'Impractical Jokers' prank customers at Farmingdale dress emporium

It was a marriage of comedy and commerce on the most recent episode of truTV’s “Impractical Jokers,” as the prankster improvisers turned their hidden-camera shtick on bridal-gown shoppers at Estelle’s Dressy Dresses in Farmingdale.

On this 11th episode of season 10 of the show, which airs Thursdays at 11 p.m., the trio of James "Murr" Murray, Brian "Q" Quinn and Sal Vulcano welcomed former “Saturday Night Live” star Bobby Moynihan. The comedians “were a delight to have in our store and we were happy to welcome them,” says Estelle Schlossberg, of Farmingdale, owner of the nearly 32-year-old formal-dress emporium. “They added joy to our day. We are proud to be on their show.” (Fellow charter member Joe Gatto left the troupe in 2021 and now tours as a solo comic.)

Shot in November 2022 in one section of the 37,000-square-foot store, the segment is the last of the episode’s three. Under the show’s format, each troupe member takes a turn with an improv task in public, and the others, watching on monitors and communicating via a hidden earpiece, toss out wacky suggestions. Whoever doesn't succeed gets "punished" with some embarrassing task in the final segment.

This episode required Murray to pretend to be the shop’s tailor, who wound up being instructed to make inappropriate comments and do odd physical bits, like jumping up and clicking his heels when he would enter or leave the floor. The episode’s four sets of brides-to-be and their friends or family members, who each had had a consultation appointment, take it all in with good-natured bewilderment, for the most part.

This holds true even when Murray is required to use a dirty-sounding homonym or to confide to a young woman’s friends that he wishes he’d met her 20 years ago — when, one of the friends points out with admirably no rancor, the bride-to-be would have been 3.

“We did have questions” when first approached for the shoot, “as far as making sure our customers were not uncomfortable or what type of episode it was going to be and things like that, to make sure it wouldn’t damage our reputation,” says the store’s executive buyer, Asena Pesmen, of Nassau County. “But we thought it would be good exposure at the same time.”

And ultimately, the joke is on the comics themselves. As seen in the episode, Murray, as part of his punishment, “did walk out of the store with a wedding dress on, which we thought was pretty funny.” As an end-credits sequence shows, he wears the no-frills gown as he traverses an undisclosed area airport all the way to the gate area. Since the cameraperson also shot from inside the plane as Murray boards, it seems reasonable to deduce the plane’s crew if not the passengers were in on that part of the stunt.

It all turned out to be, Pesmen says, “in good fun.” The customers, who as with every such show had to sign a release form after the ruse was revealed, “were more than happy to do it, I think. They were excited about it.”