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TikTok wife prank
Screengrabs via @therealhammytv / TikTok

‘I thought he was going to take it back’: Wife pranks husband when he gets home, but it turns out he’s just brought her the sweetest gift

But then again, not all is as it seems.

If you take the time to read out the terms and conditions for compulsory heterosexuality, you might stumble upon the subsection pertaining to Unnecessarily Antagonistic Marriages (or UAMs, as academics so often abbreviate them).

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UAMs pertain less to the marriage itself and more to a set of extra duties contained within the state of being married, where you not only agree to accept the absolute worst in your spouse, but make a conscious effort to bring it out of them for no other reason than your own, relatively benign schadenfreude. If you’re really good at it, like the folks over at TikTok‘s @therealhammytv, you can even make a career out of it.

The 24-second video above is just one of the many viral offerings from this pair’s monetized UAM. Here, the husband (henceforth identified as Husband) returns home from a routine excursion only to be greeted by his wife (henceforth identified as Wife), who pops a water balloon over his head and immediately follows that up with a pie to his face.

Husband is gobsmacked; what drove Wife to such cheeky madness? Wife’s giggles, however, were short-lived, because no sooner does Husband recover from the initial shock than he reaches into a bag and pulls out a brand new smartphone he just purchased for her.

Wife’s guilt finds no words, and so she apologizes by allowing Husband to pop his own water balloon over her head, complete with a pie to her face to bring the UAM karma full circle. They kiss, she keeps her gift, and they all live happily ever after.

Now, anyone with even a shred of media literacy can see that this video is staged. The reactions? Contrived. The phone box? Probably empty. The TikTok channel itself? Packed to the brim with husband-wife prank videos that are — to put it politely — far too silly.

But that was never going to stop the commenters from stamping their proof of witness on this rather forgettable dopamine hit. Some repliers stocked their comment with a suspiciously high number of laughing emojis, while others offered some vague pleasantry about true love. Some (“I thought he was going to take it back”) indirectly admitted that they didn’t realize a script was in play here.

Credit where credit is due, though; judging by this duo’s 16.7 million followers, they’ve clearly managed to tap into a market that, on some utterly dystopian level, is high-demand. As for how one can navigate the professional viral video landscape, Brand Viva Media recommends keeping your content short, relevant, and funny. Bonus points if it can arguably elicit a strong reaction from potential viewers.

And yet, the absolute best way you can navigate it is by not navigating it at all. It’s bad enough that our brains are being forced to take in more information than they’re meant to handle, to say nothing of how often that stimulation is sought out as a distraction from our emotions. So maybe — just maybe — the world doesn’t need more viral videos. Whatever space they would take up in our lives would be much better occupied by feeling, thinking, learning, and well and truly being.


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Author
Image of Charlotte Simmons
Charlotte Simmons
Charlotte is a freelance writer for We Got This Covered, a graduate of St. Thomas University's English program, a fountain of film opinions, and probably the single biggest fan of Peter Jackson's 'King Kong.' She has written professionally since 2018, and will tackle an idiosyncratic TikTok story with just as much gumption as she does a film review.