Editor's note: The below article contains spoilers for Season 4 of What We Do in the Shadows.
There is a house full of vampires on Staten Island. And we, as viewers, are eternally grateful that there is a crew capturing their exploits for the mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows. The show features Nandor (Kayvan Novak), of Al-Quolanudar (not a real place) in Southern Iran during the Ottoman Empire, Laszlo (Matt Berry) a snooty British nobleman who once confessed to being Jack the Ripper, and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), a Romani from Ancient Greece. Together the three live in harmony (for the most part) along with energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) who as the name suggests, sucks the energy out of the room in a heartbeat. However, it’s Nandor’s familiar aka human caretaker, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) who really runs the household with the overly optimistic promise that one day Nandor will turn him into a vampire himself. The show is currently in its fourth season on FX and has already been renewed for Seasons 5 and 6. A hit with both audiences and critics alike, the show comes from the minds of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, who starred in the film of the same title in 2014.
In Episode 4, titled “Private School,” one of Staten Island’s finest made a cameo in a spectacular scene in one of the season’s best episodes thus far. The TV show Impractical Jokers is a New York institution and boy, are they proud to be from Staten Island. Sal Vulcano, along with his buddies James Murray, Joe Gatto, and Brian Quinn, has been doing the show since 2011, but the foursome has been together since high school in the early 1990s. It’s a show about middle-aged guys who love nothing more than to humiliate each other. (Think Jackass, but way, way dumber.) The group also star in the show The Misery Index, a game show that premiered in 2019 hosted by Jameela Jamil. In Jokers, Vulcano is notorious for being the one who is the butt of the joke most of the time, as he somehow always finds himself being the only one paying the price of humiliation as his friends gaze upon him laughing riotously. For that fact alone, his showing up in the vampires' mansion was the definition of a perfect cameo.
In the episode, the vampires have decided to enroll Colin in school and Sean (Anthony Atamanuik) invites his former Headmaster Warren (Peter Francis James) to come to the mansion to meet Colin and his parents. When Headmaster Warren mentions that one of his student’s parents is a famous actor that you would definitely recognize from Law & Order, Nadja realizes that if Colin Robinson’s parents were famous, they’d definitely get in. But where to get a celebrity on Staten Island on short notice? Nandor leaves to find somebody, and we are left to wonder who it would be. Would it be Pete Davidson, Method Man, or any other member of the Wu-Tang Clan who happened to be around.
Nope, Nandor went to the one and only Sal Vulcano, playing into the inside joke that if you have to go get someone on Staten Island to punish, Sal Vulcano is your guy. When Sal arrives, Laszlo introduces him as “that guy from Incomprehensible Jesters,” which is close enough in Laszlo’s book. It seems as though Sal was convinced to show up at the mansion to be part of a practical joke, and he seems to be down for anything as long as he gets paid. Sal immediately snaps into his role pretending to be Colin Robinson's dad. As with many of the jokes on his show, he just goes with the flow and takes his cues off the others. If there is one thing Sal is good at it is not asking questions until everything completely goes off the rails. Perhaps that's one of the reasons Nandor immediately went to him to begin with. However, as predicted, the “joke” goes awry, and Sal pays the price — although instead of just being the butt of the joke this time, Laszlo grows tired of him and snaps his neck, promising to drain him later. His corpse appears again towards the end of the episode, which his Jokers friends will surely tell him was his best acting to date. So even though Sal is dead in the world of What We Do, do we ever really see the last of anyone on that show? Would anyone be surprised if he popped up again? But perhaps it's the funniest joke yet that Sal would get punked by a bunch of ancient vampires.
Sal wouldn't be the first random celebrity that has graced the vampires' mansion. As the show has gained more and more of a cult following, some famous guest stars have begun to pop in from time to time including Vanessa Bayer, Haley Joel Osment, Dave Bautista, Mark Hamill, Craig Robinson, Benedict Wong, and David Cross just to name a few. Scott Bakula's cameo in Season 3, when Nadja called him to apologize for mistaking him for Dracula, was pretty unforgettable. But we would be remiss to not mention the greatest cameo sequence in the show's history. In Season 1, the vampires are put on trial to defend themselves in front of an international vampire tribunal that includes Paul Reubens, Tilda Swinton, Wesley Snipes, Evan Rachel Wood, and Waititi and Clement themselves. There are allusions to The Lost Boys as well as Interview with the Vampire as well. This epic episode set the precedent for just how successful this show would be with acquiring guest stars.
We're still early into Season 4, and Fred Armisen has already popped up in a guest role. The aforementioned have certainly had more significant roles as full guest stars, but with Sal's cameo, we get to see just how rooted the vampires, especially Nandor, have become in Staten Island culture. Not only did they know who would be available and down to play in their game, they also knew Vulcano would be impressive to other Staten Island natives. There is no doubt that Nandor's instinct was that parading one of the Impractical Jokers in front of the headmaster would for sure guarantee a space for Colin Robinson at the school. Sal's demise was swift, but one can only hope that Gatto, Murray or Quinn will come around looking for their pal. Considering Laszlo's immediate dislike for Vulcano, just imagine the bloodbath.
Season 4 of What We Do in the Shadows premieres new episodes every Tuesday on FX.