Impractical Jokers Fast Food Moments That Had Us Cracking Up

The Impractical Jokers have tormented the good people of New York City and beyond for our pleasure for more than a decade. Somehow, likely because they always position themselves as the ultimate butt of every joke, it's charming and hilarious rather than obnoxious — at least for those of us watching it.  

Given that their popularity has even earned the Jokers a movie deal,  it's amazing there's anyone out there who wouldn't recognize them immediately and ruin the bit. But it sure seems like the world's full of suckers, although it sometimes seems that there are none bigger than these four themselves. They've annoyed folks at parks, malls, focus groups, dentist's offices, gyms, movie theaters, out on the street, in houses and grocery stores, and pretty much everywhere you can think of. 

However, one spot they always find their way back to is fast food joints, where they pose as staff to set up all sorts of insane shenanigans. From firing burgers at people's cars to stealing beers and breaking down crying, these are the dumbest, most immature, all-around funniest fast food moments on "Impractical Jokers."

The guys get a handful of stand-out moments from their afternoon as managers at Hooters. Murr tells a couple that another table complained about them and then has to loudly tell the other table –- who did no such thing –- to get out because he sided with the first group. Then he sniffs an old man and gets a thumbs down for refusing to ask two elderly women to be waitresses at his upcoming Hooters knockoff restaurant, which Joe dubs "Saggies." You know, pretty much what you'd expect when you dine out.

Sal's up next, and his bit is the clear winner here. After awkwardly praising the waitress who'd just taken a table's order as "beautiful," "talented," and "voluptuous" (before revealing to them she's his daughter), he heads to another table and introduces himself as the manager. Murr then tells him to shout "Enough!" at the rambunctious diners at the table behind them. Except, it's completely empty. 

Now that Sal's looking all nice and schizophrenic, the guys roll with this bit, telling him to keep stopping his pleasant conversation with the first table to scold the visibly nonexistent folks at the other one. Then he sits down and has a harsh, whispered conversation with no one, making sure to "get his hair shaking" by violently jerking his head in anger, as per Q's request. Naturally, the first table looks on, bewildered.

You need a certain level of shamelessness to be a Joker, but most of the guys have weaknesses their pals can exploit when they want to turn up the heat. Sal's an uptight germaphobe who's afraid of everything, giving the other guys plenty of handle holds for when they want to turn the screws and mess with him. Murr and Q are more solid but will still shy away from saying particularly appalling things to people. Joe, however, has no weaknesses. Sure he's turned down challenges before, but in general, he is willing to disgrace himself in public to degrees that make the other guys blush.

In one episode, Joe's operating the cash register at a fast-food joint when Q informs him there's a box of fried twinkies beneath the counter. "Go back to the sink and just start eating them shamefully," he says. Joe does, making a spectacle of himself and making sure to get powdered sugar all over his face like a six-year-old. Oh, and he's making full eye contact with the woman who's already placed her order with him.

The poor lady's having none of it. "You should see your face," she says. "You look like you got a white, confectionary sugar mustache, all over everywhere!" Joe then asks her if she's ready to order. "I ordered the cheese fries!" she says. Joe responds, "Oh, cheese fries, you wanted that for real?"

We even get an all-time classic food moment right out of the "Impractical Jokers" starting gate. In the show's pilot episode, Q is working the register at White Castle when a man comes in and orders around $9 worth of food. After some pretty benign challenges like calling the man "dawg," the boys instruct Q to hold up the man's $20 bill and freeze solid. And then — keep freezing. And stay frozen. Q just stares at the $20, fighting the urge to smirk and glance at the guy while the man looks around awkwardly.

It's essentially a game of chicken at this point to see if the guys will let Q break or if the customer will speak up about the fact that one of the workers is apparently having technical difficulties. The restaurant is silent, but we're treated to several minutes' worth of Joe, Sal, and Murr laughing, dumbfounded at how the customer is almost as frozen, and just as silent, as Q. Sal remarks, "He's not saying anything!" while Joe shouts, "Hold! Hold!" like he's commanding an army.

The guys blink first. At four minutes and forty-five seconds, the guys tell Q to proceed with the transaction like normal, confusing the man even more. It might not sound like an eternity, but hey, you try awkwardly holding your arm up for five minutes in public and see how far you get.

White Castle is apparently a glutton for punishment, as the Jokers come back repeatedly to humiliate each other by behaving like morons dressed as fast-food workers. In one episode, competition loser Sal is dragged to the burger chain to learn his fate: he'll man the drive-thru window while Murr, Joe, and Q will speak through the box for him. Whatever they say, Sal is prohibited from apologizing to the customer or trying to weasel his way out of whatever they just heard when they arrive, either furious, confused, or both, at the window. In other words, he has to act like he just said what he said and stands by it.

A lot happens here. Murr makes a woman inch her car forward, then back just a bit, then forward again, over and over, before finally taking her order and saying, "I better not see a ring on that finger!" An exasperated Joe makes a woman restart her order because she didn't say "please" the first time, prompting her to storm into the restaurant. Q just screams excitedly at the customer. Joe then makes Sal whisper when they get to the window, confusing the customer more.

The last guy pulls up to the window ready to fight after Joe rudely sighs and shouts his way through the ordering process, only to say, "Oh, my God. Sal, it's you! I watch your show all the time!"

While operating the register at a burger joint, Q asks a pair of customers if they're there for "the promotion." Joe explains through Q: "So, if I guess your birthday, you get your order for free." Q convinces the two men he's serious. Before he gets started, Joe informs him he's not allowed to stop until he actually guesses their birthday correctly. And, of course, the guys have no intention of making this easier for him.

"April 17th!" Q says. "Don't give me any hints, don't give me any hints. Uh, September 9th! October 3rd! January 8th!" Lots of predictable swings and misses. One of the guys takes a seat to wait it out. At one point, Q guesses January 28th, prompting the man to say he's on fire. Of course, Joe makes him guess August 7th next, because apparently, Q didn't already look like enough of an idiot. After a few more strikeouts, the man, who is still standing at the counter, totally exasperated, gives up on waiting and starts to order his food. But then Q nails it -– January 31st –- and rushes out screaming to hug the guy, shouting, "Free meal! Free meal! It's free!" He then tosses menus into the air.

The poor guy looks like he would've rather just paid the $12.99.

We get two for one here, but it all happened in a single turn, so we'll let it slide. While posing as a busboy, Sal is instructed to casually grab the beer off someone's table and take a sip right in front of her. He does so, prompting the poor woman to tell her boyfriend what just happened as Sal strolls away. The guy confronts him about the drink. Naturally, Sal's ordered to casually take sips while talking to the guy before he agrees to fetch the manager. Who, of course, is him, just without the hat and apron. The guy's having none of this nonsense, somehow making it even funnier. He just insists on getting a new beer.

Moments later, Sal offers to clear some dishes from a table. When the folks there argue about whether or not they're done, Joe tells Sal to shout, "Guys, what do you want me to do?!" before walking off to the side and sobbing in front of them. One of the guys walks up and asks him to come back. "Don't even worry about it," he says. "Bring your cart and your emotions. Come on back." The guy makes sure to handle Sal delicately from that point forward, even shaking his hand and hugging him for merely asking if he wants more pickles.

Cue laughter from the other guys. How Sal kept a straight face through all this is beyond us.

An early favorite of the guys was acting like morons and then asking customers for tips. You'd be surprised how many folks actually fork over some loose change. Joe managed to get a buck even after being told to scream at "Raul" threw the drive-thru speaker and having the gentlemen on the other end order him two Xanax. But Murr took things a little too far a few minutes earlier when he leaned out the drive-thru window with a slingshot and fired a mini slider onto a woman's car. The thing is, he wasn't supposed to do that – Q clearly stated to shoot the burger over, not on, the vehicle. But hey, slingshots are harder to use than they look, okay? Besides, it's hard to argue that between Murr's panicked reaction, Joe, Q, and Sal wincing and laughing, and the woman's dumbfounded reaction, that we didn't get the most comedy bang for the buck here.

"Murr, you act like you've never used a cheeseburger slingshot before," Sal mocks as Murr rushes outside with a wet rag to wipe down the car. "That was some amateur hour nonsense right there," Q said, while Joe mocks how easy it looked to lob the sandwich over the vehicle.

Now the hard part: "You know, we do accept tips," Murr says sheepishly. The woman scoffs. "Tips?!" she says. "You just frickin' threw a hamburger on my car." Cue the big, red, thumbs down. But everyone should've seen that coming.

In one episode, Joe poses as a new hire at Organic Avenue, a health food store. The poor shift manager is trying to show him the ropes when he grabs a bottle of coconut water from the cooler and gulps it down. "No, no, no, no! You're not supposed to do that," she says, clearly shocked she even has to mention it. Unfortunately, her very reasonable reaction convinces the guys to just zero in on this one stupid bit, telling Joe to keep grabbing and drinking the bottles whenever she turns her back for even a second.

"You're addicted, you're addicted!" Sal says as the guys double over. Murr chimes in: "Do it again!" When the woman asks him why he keeps doing it, he responds, "'Cause it's delicious!" He does it a few more times before switching to another bit: struggling to put a cup sleeve on a cup. The guys make sure it's the most confounding thing Joe's ever seen.

Then they have him drink more milk before he leaves to wash his hands. The zoomed-in shot of the poor manager when he's out of the room – pure exasperation and disbelief – is icing on the cake. Shockingly, the woman gives him a 5 out of 10 when her boss, in on the gag, asks her how he did.

Here, the Jokers visit Jersey Shore and pick up a few ill-fated shifts at Jimbo's Restaurant. It's a typical "do and say what the other guys tell us" bit, so pretty standard fare. Sal's turn involves him having to casually wave around an uncooked foot-long hot dog while he takes orders. "You're making me weirded out with that thing!" One woman says. "They make me hold it," he says before repeatedly tapping her receipt with the sausage as she signs it.

However, it's the next bit that earns a spot on this list. "Sal, throw a chicken finger right behind this guy," Joe says. Sal reluctantly obeys, lobbing an impressive deep-fried fastball into the wall inches behind the guy. Then he ducks behind the counter as the man storms into the restaurant, demanding answers. "Stand up or you lose!" Joe says before telling Sal to ask the man if he's the one who ordered the chicken fingers. "I didn't order anything," the guy explains. "I was walkin' along the boardwalk, and chicken came flying across like this." He mimics the trajectory with his hand.

"Yeah, I know, I threw it," Joe instructs Sal to say. Sal can't bring himself to own up to what he did, as the guy demands the perpetrator be brought out to face justice. He says instead, "I'll be on the lookout," and gets a big, fat red thumbs down.

This one is weird because the inciting incident wasn't planned at all. Plus, it was triggered by Murr, who is handling the cash register of a casual dining joint, actually refusing to say, "Hey, cool guy, why don't you take those shades off?" to a customer in sunglasses. However, he made a spectacle of the refusal, prompting the customer to discretely text the owner of the restaurant -– a friend of his -– that he should fire Murray. The owner then informed the crew. "Dude at the counter is a loose f***king cannon," reads the text, which Joe holds up to the camera. "He'd last about a day."

This gives the guys an idea: have Murr sit down across from "Sunglasses guy" and confront him about the text. The guy plays it cool, so Murr turns the screws. "You want to help me call my wife and tell her I lost another job?" The guy then says Murr wouldn't have lasted long working for him, but maybe the boss will give him a second chance. "Could you send him a text to give me a second chance? I'll leave it up to you."

When the guy refuses, the boys backstage tell Murr to tie a plastic bag on a stick like he's about to hop a freight train and give teary doe-eyes to the man. Even "Sunglasses" cracks up as Murr heads out the door. The incident, and all the improv, is almost definitely funnier than whatever the guys originally had planned.

Sal's operating the cash register. Every bit here works, including awkwardly asking a coworker to see "Hamilton" with him, who shocks everyone when she enthusiastically agrees. However, he ultimately takes the loss by shouting, "Get ready for someone to pay with a credit card!" rather than "with change," the vaguely racist comment the guys initially instructed him to say. Even though it's always fun to see Sal squirm, the real highlight is in between those two challenges.

When two women approach the counter, the guys tell Sal to rub his hands together like he's "up to something evil." It starts slowly, but everyone decides to roll with the bit. "Fries, with cheese!" he says wickedly before tossing in an evil laugh per Q's request. One of the women then asks for two 12 pieces. Sal slips out of the bit, asking if it negates the six that the other women wanted. "No, evil! Evil!" Joe says. Sal claps his hands and repeats the question in a cartoonish Disney villain voice. When they ask for sweet potato fries, Sal asks another worker, who informs him it's one size only. "It's one size fry only," Sal says maniacally, leaning out from behind a metal shelf. Then he sneaks behind it again, laughing.

After losing an episode, Sal gets to play waiter at Dallas BBQ in Times Square, but the guys have some bad news for him. He'll be wearing what Joe describes as "alcohol impairment glasses," which manipulate your vision and make it nearly impossible to tell where things are. Something directly in front of you will look like it's off to the side, and things close by will look like a few feet away. Unable to orient themselves, the wearer will stumble around like a drunk, which Sal gets to do — while pouring water in a crowded restaurant. While customers gawk, dumbfounded, Sal misses nearly every cup, pouring ice water onto table surfaces. Then, he gets to hand out glasses from a tray while wearing the goggles and drops cups on the ground while apologizing profusely.

They eventually let him out of the goggles, but only because it's time to have crew members spin him in a chair before shoving a tray in his hands and throwing him out the door. He crashes into a nearby table as customers gasp. Then he sits in a sit-and-spin and does the same thing with water. It's one of the stupidest, most repetitive, and all-around funniest things the Impractical Jokers have ever done.