was just nice seeing Black people help Black people out. It was like the...

ANDRE: ...People we were pranking were, like, even more invested because me and Rel are in peril in so many situations. And also, like, Black people have better reactions. Like, Black people are so emphatic. And, like, a lot of people in the movie like, wear their heart on their sleeve in the way, like, they don't hide their feelings. Like, some like...

SANDERS: No.

ANDRE: Like, if you prank, like, a white businessman, they just kind of like, well, that's weird. I'm just going to walk away. You know what I mean? Versus the women...

SANDERS: Whereas the Black woman starts praying for you...

ANDRE: Yes.

SANDERS: ...Literally.

ANDRE: Or the woman in the chicken wing shop, J.R. Crickets, that's like...

SANDERS: Love her.

ANDRE: ...When Tiffany comes in...

SANDERS: The short-haired woman?

ANDRE: Yeah, yeah. Jackie (ph) was her name.

SANDERS: She's amazing.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) Hey, did you see these dudes? Did they come up in here 'cause you know they love chicken.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (As self) Oh, girl, you just missed them.

JACKIE: (As self) You just missed them.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) Them [expletive] was here?

JACKIE: (As self) I was about to call you.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) Did anybody here see where these [expletive] went?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (As self) They went that way. They got in the car and went that way.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) I'm going to [expletive] these up.

JACKIE: (As self) Go get them, girl.

(CROSSTALK)

SANDERS: Yeah, I love Jackie.

ANDRE: And she's like, I was just about to call you, girl, when Tiffany came back.

ANDRE: She's like, I went to school with the police. I'm in security. I don't forget a face.

ANDRE: Like, she's just so charismatic. Like, if she was a stuffy white businessman who's like - works for a hedge fund, I don't think we would gotten that same reaction we got there (laughter).

SANDERS: Yeah, yeah. And, like, there's also - when you're getting those kind of reactions from people of color, it's also revealing something that I never saw a lot of in "Punk'd" or "Jackass" or even "Borat." And lots of reviewers have spoken about this in the film "Bad Trip." There's a certain humanity that's revealed...

SANDERS: ...In these people that are being pranked.

SANDERS: They are usually nice. They're usually kind. And they're trying to help in spite of them being totally discombobulated by the prank.

ANDRE: Totally. You know what? When we first showed the movie to Sacha Baron Cohen, he had the best, like, succinct, astute review. And he turned to me, and he goes, you know, my movies are about exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of, like, wealthy white oligarchs. He goes, your movie is about showing the humanity and the beauty and the good Samaritan nature of Black people and working-class people. And like, he goes, I really hope your movie, like, unites the working class because we're pitted against each other so often through class and race that your movie shows the humanity of the proletariat. And I was like, wow. Like, right at the end of the movie, like, that was the first thing out of his mouth.

SANDERS: You can see Eric Andre's "Bad Trip" on Netflix right now. Trust me; it'll surprise you in a good way.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KELLY: That was NPR's Sam Sanders having a lot of fun talking with comedian Eric Andre. You can hear more of their chat on Sam's podcast. It's called It's Been A Minute From NPR.

Copyright © 2021 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Here's How 'Bad Trip's Filmmakers Pulled off the Movie's Crazy Pranks

Mar. 29 2021, Updated 5:31 p.m. ET

Looking for a new laugh-out-loud comedy? 

Netflix 's latest film, Bad Trip , follows Eric André and Lil Rel Howery, who play best friends Chris and Bud, as they embark on a cross-country road trip. However, this comedy is not scripted and is instead filled with hilarious pranks and very real reactions from innocent bystanders.

So, how did the filmmakers and actors of Bad Trip pull off these outlandish pranks? Keep reading to find out more about how the film captured real reactions from people standing nearby. 

Yes, 'Bad Trip' is real! Here's how the Netflix movie pulled off its crazy stunts.

From the creators of Jackass, this hidden-camera film is filled with hilarious (yet raunchy) pranks and hijinks that only the actors are clued in on. So, how did they pull this wild movie off?

"It's a fascinating process, figuring out how to do something that seems crazy impossible," director Kitao Sakurai told USA Today . "But using tricks and sleight-of-hand, you realize that it's actually crazy, but possible."

In one scene, Chris (played by Eric) gets extremely drunk and falls about 15 feet while at the Electric Cowboy bar in Kennesaw, Ga. To prepare for this stunt, the actor practiced the fall the day prior, and fell into folded boxes with padding hidden underneath so he wouldn't get hurt.

"I did it over and over, so that it looked fluid when it was real," he told USA Today . Additionally, a crew member posed as a bar patron and very covertly fixed a tube that was attached to Eric's body, which allowed him to (fake) projectile-vomit on cue. A lovely combo of pea soup and vegetables was used.

'Bad Trip' star Tiffany Haddish tricked a city worker into thinking she had really escaped from prison.

There's no denying that Tiffany Haddish is one very funny individual. The actress stars in Bad Trip as Bud's sister Trina, who escapes from prison. 

The scene in which Tiffany is spotted escaping from the prison bus garnered one of the best reactions from a clueless bystander. 

“A guy is cleaning graffiti off a wall as this prison bus pulls up. The guard gets out, walks past him, and all of a sudden Tiffany drops out of the bottom of the bus and starts talking to the guy," producer Jeff Tremaine explained to Decider . "And the guy, looking out for her, tells her, ‘You gotta go. You gotta get out of here.’ I had no idea that she would be so good at the hidden camera game. She’s just a natural at taking people for a ride.”  

The bouncer in Netflix's 'Bad Trip' was not happy with filmmakers.

Though the innocent bystanders were not aware that they were being captured on hidden cameras at the time of their scenes, they eventually had to sign a release form after the gag, so filmmakers could use them in footage.

However, Eric revealed that some people had to be persuaded. 

During the scene when Chris (aka Eric) attempts to enter a Los Angeles art gallery party hosted by Maria (Michaela Conlin), he's denied entry by the bouncer several times.

The bouncer had been given very strict instructions not to let anyone enter the event unless they were on the list. But he eventually allows Chris inside after being told that he's trying to get ahold of his true love.

After finding out that he was part of a prank, the bouncer was not happy. "He had a long, seething moment," Eric revealed, adding that he needed to convince the man to sign a release form to use the scene in the movie. "We really had to massage his emotions after the prank to get him to sign. But he did."

Bad Trip is now streaming on Netflix.

'Bad Trip' Probably Wouldn't Have Worked if It Had All Been Filmed in One Place

Tiffany Haddish and Nicki Minaj Are Still Fighting Years After Their Feud Began

Tiffany Haddish Might Be About to Leave 'The Last O.G.'

Latest Netflix News and Updates

• ABOUT Distractify
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use
• CONNECT with Distractify
• Link to Facebook
• Link to Instagram
• Contact us by Email

Opt-out of personalized ads

© Copyright 2024 Distractify. Distractify is a registered trademark. All Rights Reserved. People may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.

'Bad Trip' star Eric André found himself in actual danger for Netflix comedy: 'Wow, I could die'

The first major filmed prank for the comedy "Bad Trip" was nearly the last.

Stars Eric André and  Lil Rel Howery shuffled into an Atlanta barber shop seeking scissor-cutting help as their characters (best friends Chris and Bud) announced their groins were stuck together in a Chinese finger trap.

In full view of hidden cameras, the unamused barber searched for a weapon and brandished a knife, menacingly chasing the fleeing duo. And it got scary.

Even after a panicked exit, André was partly thrilled knowing this type of visceral reaction from an unsuspecting subject would be just the kind of scene to put "Bad Trip" into the league of unscripted comedy prank predecessors like  "Borat" and "Bad Grandpa ." 

"Part of my brain was like, 'Wow, I could die right now.' Another part of my brain goes, 'This is going to be great footage," says André, 37, speaking by Zoom from his Los Angeles home. "I felt the movie needed a couple of death-defying scenes to give it real stakes. To make it feel raw and intense."

That's the fun of the unapologetically improper "Bad Trip," where real pranks are set around a story of two friends on a road trip to New York City.

That opening barber stunt was perhaps too edgy: Howery promptly quit the production. "He walked from the movie, we had to seduce him back," says André.

But Howery not only returned, he brought his "Carmichael Show" co-star Tiffany Haddish with him. Lured by the prospect of more out-there pranks, she joined "Bad Trip" to play a Bud's escapee sister in pursuit of the duo.

André, who voiced hyena Azizi in "The Lion King" and has appeared in comedies like 2017's "Rough Night," began pulling such raw, sometimes hazardous pranks in the surreal sketch comedy "The Eric Andre Show" on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim back in   2012. Moving up to a feature-length movie with the hijinx, with real budgets, was a major step up.

"I’ve had concussions, I’ve put my hands through glass requiring a bunch of stitches. The trials and tribulations of the 'Eric Andre Show' prepared me for this movie," says André. "But I didn't know what a stunt coordinator was before 'Bad Trip,' I didn't know you can wear knee pads to fall on concrete."

To safely pull off gags with an unsuspecting and unpredictable public, director Kitao Sakurai beefed up the security team. Headed by ex-law enforcement officials, the team used professional knowledge to scope out dangerous types and avoid them as marks for the pranks. Stunt coordinator Charles Grisham, a "Jackass" and "Punk'd" veteran, was also never far away from any group stunts and in constant contact with filmmakers watching the antics go down on multiple monitors.

The microphoned André had coded safe words, saying "popcorn" if he felt truly threatened for instant back-up.

"It's such a stressful process because it's the real world," says Sakurai. "The benefits of doing something like this are also the dangers of it. Things are unpredictable. You're working in a crowd with people that don't even know they're on camera. Really anything can happen."

Even escape plans backfire in the moment. During a provocative incident in a bar, André infuriated one patron with his incessant, faux-drunken prodding. 

"The guy did not think that was funny at all," says André, who retreated when it got too heated.  "But instead of saying 'popcorn!' I started saying 'goosebumps, goosebumps!' My security was like, 'Are you saying it's cold in here?' And then I was like, 'popcorn, popcorn!' "

"Bad Trip" has its tough physical stunts as well, such as Haddish hanging André (safely secured with hidden lines) from a roof in front of shocked bystanders. 

"I’m afraid of heights and I have a lot of anxieties. That was really scary for me," says André, who was still thrilled to see the concerned crowd believing in his faux peril. "The people were so on the hook." 

But it was always the real people interaction that brought the most unpredictability and surprise risk. Even during a bizarre musical number in an Atlanta mall, one shopper tried to roundhouse the joyously dancing André. "It's the most G-rated scene and this guy breaks out a Steven Seagal karate kick. I’m singing about love!" says André.

Surprisingly, he says, it's the most aggressive marks who were quickest to laugh off the prank and sign the vital release form, allowing the filmmakers to use the scene in "Bad Trip."

"All those guys, even the guy with the knife, was like,  'Oh my God, you totally got me, man. When does this come out?' " says André. "Then he was like, 'You’re just lucky I didn’t bring my gun to work.' "

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

Eric Andre Couldn’t Have Made  Bad Trip  Without Meg Ryan

Eric Andre’s prank movie Bad Trip is out on Netflix today, and it’s possibly the funniest film to come out since quarantine began (okay, second funniest, after the “Imagine” video). In the movie, Andre skewers rom-com tropes, Lil Rel Howery just about quits, and Tiffany Haddish gives the bravest performance this side of Maria Bakalova for pulling stunts on strangers in open-carry states. Under all the fake vomit and gorilla jizz, though, lies a sweet message about how people are fundamentally good, kind, and patient, even when you’re pulling stunts on them. Vulture spoke with Andre about how the mechanics of a large-scale prank movie even work (answer: a lot of free food), the scene with Chris Rock that had to be cut (too famous), and why he owes it all to Meg Ryan.

We’re doing this interview a couple of days after the Oscar nominations for Borat , another prank-based narrative film that’s received praise for the “bravery” of its performers, Sacha Baron Cohen and Maria Bakalova. Bad Trip is that level of bravery compounded tenfold. Because on top of pulling these stunts in the American South, you’re doing them with police officers, with army men. You’re performers of color, and you don’t have the shroud of presenting as celebrities. Were there times you thought you were going to die? Many times. I would say that Maria Bakalova is brave. Sacha is incredibly brave, but she had never done prank movies. So shout-out to the both of them. They deserve all the accolades they’re getting, and then some. What they did was no small feat. But yes. Rel, our first day of shooting — and the first time Rel had ever filmed a hidden-camera prank in his life — we had a knife pulled on us because we went into a hood barbershop with our penises stuck in a Chinese finger trap, and we asked the guy for scissors. He looked for his gun, found his knife, chased us out with a knife, and that was the first time Rel had shot a hidden-camera prank. He almost quit the movie. So that was incredibly stressful.

But because of that, he was so verklempt that he called his manager and agent, and he was like, “Eric’s gonna get me killed. It’s a nightmare, I shouldn’t have done this. I should quit.” And then he called Tiffany Haddish, who wasn’t in the movie yet. He just called her to vent to her. He was like, “I’m doing this Eric Andre movie. It’s very stressful; this guy pulled a knife on us. I don’t want to do this anymore.” She starts dying laughing. They finish the phone call. She calls me five minutes later and she goes, “Dude, you almost got Rel killed doing pranks?” I go, “Yeah, I kind of want to keep that hush-hush.” Then she goes, “Hell no, that’s awesome. I live for that shit. I want to be in your movie.” I was like, What?! And just by the grace of God, the woman that was supposed to play her role had just dropped out because she had a prior obligation to her television show, so there was an opening. Tiffany presented herself as an option, and she was incredible in the movie. So it was definitely stressful and hairy, and got pretty violent. We were shooting in open-carry states, where people were armed. It’s hard.

I want to talk about the gorilla scene at the zoo. How do you orchestrate a prank like that, how many times do you shoot it, and how do you know, this is the take we’re using ? I think we only did the gorilla prank two times, and the majority of the footage was the first group. They were so on the hook that it was tough to beat. We’ll go on Craigslist and say, “Hey, we’re opening a new zoo and we need people to check out this zoo for the first time. We’ll give you free pizza at the end of the day,” and you’ll get 40 people to show up, and you just put them in little tour groups. And then I just “happen” to make my way into the gorilla cage in front of them. Craigslist was a great tool for us. Like “Free Taco Truck!” and then Tiffany hangs me off a roof.

So the taco truck is a plant? We hired a taco truck, and we paid the taco people however much to just give free tacos to anybody that walks up. We put a big sign out, like “Free Tacos.” And then by the time 15, 20 people are wolfing down tacos, then Tiffany chucks me off a roof in front of them. You’ll see a lot of free food or food-adjacent things off in the peripheral in the movie. It’s just a way to corral people into the proper location so that we can pull our pranks.

There was the doughnut shop … There were a lot of free doughnuts at that doughnut shop that day.

This is all making me realize I’m the sort of person who would totally be a mark for a prank movie, because I never say no to free food. Most people don’t!

Do you tell the people, say, working the taco truck or the doughnut shop, to react in a certain way in advance of pulling the prank, so that they “sell” what’s happening to everyone else? Oh yeah. All the reactions in the movie are genuine. And anybody that had to be “in on the prank” for any production purpose was out of frame. You’ll literally see a guy working at a bar, and his head’s cut off, and that’s on purpose. But honestly, the people don’t have to work hard. All eyes are on me, or Tiffany, or Rel, because I’m screaming at the top of my lungs about to be dropped off a building.

Are there any stunts or pranks you wanted to do that were just impossible? Most ideas I have are impossible — either too expensive or dangerous or illegal.

Any examples? It’s a bummer. We had Chris Rock do a prank in the movie. We were trying to corral people into the car, and we were going to shoot it in a way where it looked like they were hitchhiking, and we just picked up a hitchhiker. We were going on Craigslist, and we had some elaborate ruse that made no sense, like “We’re in town visiting and we want somebody to take us around.” But we looked really suspicious, me and Rel in that car in like a Burger King parking lot trying to corral people inside.

We got one guy inside the car, and immediately he could tell we were fishy. We had Chris Rock pretend he was a cop and he pulled us over, and he was going to get the guy out of the car and be like, “Drop and give me 20!” and plant drugs on him and light the guy up and freak him out. But the guy recognized Chris Rock. Chris Rock is super famous! So it just didn’t work, and we couldn’t get people in the car, and the prank failed. It was so frustrating, because we had my comedy hero in the movie, and we had to cut him out because the prank fell apart — not because of him or his performance. That kind of stuff happens all the time. It’s almost so common that I’m numb to it a little bit. You have a 20 percent chance when you go out and film a prank that it works.

This is the last Borat -based question I’m going to ask … Oh no, ask away!

Okay, 100 Borat -based questions then. That’s the name of the segment.

The ultimate M.O. of the Borat movies is exposing the ignorance, or stupidity, or hypocrisy of so many average people. What’s refreshing, generous, and ultimately very sweet about Bad Trip is that you expose how people are ultimately decent, compassionate, and deeply concerned about your safety … Yes! I think that this movie pulled off the greatest magic trick: We were a prank movie and we weren’t cynical. We show the Good Samaritan nature of people, and the humanitarian nature.

This is a great story: We showed Sacha Baron Cohen a very early cut of the movie. It was kind of in shambles, and he was helping us piece broken parts together. And he turned to me, and he goes, “You know, my movies show how shitty rich, white people are. Your movie shows how beautiful and sweet and genuine Black and working-class people are.” I think that’s the major difference. So even the king of rock and roll himself pointed out the very same point you made. He’s there to take down Mike Pence and all of the people orbiting around Trump, whereas my movie showed the humanitarian nature of the proletariat.

Did you always know you were going to end the movie with the credits sequence of clips where you, Rel, and Tiffany reveal yourself to the real people in the scenes? We were taking off from what Jeff [Tremaine, Bad Trip producer] did with Bad Grandpa and the Jackass movies, where their credit reel is some of the best material, because they get to put in quick little pops of chaos or things that failed. So for us, it was extra important, because it showed us revealing it was a hidden-camera prank to all these people, and them being good sports about it. It felt like this great release of tension. I strongly encourage people not to change the channel and watch through the credits, because it’s the true grand-finale dismount of the movie.

If Bad Trip is a satire, it’s satirizing how if people acted the way that lead characters act in movies — like that declaration of love — but in real life, it would look insane to everyone surrounding them. What movies did you watch, besides prank movies and White Chicks , to get into that headspace? We watched a ton of rom-coms. For the bus scene, we were inspired by When Harry Met Sally. We were watching Love Actually, and Meg Ryan movies from the ’90s, thinking, What’s the prank version of the breakup and makeup scenes that happen at the end of all of these movies? And then we wrote the hidden-camera version of that. Shout-out to Meg Ryan.

So much of the humor of The Eric Andre Show is postproduction based. How did you write the pranks in Bad Trip , knowing that you wouldn’t have that element? Story has to be the foundation of every single movie, even documentaries. Eric Andre Show benefits from only having to be an 11 and a half minute run time. You’re with each episode for such a quick burst that it’s kind of like anarchy. I was very resistant to a lot of story because it’s very confining, coming from Adult Swim where I have total creative carte blanche and I don’t have to play by any rules. The rules of storytelling felt like a straitjacket at first, and then you realize their importance. You realize the pranks that are on story are actually the most satisfying to pull off.

Do you have a different mind-set when you’re pulling a stunt on a celebrity versus average folks? Yeah, my adrenaline is surging. I’m nervous and out of body. It’s intense. I’m in a heightened state of reality.

Were there moments when people recognized Tiffany? We all got busted here and there, but it wasn’t too bad. Tiffany was the most disguised. She had the face tattoos and cornrows, and she was dressed like a construction worker. Every once in a while you get busted, but you wait it out for the person that’s calling you out to leave, and then resume the prank. My demographic skews young, so I knew that anybody over the age of 45, anybody that looked like a mom or older, they weren’t going to recognize me. Not a mom on Earth knows I exist.

Do you see yourself writing a more traditionally scripted, non-prank movie, after Bad Trip ?  Yeah, absolutely. I have no loyalty to any particular medium. Music videos, prank phone calls, fine art … I want to build the world’s biggest hamster cage at the Guggenheim. That’s been a dream of mine. Don’t tell anybody.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Most Viewed Stories

• 132 Gut Reactions to Every Track on Taylor Swift’s Double Album
• Is The Tortured Poets Department Really About Matty Healy?
• The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Taylor Swift and Matty Healy’s Relationship
• RuPaul’s Drag Race Season-Finale Recap: All Hail
• Cinematrix No. 40: April 19, 2024
• Diddy’s Open Secrets

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

All of the Bad Trip pranks, ranked

By brooks whitlock | mar 28, 2021.

Bad Trip pranks

Bad Trip , the new Netflix movie starring Eric Andre, Lil Rel Howery, and Tiffany Haddish, features a lot of pranks. Its plot amounts to a fairly dull, run-of-the-mill buddy comedy, but that’s really not the reason to watch the movie – most people are clicking play to see the real-life pranks.

Frequenters of  The Eric Andre Show   have at least some familiarity with the kinds of things to expect, and  Bad Trip  falls in line with a lot of the extreme, awkward humor that the show offers.

The new Netflix movie is No. 1 on Netflix right now!

With that in mind, let’s dive into the spoiler-filled ranking of all the pranks in  Bad Trip !

20. J.R. Crickets

For a hidden-camera prank to really work, you have to hit the sweet spot of suspension of disbelief with both the people witnessing the prank and the audience watching the movie. In this prank, in which Tiffany Haddish’s Trina alternates with Andre’s Chris and Howery’s Bud in a bunch of missed connections within one busy restaurant, neither of the two criteria land at all. The prank drags out for far too long, and it doesn’t really make sense that the patrons wouldn’t think they’re on  Punk’d  here.

19. Reunited on the Bus

In a stereotypical “movie moment,” Chris stops the bus that his estranged friend Bud is on just as it’s leaving. He apologizes and reconciles with Bud in front of the bus passengers, one of whom is visibly moved by the interaction. Not much is really outrageous about the prank, and the situation itself, unfortunately, relies on more plot service than hinging on reactions – pretty unremarkable.

18. The Smaller Pranks (Title Sequence, Porta Potty, Bouncer, GTFO, etc.)

All the brief interactions between the cast and random people on the street are included here, like Chris running through random houses in the title sequence, Bud falling in the porta potty, and Maria screaming at Chris to get out, then getting consoled by cleaning ladies right after. Most of them read like first drafts of  Eric Andre Show  bits, but the best ones cede quality airtime to some more blunt, open people on the street.

17. Gas Station Leak

Before getting on the road in Georgia, Chris tries, in the stupidest way possible, to refill his gas tank, breaking the gas pump clean off. A pretty gullible “cowboy man” tries to help out by pressing all the buttons on the broken pump instead of, you know, going in the station store for help. It’s a solid bit docked a couple of  ranks for being pretty short and underdeveloped.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors.

Now streaming on:

A smoothie shop employee with butterflies in his stomach and a bleeding right hand sits next to an older gentleman on a bench. “Can I ask you something?” he prefaces. The worker then proceeds to babble about his crush, Maria. Should he follow her to New York City, and leave Florida behind? The older man offers advice—speaking from the heart—and it fills the younger man’s soul, so much that he leaps from the bench and bursts into song. It’s this young guy’s big romantic moment, and he dances away before almost getting hit by a car, and then sings at people inside a mall, in which one patron tries to side-kick him.  

This hilarious sequence, which overlaps cliché storytelling with the unassuming public, is just one of many endearing moments in “Bad Trip,” a hidden camera comedy gem starring Eric André , Lil Rel Howery , and Tiffany Haddish that’s finally coming out on Netflix. Directed by Kitao Sakurai , the previous director behind numerous episodes of “The Eric André Show,” it shows an evolution in the hidden camera subgenre, given its warming spirit about people. Unlike the films that previously defined the subgenre, it’s not so much about creating a freak show from unsuspecting extras, but in noting what one would do when confronted with someone as delusional as André’s character Chris. Natural human behavior can be extremely funny, and Sakurai and André know it’s possible to bring it out of people without being mean-spirited. Footage in the end credits of the real people excited to learn that they’re in a movie—a comfort for us as well—confirms the chaos is controlled physically and emotionally, and that allows it to be a party.    

“Bad Trip” is an excellent showcase for Eric André—it’s more mainstream than his talk-show-in-hell “The Eric André Show” and less watered down than his recent resume-boosting, commercial work like “The Lion King” and elsewhere. This role lets him scream, sprint, crash into things, and show off that he’s a sweetheart who wants to include you his absurdity. It’s no stretch to say that André is going to be a huge comedic force—I knew this when I caught his Legalize Everything stand-up tour in Chicago in 2019, when he had a sold-out Chicago Theater completely wrapped up in his FaceTime-ing with the parents of random audience members. He’s an affable anarchist with Robin Williams-like verve, and this project lets his burgeoning persona run wild alongside what the film advertises as “Real People. Real Pranks.”  

André's hilarious earnest Chris is joined in the movie by Lil Rel Howery, who would have been known enough at the time of filming from his scene-stealing turn in “ Get Out ,” but is disguised as Chris’ reserved friend Bud. They have adorable chemistry as two friends in Florida who decide to drive to New York to reunite Chris with his high school crush Maria ( Michaela Conlin ) after two disastrous brief run-ins at Eric’s jobs. They support each other, like when Chris gets extremely drunk at a cowboy bar, or Bud finds himself inside a Porta Potty. Chris is the wide-eyed dreamer, and Bud is the demure rationalist. Their chemistry is as pure as the Golden Girls, so “Thank You For Being a Friend” is featured prominently in the soundtrack, in between scenes of slapstick pranks that further their road trip.  

When Bud and Chris need a car to get to New York City, they “borrow” the bright pink Crown Vic that belongs to Bud’s sister, Trina (Tiffany Haddish), who Bud fears but is relieved when she's put in jail for breaking house arrest. And yet soon enough, Haddish crawls out from under a prison bus, having broken out and starts looking for her car. When it’s not where she stored it, she hunts Bud and Chris up the Eastern seaboard, making for some incredibly funny, abrasive scenes of her confronting people about whether they’ve seen them or her car that has “Bad Bitch” written on the window. Haddish bulldozes into every set-piece, exemplifying the film’s over-the-top spirit. When talking to progressively uncomfortable strangers, she doesn’t miss a beat and she relishes the opportunity to appear dangerous; when she steals a cop car and burns out of a donut shop parking lot, it’s one of her many triumphant moments.  

“Bad Trip” is a collision of great improvisational actors and authentically bewildered reactions from people unaware that they’re now in Chris’ story—which makes Michaela Conlin’s performance as Maria all the more an essential middle to its Venn diagram. She enters the movie also as an innocent bystander, but that’s a deceptive comic energy that plays out in very funny ways as she pushes back against Chris’ delusions. In Chris’ prank-based daydreams, Conlin matches André’s intensity; that she has to play it straight in later scenes adds to the tension she creates, like when Chris tries to profess his love to her.  

Just how funny is “Bad Trip”? After two viewings, it’s one of those comedies with a stable laughing average and high replay value, even if it doesn’t always hit you as hard. It knowingly plays a hit-and-miss game, and some scenes don’t entirely work (like a grocery store drug trip that plays out like a soft tribute to “The Eric Andre Show”), while other pranks go for discomfort more than big laughs (like when Chris gets gas springing all over a gas station). But the movie has speediness on its side, with pacing that takes the plotting from one prank to the next, often including crowds of people in the latest big dramatic confrontation that comes from Bud and Chris’ expected emotional arc. (A sudden car crash sequence is particularly well planned out, with cameras and extras ready nearby.) It’s a steady build to its ultimate destination of NYC, and every major set piece is constructed to bubble with discomfort before then skyrocketing over the top. An early scene at Chris’ smoothie shop job only begins with him making the drinks without spoons—it escalates to awkward tension with disgusted, annoyed customers, and then boom, a laugh-out-loud, gory finale that hits with impeccable, unexpected timing.  

If certain parts of “Bad Trip” aren’t as out-and-out cry-laughing as the work put into them desires, the story is still involving as it adds the dimensionality of unscripted human behavior. And it doesn’t continue the hidden camera movie’s waning intention of dunking on dummies, a factor that also makes this story more fluid than the start-and-stop traps, primed for reaction shots, in something like “Jackass”-spinoff like “Bad Grandpa.” That’s the true sweet spot, in how its pranks are engineered to get the unexpected to interact with Bud, Chris, and or Trina, and see if strangers try to help. (“You turned on us!” says Chris, after a golfer starts swinging a club at Chris and Bud while their penises are enjoined by a Chinese fingertrap.) An amazing scene comes at a tense mid-point, when Trina appears at a restaurant, spreading around fliers with Bud and Chris’ dopey faces on them, advertising her desire to kill the two. She leaves. Bud and Chris then show up at the same place minutes later, and everyone’s response, with some people trying to warn them, and others not wanting to get caught in the middle, is incredible. “Bad Trip” knows how to stir things up, and its funniest scenes often involve real people getting in the mix, tested by the brilliant skills of André, Howery, and Haddish. The ways that some people react to their pranks might shock you in some ways, and absolutely will not in others.  

Now available on Netflix.

Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

Now playing

Sleeping Dogs

Brian tallerico.

Irena's Vow

Christy lemire.

State of Consciousness

Simon abrams.

Peter Sobczynski

Stress Positions

Film credits.

Bad Trip (2021)

Rated R for crude sexual content, pervasive language, some graphic nudity and drug use.

Eric André as Chris

Lil Rel Howery as Bud

Tiffany Haddish as Trina Malone

Michaela Conlin as Maria Li

• Kitao Sakurai

Writer (story)

• Andrew Barchilon

Cinematographer

• Andrew Laboy
• Sascha Stanton Craven
• Matthew Kosinski
• Caleb Swyers
• Ludwig Göransson
• Joseph Shirley

Latest blog posts

The 2024 Chicago Palestine Film Festival Highlights

Man on the Moon Is Still the Cure for the Biopic Blues

Part of the Solution: Matthew Modine on Acting, Empathy, and Hard Miles

The Imperiled Women of Alex Garland’s Films

Review: It’s only a ‘Bad Trip’ if it doesn’t make you laugh

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

The thing about critiquing almost any comedian is that you will inevitably find yourself coming up against avid (if not rabid) fans insistent that you just don’t “get” the work. Eric Andre in particular, with his trademark Dadaist impulses and penchant for all things uncomfortably nude, is undoubtedly one of those figures. Those who enjoy his surreal and animated style of laughs will be quick to defend the comedian, citing his ability to deconstruct staid notions of late-night television and bland stand-up with his long-running Adult Swim series “The Eric Andre Show.”

On the other hand, his detractors would rightfully point to Andre’s history of transphobic, fatphobic, and myriad other jokes which serve only to punch down at certain individuals who, one might argue, have already been punched down on enough.

Which is why “Bad Trip,” the long-awaited hidden-camera comedy flick helmed by long-time “Eric Andre Show” director Kitao Sakurai , is such a curious film. Ostensibly a buddy road movie following Chris Carey (Andre, also a co-writer) and best friend Bud Malone (Lil Rel Howery) as they travel cross-country to New York, “Bad Trip” seems to be aware of these criticisms of Andre and the way in which they would be further visible in a wide-release movie (now launching on Netflix ). The jump from Adult Swim to feature film has been accompanied by a watering down of Andre’s unpredictable absurdities and instead offers a much more conventional approach to its prankster schematics.

The laughs are certainly there, but Andre’s almost trademark sense of intentional derangement is missing and in many ways, this is one of his strengths as a performer. Sure, there are the juvenile gags that form many of the film’s comedic centerpieces — a scene involving boisterous gorilla sex comes to mind as one of several moments that attempts to tap into Andre’s chaotic energy but fizzles out, leaving instead the bad taste of an obvious, if not adolescent, bit. While for some this style of failure might only deepen their appreciation for Andre and the ways in which they view him as a sort of anti-comedian, it’s also imperative to remember that the phrase anti-comedy should not act as a synonym for shallow, empty or thoughtless.

The film loosely entwines its real-world pranks with an overarching story that knows itself to be a farce, but can’t help but be burdened by its halfhearted tries at sincerity. Andre is not a strong enough actor to pull this particular positioning off but then again, that is anything but the point here. Even within that, the slack nature of “Bad Trip’s” premise is enough to put in higher relief both the successes and failures of the comedy’s gags. The former has a sharp ability to see the innately comedic textures of humanity (further seen in the film’s delightful post-credits sequence), while the latter is too staged and likewise rigidly edited (particularly toward the film’s front end which too often takes on the tonality of a warm-up).

For a cornier, more establishment type of comedian, the kind of story environment emblematic of these failures might be par for the course but for an iconoclast like Andre, the misses here can be glaring — I doubt even his most stringent detractors would honestly be able to call Andre a mediocre or average performer. Which is why it is so disappointing that “Bad Trip” falls just as easily into humdrum ordinariness as much as it does its most simple and effective bits.

Andre’s influences have always been clear, from Sacha Baron Cohen to Tom Green to the “Jackass” bunch, but they struggle in the present when faced with Andre’s move from surrealism to literalism. Unlike oft-cited inspiration and Borat star Cohen, Andre’s previous world-making has been exactly out of this world, if not a complete undoing and deflation of it. While he is able to elevate the everyday to the level of the comedic through a more even-keeled yet effective style of absurdity here, there is a certain degree of impact missing that will will be expected given the star. While Howery provides the perfect foil to Andre’s Chris and Tiffany Haddish (here playing Bud’s prison-breaking sister, Trina Malone) is, as always, nothing but an expert improviser (and arguably the reason to see “Bad Trip”), it is Andre’s strange turn to reality which will leave audiences searching for more.

All of this said and done, if it makes you laugh (and I mean really makes you laugh) as it often did me, that can be salve enough.

'Bad Trip'

Rated: R, for crude sexual content, pervasive language, some graphic nudity and drug use Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes Playing: Available March 26 on Netflix

More to Read

Dana Carvey apologizes to Sharon Stone for raunchy ‘90s ‘SNL’ skit: ‘From another era’

March 22, 2024

Netflix is a Joke Festival unveils new outdoor comedy hub Outside Joke at the Palladium

March 20, 2024

Abcarian: What exactly did ‘SNL’ prove by inviting Shane Gillis back as host?

Feb. 27, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

How accurate is a new movie about the real-life spies who inspired Bond? We checked

April 19, 2024

‘The Sympathizer’ depicts war from a Vietnamese point of view, but how does the community see it?

Sydney Sweeney’s team fires back at producer who said ‘she’s not pretty’ and ‘can’t act’

April 18, 2024

‘Civil War’: What you need to know about A24’s dystopian action movie

Where to Watch

Eric André (Chris Carey) Michaela Conlin (Maria Li) Lil Rel Howery (Bud Malone) Tiffany Haddish (Trina Malone) Gerald Espinoza (Dancer) Kaleila Johnson (Dancer) Michael Starr (Dancer) Yvette Tucker (Dancer) Allan Graf (Bus Driver) Kevin Cassidy (Hunky Guy)

Kitao Sakurai

This mix of a scripted buddy comedy road movie and a real hidden camera prank show follows the outrageous misadventures of two buds stuck in a rut who embark on a cross-country road trip to NYC. The storyline sets up shocking real pranks.

Recommendations

More about Bad Trip

Eric André brought back his talk show partially because he made no money on Bad Trip

Everything seems to have worked out alright for Eric André, though

Advertisement

Eric André brings his pranks to the movies with the funny, warmhearted Bad Trip

In the specialized subgenre of movies blending fictional characters with hidden-camera pranks and stunts in the …

Eric Andre and Lil Rel Howery are on a prank-filled journey in this trailer for Bad Trip

If there’s one problem that most movies share, it’s that there aren’t nearly enough shots of regular people reacting …

Is Bad Trip Scripted or Real?

Directed by Kitao Sakurai, ‘Bad Trip’ is a comedy road movie that revolves around Chris Carey (Eric André) and Bud Malone (Lil Rel Howery), two underachieving friends who are dissatisfied with their dead-end jobs and how their lives have turned out to be. After Chris has a chance encounter with his high-school crush Maria Li (Michaela Conlin), he and Bud decide to travel from their Florida hometown to New York City so that Chris can ask her out.

Unbeknownst to them, Trina (Tiffany Haddish), Bud’s sister and a convicted criminal, is pursuing them as they stole her car. In the course of the film, the two friends get involved in one bizarre situation after another. If the bystanders’ response to their antics has made you wonder whether ‘Bad Trip’ is inspired by real-life events, this is what we know.

Is Bad Trip Real or Fake?

No, ‘Bad Trip’ is not real. The film’s screenplay was written by André, Sakurai, and Dan Curry. The original story was developed by André, Sakurai, and Andrew Barchilon. André has made a career for himself with his unique brand of physical comedy and pranks. In Adult Swim’s surrealistic comedy series ‘The Eric Andre Show,’ he pranks his celebrity guests and members of the general public by putting them through embarrassing and absurd situations.

‘Bad Trip’ is an extension of that. As mentioned above, the film is scripted, so the various outrageously hilarious situations that the two protagonists keep getting involved in are pre-planned. However, the bystanders watching these situations unfold are not aware of this, and their genuine reactions are filmed with hidden cameras.

Speaking about how he acts in such tricky circumstances, André stated in an interview , “When you are interacting with real people in a hidden-camera prank scenario, it’s impossible for your performance to be stale, because you’re using every part of your brain to improvise within the situation and mine the most comedy.” According to him, it’s all about spontaneity. He continued, “It’s also like a high-wire act. It’s the highest-stakes version of comedy, because you’re putting yourself in danger.”

André and Howery inevitably encountered similar situations while filming ‘Bad Trip.’ In multiple interviews, André related an incident in which they nearly got stabbed. It was Howery’s first day of filming. In Atlanta, they were shooting a scene in which André and Howery’s characters have their penises stuck inside a Chinese finger trap.

When they entered a barbershop, the man took a look at them and immediately started chasing them with a knife. Because of the sheer fear, André forgot the pre-determined safe word, and the only thing he and Howery could do was run. Fortunately for them, the security eventually intervened. When the man was informed that they were filming a scene for a movie, he calmed down.

According to André, 80 to 90% of the footage they shot ended up on the cutting room floor. “Filming is part of the writing process in a roundabout, very expensive way, because you’re dealing with so much unknown,” he said about the process in the interview mentioned above. “You don’t know how people are going to react to each prank. You don’t know if the prank is going to fit in the body of the movie. We did each prank two or three times, and we would pick the best person or group of people at each time. Then on top of that, thinking about how much the editors are burning. A normal movie has one, two, maybe three cameras rolling max on a scene? We had like 19 cameras rolling for every scene.”

One of the scenes that didn’t make it to the final cut depicts actor and comedian Chris Rock portraying a police officer. Although they spent 12 hours filming the scene, it just didn’t work. While developing the film, André received invaluable suggestions from one of the pioneers of the genre, ‘Jackass’ co-creator Jeff Tremaine, who served as a producer on ‘Bad Trip.’

André also consulted Sacha Baron Cohen, whose pranks in films like ‘ Borat ,’ ‘The Dictator,’ and ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’ have transcended the genre to become the purest form of political and social satire. Evidently, ‘Bad Trip’ is not inspired by true events, but like ‘Borat,’ it uses real people as bystanders and pranks them with the main two characters’ antics. The closing credits are accompanied by the footage of the bystanders learning about the pranks and hidden cameras.

Read More: Where Was Bad Trip Filmed?

SPONSORED LINKS

• Movie Explainers
• TV Explainers
• About The Cinemaholic

Bad Trip (2021)

Unrated | Comedy

• Entertainment

How Much of Netflix's Bad Trip Is Scripted? The Answer Is Surprising

Published on 4/1/2021 at 1:25 PM

If you can't go on a road trip yourself right now, then the next best thing you can do is watch Netflix's new hidden-camera comedy flick, Bad Trip . Starring Eric André, Lil Rel Howery, and Tiffany Haddish, Bad Trip follows two friends on a prank-filled road trip to New York, and though it's undeniably hilarious, it's unclear how much of the movie is scripted and how much is actually real. But just like Borat , Bad Grandpa , and other unscripted comedy prank films, the pranks and the reactions are all very real — so real, in fact, that Howery feared for his life at one point and almost quit the movie.

During an interview with USA Today , André discussed that scene where Chris and Bud pretend they're bound together by a Chinese finger trap — but of course, it's not their fingers that are stuck. The two men go to an Atlanta barbershop looking for a pair of scissors, and an unamused barber ends up pulling out a knife on the actors. That whole scene? Completely real. "Part of my brain was like, 'Wow, I could die right now,'" André recounted. "Another part of my brain goes, 'This is going to be great footage.' I felt the movie needed a couple of death-defying scenes to give it real stakes. To make it feel raw and intense." According to André, his costar was more than a little freaked by the whole incident. "He walked from the movie," André continued. "We had to seduce him back."

Though the knife-brandishing barber presented a real threat, director Kitao Sakurai took precautions to make the filming process as risk-free as possible. "It's such a stressful process because it's the real world," Sakurai told USA Today . "The benefits of doing something like this are also the dangers of it. Things are unpredictable. You're working in a crowd with people that don't even know they're on camera. Really anything can happen." To lessen the threat, Sakurai put together a team headed by ex-law enforcement officials to vet potential prank victims, and they had a stunt coordinator on set who previously worked on Jackass and Punk'd . André also had a safe word ("popcorn"), which he unfortunately forgot at one point during a heated bar altercation. Luckily, his security team eventually figured out he was in trouble.

The pranks are real, the threats are real, and all those reactions you see from other people are just as real . As André explained to Decider, "Our whole thing is that there's not a single fake reaction in the movie. We never had people pretend they were in shock or anything. We had like an ethos about it. Because even if there's one fake reaction in the movie, it jeopardizes all the rest of them . . . We go to these great lengths because we want every single reaction to be authentic. You feel the authenticity and the reactions."

• Tiffany Haddish
• Lil Rel Howery

'Bad Trip' Trailer: Prank Movie Puts Eric André And Lil Rel Howery In A Compromising Position

Eric André  ( The Eric André Show , Man Seeking Woman ) rarely shies away from comedic extremes in his work, and it appears that streak will continue in Bad Trip , the new prank movie which debuts on Netflix later this month.

The streamer has released a new trailer for the film that showcases some pranks we've seen in previous marketing materials, but also reveals a new bit involving André and co-star Lil Rel Howery as the two –  well, there's no way to put this delicately – get their dicks stuck in a Chinese finger trap and wander onto a golf course. Check out the trailer below.

Bad Trip Trailer

It sounds like the "dicks in a finger trap" bit was exceptionally dangerous to stage. "We went to this barbershop in the hood with our dicks connected in the Chinese finger trap, and we ran into this barber shop and we're like, 'Does anybody got a scissors? Our dicks are stuck in this thing!'" André told Esquire . "This guy reached for his gun, couldn't find it, grabbed his knife, chased us out. We're in this crazy dick rig contraption. Rel falls and rolls down the street. I'm running for my life. It's f***ing intense, and we're evading the police, and...yeah. That one was pretty stressful."

This style of comedy is obviously not going to be for everyone, and it might not help that this movie was shot literally years ago and was initially intended to be released in theaters in October of 2019. But I guess we're all starved for comedies right now, and this could theoretically scratch that itch for André's most ardent devotees and/or the generation that grew up watching prank videos on YouTube.

(A quick humorous aside: in that same Esquire piece, André, who co-wrote this film's screenplay, talks about pitching sketch ideas to Jackass maestro Jeff Tremaine , who told him there needed to be some connective tissue in the story, and this was André's reaction: "I'd never written a story, I'm not f***ing Aaron Sorkin. I don't know any of that shit. I'm just a joke writer. Story? Why is everybody hell-bent on story? Who gives a shit. And then I realized the importance of story. I basically had to educate myself.")

Here is the official synopsis:

Real pranks. Real People. Real Movie. From one of the guys that brought you Jackass and Bad Grandpa, this hidden camera comedy follows two best friends as they go on a cross-country road trip full of hilarious, inventive pranks, pulling its real-life audience into the mayhem.

Bad Trip arrives on Netflix on March 26 , 2021 .

Advertisement

Supported by

Dubai’s Extraordinary Flooding: Here’s What to Know

Images of a saturated desert metropolis startled the world, prompting talk of cloud seeding, climate change and designing cities for intensified weather.

• Share full article

By Raymond Zhong

Scenes of flood-ravaged neighborhoods in one of the planet’s driest regions have stunned the world this week. Heavy rains in the United Arab Emirates and Oman submerged cars, clogged highways and killed at least 21 people. Flights out of Dubai’s airport, a major global hub, were severely disrupted.

The downpours weren’t a freak event — forecasters anticipated the storms several days out and issued warnings. But they were certainly unusual. Here’s what to know.

Heavy rain there is rare, but not unheard-of.

On average, the Arabian Peninsula receives a scant few inches of rain a year, although scientists have found that a sizable chunk of that precipitation falls in infrequent but severe bursts, not as periodic showers.

U.A.E. officials said the 24-hour rain total on Tuesday was the country’s largest since records there began in 1949 . But parts of the nation had experienced an earlier round of thunderstorms just last month.

Oman, with its coastline on the Arabian Sea, is also vulnerable to tropical cyclones. Past storms there have brought torrential rain, powerful winds and mudslides, causing extensive damage.

Global warming is projected to intensify downpours.

Stronger storms are a key consequence of human-caused global warming. As the atmosphere gets hotter, it can hold more moisture, which can eventually make its way down to the earth as rain or snow.

But that doesn’t mean rainfall patterns are changing in precisely the same way across every corner of the globe.

In their latest assessment of climate research , scientists convened by the United Nations found there wasn’t enough data to have firm conclusions about rainfall trends in the Arabian Peninsula and how climate change was affecting them. The researchers said, however, that if global warming were to be allowed to continue worsening in the coming decades, extreme downpours in the region would quite likely become more intense and more frequent.

The role of cloud seeding isn’t clear.

The U.A.E. has for decades worked to increase rainfall and boost water supplies by seeding clouds. Essentially, this involves shooting particles into clouds to encourage the moisture to gather into larger, heavier droplets, ones that are more likely to fall as rain or snow.

Cloud seeding and other rain-enhancement methods have been tried across the world, including in Australia, China, India, Israel, South Africa and the United States. Studies have found that these operations can, at best, affect precipitation modestly — enough to turn a downpour into a bigger downpour, but probably not a drizzle into a deluge.

Still, experts said pinning down how much seeding might have contributed to this week’s storms would require detailed study.

“In general, it is quite a challenge to assess the impact of seeding,” said Luca Delle Monache, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. Dr. Delle Monache has been leading efforts to use artificial intelligence to improve the U.A.E.’s rain-enhancement program.

An official with the U.A.E.’s National Center of Meteorology, Omar Al Yazeedi, told news outlets this week that the agency didn’t conduct any seeding during the latest storms. His statements didn’t make clear, however, whether that was also true in the hours or days before.

Mr. Al Yazeedi didn’t respond to emailed questions from The New York Times on Thursday, and Adel Kamal, a spokesman for the center, didn’t immediately have further comment.

Cities in dry places just aren’t designed for floods.

Wherever it happens, flooding isn’t just a matter of how much rain comes down. It’s also about what happens to all that water once it’s on the ground — most critically, in the places people live.

Cities in arid regions often aren’t designed to drain very effectively. In these areas, paved surfaces block rain from seeping into the earth below, forcing it into drainage systems that can easily become overwhelmed.

One recent study of Sharjah , the capital of the third-largest emirate in the U.A.E., found that the city’s rapid growth over the past half century had made it vulnerable to flooding at far lower levels of rain than before.

Omnia Al Desoukie contributed reporting.

Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times. More about Raymond Zhong