Credit: Dangerous Minds

For a long time now, I’ve had a fairly simply maxim when it comes to art.

Either everything is art or nothing is. To me, a sunset is just as much a piece of art as a photograph because art is the feeling you get from something rather than the act of capturing it. Very few things support this line of thought like the bizarre tale of Longmont Potion Castle, who made an art form out of the prank call.

I know how this sounds, but they really do need to be heard to be believed. Rainn Wilson once compared the act to the Marx Brothers, saying that the Longmont Potion Castle’s work is “as if Salvador Dalí were going prank phone calls”. Compared to this, the likes of Crank Yankers or Fonejacker are mere wind-up attempts put onto the telly as an early 2000s form of attention-grabbing content. What Longmont Potion Castle does is proper comedy, which has a habit of winding the victims up, but that’s beside the point.

At this point, I’d normally start talking about the life and times of Longmont Potion Castle, his real name, the place he grew up, the childhood trauma that made him want to take the ancient art of making a stupid phone call and turn it into surreal comedy brilliance. There’s just one problem: we don’t know any of that. Longmont Potion Castle might, for all we know, be his real name because he’s remained almost completely anonymous for his storied 40-year career.

The limited information available shows he was born in July 1972, is based in Colorado and has been active since the late 1980s. There are also some conflicting reports of where he was born; some say he’s a Texas native, and others claim he’s from Denver. This anonymity is probably just as well. After all, said storied career has consisted of calling unsuspecting strangers, being extremely silly to them, recording (the vast majority of) them going ape shit, then selling the recordings on his 26 albums.

Given the number of people who’ve threatened to kill him, he has a very good reason to hide his identity.

Why is Longmont Potion Castle such a beloved figure?

Now, Longmont Potion Castle is not the only person to make their bread and butter this way. The aforementioned TV shows took this very form of comedy onto screens the world over. The likes of Opie and Anthony and other tiresome berks of the 1990s American alternative comedy scene filled a number of hours on their seemingly endless radio shows, calling people up and having a laugh at their expense. Those are as funny as an ingrown toenail and seemingly, just as easy to get rid of, so what sets LPC apart from them?

Well, for the most part, those other comedians wind up their victims by being a massive dickhead to them. Which is, regrettably, enough for most people. Longmont Potion Castle goes a different route and is just incredibly confusing. Take his infamous ‘Food and Friends’ sketch, where he drives a man to utter distraction simply by calling and offering a special discount to a deeply strange, newly opened free-range grocery store.

Suddenly, the person being called isn’t the victim but, weirdly enough, the aggressor. There’s absolutely nothing about LPC’s calls that is insulting, rude or degrading, yet they’re strange and confusing enough that insecure people seem to always become the aggressor. It really is true what they say, comedy can make people show their true colours better than just about any other art form, which is what elevates his material beyond other prank call-based “comedy”.

So, next time you get a call from an unknown number, think twice before ignoring it; it might just be one of the strangest, yet wonderful voices in alternative comedy.