I’ve never spoken about this, but I’ve been entertained for years, on and off, by a peculiar kind of internet phenomenon that is generally referred to as “soundboard pranks.” Basically someone gets pranked, and if that person happens to be interesting enough, their speech gets cut up into individual sound files. The clips are played back to other people during subsequent phone calls, as improvised responses. Pranksters play the soundboards as if they were fucked-up pianos.

What always fascinated me about this folk-like tradition is the artistry in it. Different people can play the same soundboard and sound nothing alike. You start recognizing the prankster behind the borrowed voice: the timing, the combinations, the particular lines they keep returning to. In addition, some of the soundboard personalities we’ve ended up with over the years feel like lovable idiots who have made you laugh over and over.

My favorite is the bail bondsman. The voice belonged to a guy named Fred Gordon Herbert, who operated his own bail bonds company from Southern California. To me, Fred sounded like a clever guy who had made some bad decisions throughout his life but had managed to make the best out of dealing with the scum of society on a regular basis. He readily admitted at some point that he had fucked up every relationship he had ever had. He also went about his license plate collection, how he had been attending AA meetings, and that when he worked as a cop back in the seventies, he used to smoke marihuana from the evidence locker.

Once pranksters from all over the world discovered him, they bombarded him with absurd calls, and used his voice to prank his neighbors, his family, his clients. I seem to recall a case in which, during a prank call with a neighbor, the victim went to Fred’s office to complain, only to find Fred definitely not talking on the phone. The victim sounded utterly bewildered, and you could hear the actual Fred talking in the background while recorded Fred kept spouting his idiotic lines.

It was all in good fun from the pranksters’ perspective, but obviously it made an utter mess of the guy’s life. Sadly he died in 2018 while vacationing in Costa Rica. Maybe he had moved there, who knows. People still use his voice to prank people, and the comments regularly mention how much they miss the actual guy. There’s something strange about becoming fond of a man through recordings of people who wouldn’t leave him alone.

There’s also Frank Garrett, a construction contractor from Oklahoma who had a weird way of speaking, shot back nasty insults, and called himself “the meanest son-of-a-bitch in nine counties.” The guy seemed to be estranged from his family. In some of the later recordings, he sounded as though he was enjoying the conversation. Many of the locals from his small town were pranked with Frank’s voice, and they didn’t sound very surprised about randomly receiving nasty insults from him at two in the morning. The local librarian even sent the police to his company. After he died, the librarian kept telling callers about the fact that people were using a dead man’s voice to prank people in town. Frank ended up dying of cancer in 2011.

What fascinates me is how the tradition builds on itself: people record some interesting person, they make a collage of their voices, they share those collages, they use the results to produce more soundbites, they grow the soundboard. And some become true virtuosos in their use after what must be a ridiculous amount of practice, even though it has no sane application whatsoever.

I remember these soundboard pranks seeming to be everywhere around 2010–2015. Over time, many of the calls I remembered disappeared from YouTube, but some survive through reuploads by people still in the community.

Here are a few calls made with the bail bondsman soundboard.