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Impractical Jokers stars James Murray, Brian Quinn, and Sal Vulcano have provided an update on their relationship with Joe Gatto. Gatto was a founding member of their comedy troupe The Tenderloins and had co-starred on the TV show before stepping back in December of 2021. However, his friendship with the jokers remains intact.

Joe Gatto, Sal Vulcano, Brian Quinn, and James Murray of truTV's 'Impractical Jokers' pose together on the red carpet at a media event
The stars of ‘Impractical Jokers,’ including Joe Gatto, Sal Vulcano, Brian Quinn, and James Murray, on the red carpet at an event in May 2019 in New York City | Mike Coppola/Getty Images for WarnerMedia

Joe Gatto is still ‘[their] boy’ despite his departure

People caught up with the comedians ahead of the premiere of a special episode featuring prankster Eric André. It is the first since Gatto left the series and introduces a new format of celebrity guest hosts to help that void. Vulcano spoke about how “tough” it was to lose Gatto and how they initially “did not know what it was going to be like when we came back without him.”

“We’re doing the show together [for] almost 10 years, we’re friends [for] 30 years so it was tough to lose him,” he said. “We didn’t want to see him go, but we had to give him his space … We miss him and we love him, we still talk to him all the time.”

“He’s our boy,” Quinn added. “We love him. He’s our guy. It’s just, he wanted to leave so what are you going to do?”

Joe Gatto left ‘Impractical Jokers’ after a nine-season run

Gatto wrote on Instagram at the time that he was leaving the show because of “issues in [his] personal life.” Specifically, he was going through a separation from his wife, Bessy Gatto, and wanted “to focus on being the best father and co-parent to our two incredible kids.”

“Outside of my family, my relationships with Murr, Q, and Sal have been the most important in my life. I know they will continue to make the world laugh,” he wrote in part.

Since then, they’ve reunited outside of work. Vulcano noted that they had recently met up for dinner, during which they pranked him and left him with the $600 check while he was in the bathroom. Murr joked that he had “never peeled out of a parking lot so fast in my life as [I did] that day.”

“I ran out to the lot because it was almost like at the end of Usual Suspects where everything was coming together,” Vulcano recalled. “I’m like, ‘Wait, where are they?’ I was like, ‘Oh, they’re joking. They’re going to come out and laugh in a moment.’ Then when I sat with the bill alone for two minutes, I was like, ‘Let me run out to the parking lot,’ and all the cars were gone. I was like, ‘Alright, touché.'”

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Expect more hilarious pranks and challenges on ‘Impractical Jokers’

There’s no doubt that Gatto’s departure is a huge loss, but the jokers promise great things are ahead. There are mainly a lot of exciting guest hosts, including David Cross, Chris Jericho, Colin Jost, Method Man, and Brooke Shields, among others.

“[Shields] is so vastly underrated, her comedic skills,” Quinn said of the Pretty Baby star. “She killed us. Killed. We had David Cross and we were dying and then we had Brooke Shields come in and she was killing on a David Cross level… It was nuts, man. We’ve been having a lot of fun with people.”

“For the most part, we wanted to make it organic to us,” Vulcano noted. “We have relationships with a lot of the guests that came on so far. It’s been really, really fun. We weren’t just pulling names. We wanted to have people that we were interested in, that would be a unique guest to our show.”

Impractical Jokers released the episode with André on April 2 and will return with more in June.

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