Have we reached ‘peak prank’? Video of dad throwing kid over balcony raises questions

SHOCKING footage of a father throwing his son over a balcony went viral this week. Does the ‘killing my own kid’ clip prove prank videos have gone too far?

Have we reached ‘peak prank’?

A SHOCKING video of a father throwing his son over a balcony went viral this week.

The kid’s horrified mother is seen racing downstairs to where the boy lies prone on the ground. But — surprise! — it’s just a dummy.

The “killing my own kid prank” has had more than three million views on YouTube this week.

And the tasteless joke highlights a disturbing trend.

“Wow, his next prank will be at Divorce Court!” wrote one horrified viewer of the clip.

Another added: “Looks like this douchebag has ran out of good ideas for pranks when he decides to do such stupid ‘joke’.”

The same couple came under the spotlight a year ago for another prank video, in which Roman Atwood pretended he had cheated on his partner Britney.

She then turned the tables by starting to cry and answering “I cheated too”, sending him into meltdown.

But was either video actually real, or was the whole thing staged? And if a cruel joke is faked, does that make it funny?

A mother convinces her son he has Ebola.

Our viral video-obsessed culture is so saturated with “prank” videos that it’s becoming hard to determine where the boundaries lie.

Many are genuinely amusing. Take Jimmy Kimmel’s annual “Halloween Candy” prank, where parents pretend to have eaten their kids’ lollies.

It may seem a little mean to the very soft-hearted, but it never fails to elicit hilarious reactions — and it teaches children a valuable lesson about greed on a highly commercialised holiday.

But you might start to have doubts when parents trick their son into thinking he has Ebola.

Or maybe your sympathy would kick in when it’s tricking an arachnophobic friend into thinking there’s a spider crawling over their hand.

The ‘drunk girl in public’ video set up men to look like predators.

How about fooling someone into thinking you’ve died before proposing? Or that they’re about to die in a car crash, or a plane crash?

Other pranks are actually putting lives in danger. A 22-year-old was arrested for driving his girlfriend’s car around a race track in a highly dangerous stunt, which got 200,000 views on YouTube.

And surely everyone can agree that a group of schoolkids thinking it’s funny to tip a bucket of urine and spit over an autistic classmate’s head is well over the line.

Prank videos now also intersect with “social experiment” footage, which tries to demonstrate something useful about society.

When it’s showing how people would react to witnessing domestic abuse, it can send an important message.

But when it’s a fake drunk girl tricking innocent men into looking like predators, or faking a homophobic expose, things get ridiculous. And the endless “10-hour” catcall videos just got boring.

It’s time to ask what is OK, and what the popularity of these videos says about our society.

Tell us what you think in the comments. When do prank videos cross the line?