Paramount Pictures / Broadway Pictures
If you had ‘Chris Farley’s classic fake name gag from Black Sheep goes viral’ on your weekly BINGO card then go ahead and check it off. Because a Kentucky Publix grand opening is going viral after one of the first customers wound up on the evening news.
Now, I’m not 100% certain that this classic fake name gag didn’t appear on The Simpsons before it made an appearance in Black Sheep with Chris Farley. So if it did, I apologize do the diehard Simpsonites out there for not knowing every single prank call Bart ever made to Moe. But as a geriatric millennial, I think associate this particular fake name gag with Black Sheep.
The video was picked up by Awful Announcing and has since gone viral across X and other social networks. The payoff comes at the end of the video:
Wait for it… pic.twitter.com/TxHobkCxF1
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) March 27, 2025
How? How in 2025 does someone still fall for the ‘Mehoff, Jack’ prank?! The only explanation I can come up with is the segment producer is Gen Z because they don’t make phone calls as frequently as other generations and didn’t go through a prank call phase like millennials.
That, or the segment producer is a boomer and is too unaware of pop culture to catch the ‘Jack Mehof’ reference seen below at the Publix in Kentucky that’s going viral:
Here's one of the first customers at the new @Publix in Richwood. @Local12 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/cJZmXtL86Z
— Chad (@ChadBlue83) March 26, 2025
Some of you out there are thinking ‘Cass, how is this newsworthy? Did you seriously just write a full article about this?’ and to that I would say ‘the Internet used to be fun and not a place inundated with anxiety-inducing news stories.’
We need more humorous stories like this to balance out the daily barrage of negative news from across the world every single day. So take this as a sign to go forth into the world and bring back fake name gags. Be the change you want to see in the world.