Is there any better feeling than pulling off the perfect prank? Ellen DeGeneres knows what we’re talking about. She’s pretty much the master of tricking celebrities — and in honor of April Fools’ Day, we’re reminiscing about some of our favorite frights and fools from The Ellen DeGeneres Show over the years.
When it comes to jump-scaring the stars, there’s no one better. Though her gags are rarely as elaborate as Ashton Kutcher’s were back in the days of Punk’d, they’re usually still pretty incredible. The more celebs come to expect her antics, the more creative she gets with them! But she doesn’t just set her sights on the rich and famous. Every now and then, Ellen pulls a pretty good prank on us normal people, too.]
Some of our favorites have to be her “Ellen in Your Ear” bits. In segments that star celebs like Jennifer Aniston and David Beckham, the talk show host directs her pals to do and say hilarious things to the people around them. When it was his turn, the soccer player even went undercover, dressing up as a Target employee and convincing unwitting customers to get involved with the antics. For her part, the Friends alum got roped into telling silly stories and seeing how far her star power could take her.
Though Chrissy Teigen hasn’t (yet) been the target of a trick, she has gotten in on the scares — and the laughs — when the comedian sent her through a haunted house with executive producer Andy Lassner. The Ellen employee is famously freaked out by jump scares, and his boss sends him to a house of horrors every Halloween. In 2018, he was joined by the cookbook author, and the two quickly found themselves crawling over each other as they tried to make it through.
While Ellen was away from the show in the fall of 2019, Chrissy helped keep the scares coming in her absence. When husband John Legend took the stage as a guest host on November 15, his wife hid away in the wooden box next to the talk show’s armchairs. Halfway through the singer’s monologue, right as he joked about not telling Chrissy about a steamy music video he shot with Ellen, she popped out to give her man a fright. It was a double-whammy, since she startled herself when she accidentally swore, and the audience couldn’t stop clapping. But it gets even better.
Check out the gallery below to see all of Ellen’s incredible pranks.