Plot
In the firehouse dining area, Slimer, Ray, Winston, and Peter eat sandwiches made by Egon. Egon explains the sandwiches are a blend of chemical components meant to replace vitamins and minerals lost through sweat, which puts everyone off them. The rest go to Slimer. A mailman delivers a special envelope for Ray: his Uncle Gaylord has passed away and willed him a joke shop in Queens.
Ray and Slimer go to look the place over and try out the merchandise. Ray finds a hidden button near the register, presses it, and drops through a trap door into Gaylord's Hall of Humor, a private museum of gags. While poking around, Ray accidentally opens a box and releases two Imps without noticing, then sets the box aside. As he and Slimer leave, the Imps emerge, turn invisible, and trail along after the pranks Ray plays.
Back at the firehouse, Ray and Slimer rig a whoopee cushion on Janine's chair and snap a "group photo" that fires a pie at Egon, Peter, and Winston. The Imps, watching from outside, tap the phone lines and trigger a false alarm. The team responds to the Hasty Pastry Bakery, where a giant frog and runaway machinery wreck the place. Egon finds a piece of the frog labeled "Gaylord's Joke Shop," and everyone blames Ray.
Returning the gag props, Ray and Slimer discover the trap door open and the Imps loose again. The Imps, now larger and more dangerous, lure the Ghostbusters to the Twin Towers construction site downtown, drop a girder, and sabotage a service elevator, nearly killing the team before they blast the elevator motor to stop their fall. Egon rigs adjusted Ecto-Goggles so the Imps can be seen. A third call leads the Ghostbusters to a luxury liner docked at Pier 13, where the Imps operate a crane to hoist the team into the ship's pool. Proton streams prove useless against the Imps at this stage.
Ray decides to re-trap the Imps in the same black box that held them. He deploys the Ecto-3 from one of Ecto-1's rear panels and instructs the team to lead the Imps back to the joke shop. The team barricades inside, then Ray and Slimer bait the Imps with water and pies. Enraged, the Imps charge straight into the open box and are sucked in, and the box is thrown into a Ghost Trap. Ray vows there will be no more jokes, then promptly sits on a whoopee cushion to find the others wearing Groucho Marx glasses.
Entities
Imps
The Imps are a pair of supernatural creatures that are drawn to and feed on pranks. They begin the episode small and mischievous, but grow physically larger and more powerful as the prank energy around them increases. In their early state they can only tap phone lines and trigger false alarms; by the time the team pursues them at Pier 13, they can redirect proton streams entirely. They were originally contained inside a "Little Black Box" kept in Gaylord's Hall of Humor. The only way to re-capture them is with the same box, baited by the kinds of pranks they feed on.
When the team first encounters the creatures here, Peter asks what Imps are, which sits oddly against the earlier episode "Janine's Day Off," where the team had a prior run-in with Imps.
Gaylord's Joke Shop
Gaylord's Joke Shop is a novelty store located at 1313 Avenue in Queens, NY 11001, owned and operated by Gaylord, one of Ray Stantz's uncles. Beneath the shop Gaylord built a secret museum dedicated to gags throughout history: Gaylord's Hall of Humor. The hall also served as the repository for the Little Black Box that imprisoned the Imps. Gaylord willed the shop to Ray because he believed Ray had the worst sense of humor of all his nephews.
Hasty Pastry Bakery
The Hasty Pastry Bakery is a baked goods factory in New York. The Imps use it as the location for their first major prank on the Ghostbusters, calling in a false alarm and then unleashing a giant inflated frog and triggering the assembly line machinery. Peter shuts the machinery off, but a Gaylord's Joke Shop label on the frog props implicates Ray. The Hasty Pastry Bakery name and logo became a recurring background Easter egg in IDW Publishing's Ghostbusters comics, appearing in boxes and signage across multiple issues of the ongoing series, Ghostbusters Annual 2015, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Ghostbusters crossover.
Pier 13
Pier 13 is part of the waterfront in Lower Manhattan. The Imps lure the Ghostbusters there for a third confrontation aboard a docked luxury liner. At this point, the Imps have grown powerful enough to resist proton streams, and they use a crane to dump the team into the ship's pool. The failure here prompts Ray to devise the black-box re-trapping plan.
Production
The episode was recorded on June 6, 1988.2 During the struggle with the black box, some of Peter's lines use Lorenzo Music's earlier recordings rather than Dave Coulier's, until the moment Peter orders the box thrown. Dave Coulier also voices the jester puppet in Gaylord's Hall of Humor.
"The Joke's on Ray" was the first of two appearances of the Ecto-3, a small auxiliary vehicle Ray stows in one of Ecto-1's rear panels.
Continuity
Ray was willed the joke shop because his uncle considered him the nephew with the worst sense of humor. When the team first encounters the creatures here, Peter asks what Imps are, which sits oddly against an earlier run-in with Imps in "Janine's Day Off."
Release
In air-date order the episode follows "Camping it Up" and precedes "Flip Side." In DVD order it follows "Poultrygeist" and precedes "Standing Room Only." It was issued on home video as part of The Real Ghostbusters: Complete Collection, on Volume 4, Disc 1.
References
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Eatock, James & Mangels, Andy (2008). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection booklet, p. 30. CPT Holdings, Inc.
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Marsha Goodman (1988). Episode Call Sheet and SAG Report, "Flip Side" (1988).
