Terrifying strangers with fake gun = super funny web comedy series

You may recall some stories lately about a few guys in a truck who pointed a fake gun at a man and demanded his rock salt last week. According to the Daily News:

He repeatedly asked the victim how much he wanted for his rock salt and then he pulled out what the victim believed to be a black handgun and took the rock salt from the man, police said. Stinson then threw the rock salt in the bed of the truck and the pair sped off, police said.

Most of the stories focused on the "Wow, people are really desperate for rock salt!" angle, even after the primary guy involved, Daron Stinson, turned himself in Monday night. But what really interested us was this sentence:

Stingy Stinson and his unidentified cohort allegedly recorded both of these incidents like the rocket scientists they are and uploaded them to Instagram, police said.

So of course we had to find the video in question, which is this:

But then we started looking at some of the other nearly 400 posts made on the account in the three months the it's been open, and this thing is insane. 

The rock-salt video is part of a completely fucked-up attempt at a Candid Camera-style comedy series made by Stinson with the help of a few recurring friends — if Candid Camera went around pointing guns at people (mostly old people) and pretending that they're about to be the victim of a driveby or robbery. The Instagram account is called funniestnphilly, and the description is this:

U gone watch it happen an ima prove the people wrng tht said its not gone happen #comedian #actor #hood2hollywood for bookings

What's even more surprising than the fact that the account's still up and public — many of the videos are of a similarly prosecutable nature — is that it has more than 11,000 followers. Recent videos reguarly get hundreds of comments and likes from real people; the videos that get the most likes are the ones where they use the fake gun to frighten strangers, like in this recent one:

Actually, the 11,000 followers are probably exactly the reason Stinson hasn't shut it down, despite it being not at all in his best legal interest.

Pretty much every comedian (and writer, for that matter) will talk about their weird desperation for recognition and attention from large amounts of people; they'll also talk about how they shape their material around the feedback they get from audiences at open mics, etc. It's hard not to see a parallel in the progression of Stinson & co.'s videos through all the fucked-uppedness and how it related to the feedback he was getting on what the people wanted.

For example, here's a video Stinson posted as police were looking for the people who made the rock-salt video. He's asking for people to comment with more prank suggestions:

Among the 195 comments:

• Run up n city hall with the strap out and up that would be the grand finale of all the funny
• Go to a kid and tell them your in the Illuminati. Tell them that you KILLED TUPAC and that satan is telling you that you need to, "Sacrifice a pure soul". And that your about to sacrifice them if they don't get in the car. LOL and then wave your gun around so they get scared. 
• GO IN THE BANK AND ACT LIKE YOU GONE ROB THEM
• Naw go in a library and pull ur gun out on one of the librarians lmao! It's quiet as shit in there that'll be funny
• They tryna get you bagged, just push random people I n the snow
• Go in a lottery place buy a scratch off ticket and act like u win a Million dollars .. 
• Just be safe. .I wanna see you make it without hearing a tragic story young homie. Philly has never been safe and its getting worse...just be safe Sir.
• Go around asking girls to let you.fuck and if they say no pull the gun out on them lmaoo, and btw you should make a youtube channel
• Tell a Bitch to strip while you got the gun to ha face
• Get on the sub and make sure the doors never shut lmfaooo
• Drug deal in front of the police station on vine
• Keep doing driveby prankss too funny
• Rob a corner store or run up and down the street butt ass naked or pull over a cop and tell them your a raspiest
• These requests gone get you locked up ... Everyone is craZy for these posts
• Do more of them fake gun pranks ! Them Shits Mad Funny
• Yo you should put a condom on your head and walk into the rite aid/cvs and be like "yo I think I put this shit on wrong can you help me"
• I read like 1/4 of these comments and y'all pussies don't care bout this man you just want him for entertainment y'all done give a fuck if he get locked up or rocked. Selfish pussies out here
• Y'all done got this nigga booked... Now who gonna anty up the bail money??

OK, yeah, I may have gotten morbidly fascinated with this Instagram account. But it is legitimately pretty fascinating. If you start watching the videos at the beginning, you can actually watch as this "we'll prank people!" idea goes really bad, really fast in correlation to commenters egging them on.

The account was opened in December 2013, and started out as mostly Stinson telling jokes into the camera. But after the first "prank" that employed the gun got a lot of attention, he and his friends started doing more of them, and their nature got more and more extreme and violent. The pranks involving the fake gun generally got double or triple the comments and likes than average, with the "lmfao" feedback vastly outnumbering the "that was fucked up" comments. On many of the less popular Ferris Bueller-style direct-to-camera videos, people often asked for more gun-prank videos, and the account was getting quasi-famous:

But even disregarding all the people who've been terrified or assaulted, the guys behind the iPhone (you can see a few iPhones in some of the videos) either don't notice or don't care that by giving the people what they want and doing more and more risky pranks, they've crossed into territory that could easily get them arrested or killed.

This all seems to have started out more as Stinson telling jokes to the camera, as in the account's first video, posted Dec. 11, in which he does an impression of Bernie Mac:

Stinson talking to the camera and ripping off Bernie Mac bits are a recurring theme; so is a group of Stinson and his friends staging pretend fights in public places, which generally end with one friend fake-slapping another so hard he appears to be knocked out:

This is interspersed with videos of them goofing around and doing stripper dances:

There's actually kind of a lot of photos and videos of Stinson in drag or pretending to be gay for humorous effect, too.

But the sillier ones don't get nearly as many likes and comments as the stuff involving scaring the shit out of strangers, which they do mostly in their Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, an area the city historically doesn't really give much of a shit about.

And so from December to last week, staging public slapfights evolved into staging fake gunfights in convenience stores and restaurants:

And fake driveby pranks evolve from yelling something, flashing the fake gun, and immediately speeding off giggling, like in this first fake driveby video they posted:

To pulling the fake gun on a guy walking down the street with his kid: 

From pretending to kidnap each other in December:

To actually pretending to kidnap an old man who is not in on the joke:

The first video that appears to have gotten significant attention from more than just from friends and family was this one from Dec. 19, in which the guys use the fake gun to pretend-rob a Pizza Hut Stinson says is his old job:

The same night, they throw water on a lady working at a drive-through:

As the pranks got wilder, some of the comments started showing reservations; several people posted variations on "that was fucked up" on the video where they chased the guy and his kid with the gun (Stinson later posted that the man was his cousin so it was OK, although the man in the video clearly does not think it's a joke), and there's a sprinkling of "you're going to get yourself shot" comments on the riskiest videos. 

The closest it came to that I found is them getting chased by a guy in a car they apparently kicked:

That's probably because they usually choose pranking victims who appear unlikely to be able to fight back or be carrying a gun, usually older men (almost never women) who are often homeless-looking:

Or people working in neighborhood bodegas or Chinese takeout places:

Or, in several cases, his family, who you start feeling really bad for (particularly his mom):

Watching the videos is kind of a depressing lesson in the average amount of shit one has to put up with living in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods like Strawberry Mansion. For example, everybody in this video knows you run the fuck away if two guys are fighting and one goes to his car:  

And how they note that the guy in the background quietly got the hell out of there when things started looking heated:

The fact that this account lasted for nearly three months of fake assaults and armed robberies is crazy — can you imagine someone doing something similar in Center City, Northern Liberties or another area that people with influence historically give a shit about and having it go on more than a couple days?

Anyway, Stinson turned himself in to police on Monday night; according to comments on the videos, people think his dad gave him up. His dad, Rodney Stinson, did not seem at all amused about this when talking to NBC: 

"He considers it funny," Rodney said. "He does a lot of other things. Nothing with the gun is funny. Nothing. I don't consider it funny."

... While Rodney made no excuses for his son, he also told NBC10 that Daron normally apologized to the people he pranked but didn't get a chance to in the most recent videos.

"Unfortunately, the situation with the gun was so frightening that people ran away and he didn't have the opportunity to explain himself," Rodney said.

Daron did post another video after being released, showing a brand-new camera and saying "I'm right back at it." 

I was finding it hard to figure out and put into words why I found these videos so fascinating, but I think it boils down to this:

There's a lot of topics that comedians tend to hit over and over again, some to the point of becoming cliches. Sex, relationships, being intoxicated, celebrities, politicians, TV and movies, bad customer service — the list goes on and on. It's easier to get a laugh by making a joke about something you're pretty sure most people in your audience are familiar with and ideally have experienced — getting that "It's so true!" laugh. That's what all those cliche topics have in common: No matter where you are on tour, pretty much everyone's going to have had a relationship, or know who Kanye is, or whatever.

What's maybe the craziest thing about how popular these @funniestnphilly videos got is that it implies that, for their audience, violence is something on that list of universally familiar things. It's almost even more depressing that Daron Stinson, with his #hoodtohollywood hashtags and earnest posts about how he's going to keep trying until he makes it, appears to actually believe that Hollywood would touch him with a ten-foot pole — that anybody would get that "oh my god, it's so true!" laugh from seeing people's terrified reactions to threats of violence. You know, sort of like airplane food. Man, what's the deal with airplane food?