Sociology of Laughter and Prank: Sublimating Individuality in Others’ Follies

Laughter is familiar to our positivity and happiness. Pranks constitute ways in which laughter is socially situated. New media has traversed pranks’ nature to a different arena. Based on content analysis of prank videos of popular YouTube channels, the study aims to find the nature and extent of the shifts, in the directions of laughter. The study revealed wide acceptance of the pranks by virtual audience elicited by the strangers and from the strangers. Ethos of Consumer culture ingrained in the pranks is reflected in the consumption at the cost of deficiency in others. The subjects of laughter, that is ‘to laugh at’ and ‘to laugh with’ has undergone transformations with their components traversing to newer territories.