Eric Andre Pranks That Went Too Far

Since 2012, the Adult Swim mainstay "The Eric Andre Show" has taken both prank TV and talk shows to absurd, uncomfortable highs. On a set he destroys at the beginning of every episode, actor and comedian Eric André brings in big celebrities and makes them instantly regret their decision to come, unnerving them with bad questions and hostile acts. André also presents envelope-pushing street-side pranks perpetuated on unwitting strangers.

While the mixture of gonzo and confrontational performance art pieces with an anarchic talk show format may seem incongruous, it all serves the same purpose: to provoke, annoy, and entertain. There's an inherent risk to such behavior, as some of the greatest pranks in history went wrong, and some pranks have accidentally killed people. Even at its weirdest, edgiest, and hardest to watch, nothing in the extraordinary story of Eric André suggests that "The Eric Andre Show" ever reached those levels. But it has, on frequent occasions, taken the situation right up to or over the edge of safety and civility. Here are all the times when André, in the service of comedy and making "The Eric Andre Show," put himself in tremendous danger and endured physical or emotional pain.

One of the earliest pranks featured on "The Eric Andre Show" was also among the most potentially dangerous for the series' star and creator. But it also provided a charge to the first season of the show, as Eric André characterized it as one of the better moments. "All the bits where I thought I was definitely going to get assaulted, I didn't," André told HuffPost. "I got beat up at a Mensa convention, that was kind of cool." 

The star found a gathering of Mensa, the organization for extremely intelligent people, and, obnoxiously claiming to boast an IQ of 400, tried to enter the convention while wearing a knight's suit of armor. André yelled out purposely dumb questions like, "Pop Rocks: Are they science or voodoo?" and "How high is the sky?" and "Why would you think pee-pee comes out yellow?" Mensa members roughly handled and pushed around André to the point where he agreed to quit filming and leave the convention center before security guards arrived.

In the first season of "The Eric Andre Show," the star barely avoided substantial legal ramifications for his antics in an on-location shoot in California. "I went to a town hall meeting in Rancho Cucamonga," Eric André told Interview Magazine. "The mayor was speaking and in the middle of the meeting I ran up to the podium dressed like a frat boy." He then gave a pitch as if he were running for class president, promising to replace the water in the drinking fountains with beer and to install cameras in women's locker rooms. Almost instantly, André was stopped. "There were 20 sheriffs there and they were like, 'What the f*** are you doing?'"

The authorities removed André from the premises while the star imitated a viral video, shouting, "Don't tase me, bro!" When they were attempting to book him, André gave his name as that of jazz great John Coltrane. "It was so funny to see white sheriffs furiously look up John Coltrane in their database. They were like, 'You're not coming up in the system Coltrane.'" Ultimately, they placed André in the local lockup. "They threw me in jail. Just for the night," he told The Fader. "But I had to go to court and get a lawyer. Very expensive."

A signature and perhaps the most famous element of "The Eric Andre Show" is the introductory segment. Each episode of the anarchic talk-and-prank show begins with a rowdy Eric André storming his own set and plowing through his desk and other furniture, appearing to cause elaborate property damage if not personal bodily harm. All of those sequences are carefully filmed with special, lightweight props and set pieces, but André has still occasionally hurt himself in an intro sketch. "I don't remember when or how it happened, but I just went home and it looked like someone had held a cigarette against my butt cheek and just kept going until it melted deep, deep into the cheek," André told Spin of one mysterious injury.

While shooting Season One, André exacerbated an injury he sustained in high school when he tried to lift sidekick Hannibal Buress along with the co-host's chair. "I have two bulging discs in my spine from working out at the gym completely wrong from when I was like 16 years old until I was 20, so my back is all f*** up," André told Spin. "And I tried to like run up to Hannibal's chair. It was way heavier than I anticipated and I tore my back in half." André recalled crawling off the set for a 20-minute taping break.

Early in the production of Season One of "The Eric Andre Show," creator and star Eric André suffered for his art, enduring a lingering injury from the result of the particular mechanics of what was otherwise a low-key prank. "I hid in a garbage can and jumped out and surprised people," André told Spin of the hidden-camera sequence. It took the better part of the day to film, and as it was dependent on people walking by so that André could jump out, there was a lot of waiting. 

That meant André passed the hours by squatting in that confined space, which was exceptionally taxing on his body. "I permanently f***ed up both my knees for crouching in a garbage can for hours on end," André said. "I'm in physical therapy for it. My knees are both out of the track."

By Season Five of "The Eric Andre Show," the series was probably best known for its star obliterating the set in each episode's opening moments. That earned the production some fame and clout, and so it was able to reach out and ask for the help of celebrity guests. In an orchestrated move, the show brought in wrestler and actor John Cena to pick up Eric André and toss him through a shelf. Nearly every precaution had been taken before Cena lifted a loose and agile André and threw him across the room, destroying the bookshelf as planned.

"I got through the shelf okay, but we forgot to sandbag the shelf — the frame of the shelf — so the metal frame tipped over and knocked me in the head," André explained to People. Sensing something was very wrong, André went to a hospital and was diagnosed with a concussion. A CAT scan revealed no extensive or lasting damage to André's brain, while the show had to pause taping for half of a day.

Sometimes pranks went so awry on "The Eric Andre Show" that its titular perpetuator required emergency medical attention to treat the assorted wounds and injuries that resulted. While out in the streets of Brooklyn filming a prank in an early episode, Eric André smashed a car window with his bare hand. "In the bit I was supposed to like hail through a car window," he told Den of Geek. "I was trying to hammer the window, but my whole hand went through," he told People. "It sliced me up, and I had to get stitches. I had to go to the hospital for that."

Because the accident occurred so early in the filming period, André had to record many more sketches while trying to conceal and nurse his hand. "My fingers are like in weird silver finger casts for a lot of the street stuff. But yeah, that sucked."

When "The Eric Andre Show" entered production in the early 2010s, it was as anarchic and slap-dash of a project behind the scenes as it intentionally appeared on camera. To that end, Eric André personally inflicted needless damage to his body because of his self-professed ignorance regarding how to make a TV show. "Towards the beginning, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know how to do stunts properly. I didn't know you could wear pads, or jump into pads. I was just wiping out on concrete and destroying my body," he told Exclaim.

He had what he believes to be his worst injury of the entire series while taping Season Two. "During the Vivica A. Fox interview I jumped on the desk and landed on my tailbone on the ground, which was solid concrete evidently," André told Den of Geek. "I landed in this way that had this domino ripple effect up my spine so my body was asymmetrical for the rest of the year. I was walking around all weird."

Eric André's trip to the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, yielded so much material that it became the basis for two special extra episodes of "The Eric Andre Show." The idea for André to attend a gathering of people whose political views are largely opposed to his own, as well as numerous outsider groups, came from "The Eric Andre Show" head writer Dan Curry. "We went out and it was intense, man. It was scary," André told Interview Magazine. "It was an open carry state. People really hated me — like old school, white supremacist hatred."

Part of the festivities was a talk by former "InfoWars" host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. André invited himself. "I crashed his rally. I asked him to f*** my wife." Authorities quickly removed André from the stage, at which point someone shouted, "You're not Martin Luther King!"

There isn't really a theme to each of the six seasons of "The Eric Andre Show," but viewers can tell when an episode was produced via a quick glance at the show's host. Before filming a batch of episodes, Eric André submits to some kind of audacious physical transformation. He does it to look different, and he does it for the comedy value. "I was going to shave male-pattern baldness into my dreadlocks, but that's hard to do while still making it look real, and the whole point when I'm in people's faces or in the street is that this looks real and not like a costume," André told Den of Geek. "So I just didn't brush my hair the whole year. I didn't cut my fingernails—I grew my fingernails as long as possible like Howard Hughes."

Because he does such things with the show in mind, André largely disregards or downplays the physical, medical, and social effects of such decisions. "I lost weight. I didn't wear deodorant the entire season and I didn't let the costume department wash my suit the entire season. I didn't go out in the sun the entire year so I'd look as pale and gaunt as possible. I was trying to lose thirty pounds but I was just so hungry and miserable that it became too difficult to write comedy. So I gave up on that and only lost about seven pounds, but even that was a lot."

Taping for Season 6 of "The Eric Andre Show" got underway with an on-location shoot in northern New Jersey. In the piece, Eric André pretends to find a badly injured and blood-soaked fallen police officer (an actor in costume), before going on to demean him by sticking doughnuts in his mouth and attempting to restore consciousness by suggestively massaging him. It was so convincing that real police descended on the scene, despite "The Eric Andre Show" producers letting law enforcement know ahead of time about the stunt.

"We had more New Jersey cops called on us than the entire history of the show," André told Rolling Stone. "But this department was so unorganized and corrupt that I almost got shot." An observer called authorities and it was reported as a "man down" event, leading to a large momentary police presence. "They almost shut down the whole production."

One of the guests on a 2023 episode of "The Eric Andre Show" was Chet Hanks, best known for being a rapper, actor, and son of Tom Hanks, as well as a high-profile stay in a rehab facility and not being able to stand Howard Stern. Eric André singled out Hanks as the most problematic and challenging guest of his show's sixth season. "He broke our crew," André told Rolling Stone. "He broke us down."

"The Eric Andre Show" is set up to fool and baffle its celebrity guests, but André thinks that Hanks tried to get the jump on the production. "He tried to prank us back," André explained. "He stole a motorcycle and rode it around. He almost knocked a bunch of grips and gaffers off their ladders. It was very dangerous." André said that the show removed all the offending footage, but the episode still contains some sequences of Hanks ripping out parts of a beaded curtain, stalking around with a gun, scat singing, and performing impressions. "He is ... emotionally disturbed," André declared.