Spanish YouTube prankster slapped after calling a worker an 'anchovy face'

Out of all the annoyances that sprang from the birth of the internet, YouTube pranksters have to be top of the list.

Below Farmville game requests and above email spam on the irritation scale, these guys rarely serve much of a purpose.

They hassle complete strangers in the name of "comedy" and then post their reactions on YouTube to feed their egos.

So when a prank backfires on them, it's delicious.

Cue Spanish prankster Mr GranBomba, whose video of a prank gone wrong has notched up more than 1.7 million views and 111,000 dislikes in two days.

The incident is all in Spanish, but bilingual YouTuber Soren Morseth explains the interaction in English for us in the comments section.

"This Mr GranBomba wants to prank this dude by saying that he is an "anchovy-face" (kind of an insult) and he gets what he deserves when he says it for the second time," he says.

"A few kids defend this … YouTuber, the rest of the society is angry because he only got slapped once."

We don't condone violence and slapping someone is never the best way to deal with situation but YouTubers are backing up the worker, ripping on the prankster for provoking him.

Commenters seem to think this guy's reaction to the slap was over the top - he went to the hospital, went to the police and ranted about the incident for nearly four minutes.

All this was set to dramatic "things just got serious" music.

On Facebook, the video was also prompting a lot of conversation – most of which was on the side of pestered worker who slapped the YouTube "star".

Rodolfo Osvaldo Armendariz Moreno said the slap was a "risk of the job" in a comment which attracted more than 150 likes.

"You cannot go and insult other and then complain…" he says.

One user even suggested setting up a crowd funding site to pay for the legal costs of the worker if the matter progresses to court.

We're not sure the internet's reaction to the video is what he was aiming for, but at least it's going viral.