Where are the Impractical Jokers from? All four shared the same high school classrooms
Staten Island. Specifically, room by room, the same all-boys Catholic high school on Staten Island, where four freshmen were put in the same religion class in 1990 and have essentially not stopped working together since.
The school is Monsignor Farrell High School in Oakwood. The class is the whole origin story.
The four, and their Staten Island credentials
- Joe Gatto — born on Staten Island in 1976, Monsignor Farrell class of 1994, later an accounting degree from LIU Post.
- James "Murr" Murray — also born 1976 and also class of 1994; after college he was commuting on the Staten Island Ferry when he ran into Sal and the reunion started.
- Sal Vulcano — Staten Island born; his private list of words he found embarrassing to say out loud eventually supplied the troupe's name.
- Brian "Q" Quinn — the technicality. Born in Brooklyn, moved to Staten Island aged 2, went to Farrell with the others, then spent years as a firefighter before joining the group properly in 2005.
Why a religion class turned into a comedy troupe
All four found their way into the school's improv club, and the reason they've given for decades is that at an all-boys school it was the only route to meeting girls. The name came later: Vulcano's list included "culottes", "gargoyle" and "nougat" before they settled on The Tenderloins in 1999.
The early line-up wasn't the TV four. Mike Boccio and Gideon Horowitz were both members; Horowitz left in 2001, Boccio in the mid-2000s, and Quinn filled the gap. They practised at Gatto's house three days a week for six months before performing.
From the ferry to truTV
Sketches went online from 2006 and did well enough on YouTube and MySpace to land them on NBC's It's Your Show in 2007, which they won, taking a $100,000 prize. A Spike TV pilot called Mission: Uncomfortable didn't get picked up. Retitled Impractical Jokers, it premiered on truTV on 15 December 2011 and ran with Gatto until he left at the end of 2021.
Most of the filming stayed local — New York parks, supermarkets, the Top of the Rock. On 9 November 2017 the Tenderloins sold out Madison Square Garden. Murray told silive.com beforehand what that meant to them:
"playing MSG as a New Yorker, as a Staten Islander", he said in 2017.
For the record: a Staten Island man named Larry Crisci, whose name the Jokers had shouted at strangers as a running gag, sued the show's producer for $500,000. His name stopped appearing after 2016.