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Practically Joking
By Moira Marsh University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-984-5
CHAPTER 1
What's Practical about Practical Jokes?
It's surprisingly hard to define "practical joke" or its synonym, "prank." It is also difficult to explain what is "practical" about these expressive forms. A good definition must account for a wide variety of pranks and practical jokes, from the simple to the elaborate, from the benign to the malicious. Practical jokes may be personal or anonymous, private or public. Some are tailored for specific individuals and enacted just once while others have been repeated so often that they may be recognized by name, such as the short-sheeted bed, the snipe hunt, or "Going to see the Widow" (Cohen 1951; Grotegut 1955; Stahl and Kirby 1958). For many people, "practical joke" and "prank" conjure up the use of novelties and gag items. "The list is extensive: fake insects, vomit, and animal feces; dribble cups and spoons; foaming sugar; disappearing binoculars; soap and rubber crackers, nuts, eggs, gum, chocolates, and pretzels; dirty and bloody soap; crazy pitch baseballs; useless hinged scissors; exploding pens, cigars, cigarettes, cigarette cases; sneezing and itching powder" (Erard 1991, 1). Yet, while some practical jokes rely on elaborate props and scenery, others are equally effective using no extraverbal means at all. Some pranks involve mess and physical discomfiture of the target while others are more cerebral; some involve extended action sequences, but others can be accomplished in an armchair.
All these activities are playful performances involving the interaction of two parties — trickster and dupe — who have mutually incompatible ideas about what is going on. The involvement of dupes seems to be an essential characteristic of the genre. The role of the dupe is relatively passive: the trickster acts and initiates while the dupe is acted upon.
Dupes play an important role in this genre, as reflected in the abundance of vernacular terms to label them. There are relatively few terms in English for the perpetrators, trickster and joker being the most common. On the other side is the victim, fool, dupe, or butt (from the French for "target"). With the possible exception of victim, the names for practical joke dupes are always derogatory. Many traditional metaphorical terms compare them to animals, birds, or fish. In German, an April fool might be an Aprilochse (April ox) or Aprilesel (April donkey), to give just two possibilities (Wolf-Beranek 1968). The insulting reference to donkeys works in English, too, as witness the English April Fools' Day hoax from 1864 when a London newspaper, the Evening Star, announced "a grand exhibition of donkeys" for the following day at the Agricultural Hall. "Early on the morning of April 1st, a large crowd assembled outside the doors of the hall only to discover that they themselves were the donkeys" (quoted in Wight 1927, 40).
Bird metaphors are common in the language of practical joking. In Scotland, the April fool is a gowk, that is, a cuckoo, and a traditional practical joke called "hunting the gowk" sends its target from one person to the next in a vain search for an object that does not exist. In general, a naïve or gullible person is sometimes termed a pigeon, and the word dupe itself derives from the Latin upupa (the hoopoe, a bird renowned for its stupidity). May gosling is an older English label for the victim of a May Day trick (compare the German Aprilgans [April goose]) (Opie and Opie 1959, 256–257). The comparison of dupes to birdbrains probably lies behind the verb gull, meaning to cheat or fool someone (that is, to make a gull of them), from which we get the more common word gullible.
Fish are commonly represented in the language used to refer to those taken in by practical jokes. In France, Belgium, and Italy, the April fool is an "April fish" (poisson d'avril or pesce d'aprile); fish motifs predominate in tricks played on this date and appear on a wide variety of greeting cards. Over the centuries several theories have been put forward to explain why fish should be the symbol of April Fools' Day (Dundes 1989), but none observe that the fish theme is also common in the broader vocabulary of practical joking. As fish are caught because they are fooled into swallowing bait, so we speak of a credulous person "swallowing" a false story or falling for it "hook, line, and sinker." In Ireland, codding is the current term for playing practical jokes (Harlow 1997). The term catch, used for a variety of deceptive routines favored by American children and youth, is another manifestation of the fish metaphor (Roemer 1977).
I talk about targets rather than victims of practical jokes because the latter term prejudges the outcome of the trickery. The vernacular terminology for the participants in practical joking puts the perpetrators in the active, superior position, but in taking aim at a target it is always possible to miss. While not as derogatory as some of the other terms, victim still imputes a passive role to the target of a practical joke, but targets can and do turn the tables on tricksters. Further, victim prejudges the propriety and humorousness of the genre, whereas debates and negotiations over these questions are at the heart of practically joking.
Riddle jokes and narrative jokes also have targets — blonds, Polacks, JAPs, and many others. However, while the targets of verbal jokes are arguably fictional characters rather than sociological facts (Davies 2011; Oring 2003, 58–70), there can be no doubt that practical jokes, like teases and jocular insults, take aim at real people. No practical joke can exist without a specific, live target or targets.
What makes a target is containment: instead of witnessing a joke or a play activity, the target is unilaterally enclosed in it. Performance and play are framed representations or transformations of reality, but the practical joke requires that one party be unaware of these frames. Because of this lack of awareness, the targets are themselves contained in the performance. Containment and differential framing are what distinguish practical jokes from other jokes, making them both peculiar kinds of performance and peculiar kinds of play. As performance, practical jokes feature protagonists who are acting while not acting. Whereas play is usually thought to be voluntary, practical jokes are unilateral play forms that attempt to compel their targets into play through surprise or trickery.
Narrative and riddle jokes readily lend themselves to frequent decontextualization and recontextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990) and so spread far and wide; for this reason they are sometimes called "canned" or "prepared" jokes, both terms that underplay the variation and individual creativity that characterize live performance. In contrast, most jocular speech (joking as contrasted to joke telling) is spontaneous, closely tied to its context of origin, and not often repeated. Practical jokes fall somewhere between these two poles of contextualizaton. A spontaneous practical joke is conceivable but relatively rare; most are planned and scripted in advance. Commonly, this planning and anticipation are half the fun for the jokers. Some pranks are generic, replayed in new settings from tradition, experience, or instructions found in books or on websites. Others are unique, being tailored to the habits, personality, and personal proclivities of specific targets. As with most forms of folklore, however, even the oldest generic pranks offer room for individual variation and style when they are performed.
Many practical jokes appear to exist in imagination only. These have been called practical joke recipes: instructions for how to carry out a fabrication (Morrison 1974). Would-be pranksters can find these blueprints by the dozen in popular books (Jillette and Teller 1989), for example, and on websites like April Fool Zone (AmazingFX.net and Regan 2008). Here's an example from a New Zealand online bulletin board with a suggestion for how to liven up a party:
If you can get a chicken from somewhere (maybe you live rurally?) [this] is quite a good one.
It has to be at a party where everyone is really drunk and the bathroom is quite large, with a toilet at the far end of the room.
First of all, stuff a good base of newspaper as a bedding across the bottom of the toilet basin (so chook [chicken] doesn't get too wet and uncomfortable). And I know it sounds cruel but next, stuff the chicken in the bowl and shut the lid. The chicken will struggle for a few minutes but they generally go quiet after a few minutes in the dark.
Take the light bulb out of the socket and close the door.
Everything going to plan, someone, preferably female will open the door, try the light, and attempt to cross the room in the dark. When they open the lid (and certainly when they start pissing on it) the chicken will fly out and go nuts.
Without more investigation of the readership of these websites and instruction books, it is unclear how often any of these recipes are ever enacted. Quite possibly, readers have fun simply imagining the possibilities without going to the trouble of sneaking a live chicken into a party, let alone taking the risk of startling fellow partygoers.
What is significant for my purposes is that practical joke recipes contain not only step-by-step instructions for the trickster (First, take your chicken ...) but also descriptions of what is supposed to happen next. Frequently they contain what is essentially a script for how the targets will behave (open the door, try the light, cross the room in the dark, and open the lid). The suggestion is that if the jokers carry out their part properly, the targets will unwittingly follow this script. We are left to imagine the miniature mayhem that ensues but, "everything going to plan," events will follow the course as laid out in the recipe. The key is that there is a plan — or rather, a script. I contend that the presence of a script is the second essential ingredient, alongside a target, in all practical jokes.
Practical Jokes as Unilateral Play
A practical joke is a scripted, unilateral play performance involving two opposed parties — trickster and target — with the goal of incorporating the target into play without his or her knowledge, permission, or both. I have adopted the somewhat awkward phrase "play performance" rather than "playful performance" in order to emphasize the nature of the genre as both participatory play and performance for an audience in equal measure. This definition is broader than the best existing definitions of the genre in order to account for several activities that are commonly called either pranks or practical jokes but that do not fit the usual definitions. These cases will be discussed in detail in the next chapter.
In my definition deception is not a necessary part of the practical joke. Since individuals often become targets through trickery and deception, most definitions make playful deceit a central feature (Bauman 1986, 36). For example, Erving Goffman (1974) considered practical jokes one of several forms of "benign fabrication," defined as "the intentional effort on the part of one or more individuals to manage activity so that a party of one or more others will be induced to have a false belief about what it is that is going on" (86). The targets of practical jokes are contained, to use Goffman's term, in a framed play activity initiated by others without the targets' knowledge, without their permission, and sometimes without both. Considered more broadly, deceit is a frequent but not necessary element in an effective practical joke. In many cases, it is enough to startle targets with a surprise unilateral move into play.
Most definitions of the practical joke also require the discomfiture of the target, meaning that he or she is caused confusion, embarrassment, or some other mental and/or physical inconvenience or discomfort (Bauman 1986, 36; Tallman 1974, 260). A common assumption is that at a minimum, targets are embarrassed when the joke is revealed to them. The difficulty with this requirement is that there are many perfectly effective and well-received practical jokes with targets who are kept permanently in the dark:
One mornin' I was gittin' ready to send the general off down there. He come out an' crawled up in th' cockpit an' I strapped him in. He was startin' the airplane up, an' on a T-33 you got a fuel control, you got a starting fuel control on it, an' you switch over to th' main as you're starting. It always made a rumblin' sound as you switched the fuel control over, an' that airplane rumbled, an' the ol' General looked at me an' he said, "Sarge, what's that noise?" I said, "Oh, sir, it ain't nothin' to worry about, it's jest that ol' lumpy fuel." I said, "It's jest a chunk of it went in there." He said, "Oh, okay."
They took off an' they was goin' to New Orleans, an' the next day the General's aide came back. He was a captain. The General had stayed down there, an' the General's aide come back in, an' I parked him. He got outa that airplane a-cussin'. He said, "God damn, Sarge, don't ever, don't EVER, tell that General anything like that again. You told that man that cock-and-bull story an' he believed you, an' there wudn't nothin' I could tell him to straighten him out. I tried to explain fuel controls to him all the way to New Orleans, an he didn' believe a damn word I said. He said Sgt. Yount told me it was lumpy fuel. He said git it straightened out. We don't ever want no more lumpy fuel." (Yount 1984, 25)
Angela Yount recorded this personal experience narrative from her grandfather Bill. Quite possibly, the general's containment in this joke might have been unintentional — when Sergeant Yount offered "lumpy fuel" as a joking explanation for the rumbling of the plane, he might have meant it as nothing more than a witticism. But the general treated the joking claim as factual truth and acted on this belief, to the annoyance of his aide. Since to tell the general he had been taken in by a joke would cause the superior officer to lose face, his subordinates wisely decided to keep him in the dark. Arguably, it was the aide who was discomforted by the joke, but the general is the chief target of the joke, the object of ridicule because of his ignorance. The fact that he remains unaware of being ridiculed only adds to the satisfaction of the joker — it is one more dimension of his superior's inferiority. The general's discomfiture, if we can call it that, is that his status is diminished in the eyes of the practical joker and others who are aware of the joke. Practical jokes on the powerful are more likely to be open-ended, because of the greater risk of negative repercussions on subordinate jokers, but this feature does not detract from the satisfaction of the joke in the least.
Revelation is not necessary for a successful practical joke, only the existence of simultaneous, mutually contradictory framings of the activity. Not every practical joke fabrication is revealed, but all are discreditable (Goffman 1974), vulnerable to discovery by those who were contained. The general might believe in lumpy fuel to this day, but since there is no such thing as lumpy fuel, there is always the possibility, however slight, that he will one day find that out. The targets' low status stems from the fact that although their situation is discoverable, they fail to discern it.
Audiences, Performers, and Scripts
With or without revelation, embarrassment, or deceit, the targets of practical jokes are the unwitting objects of close scrutiny by an audience. This effect may be achieved by the simple stratagem of pinning a tail, a paper fish, or a "Kick me" sign to the back of a person's clothing to create a situation of differential framing. "Another thing we remember well was sticking tails on him [the headmaster] on April Fools' Day," goes a reminiscence of schooldays in 1874 near Dunedin, New Zealand. "Hilarious laughter used to proceed from the class as he strutted 'round the room with his long dust coat on and the tail sticking onto him" (Sutton-Smith 1981, 208). The language used to describe this prank is telling. The word strutted suggests an exaggerated, stylized gait, but we can reasonably assume that the headmaster was not walking any differently than normal since he apparently was unaware of his new appendage. Instead, the children were watching him differently. They thought of him as strutting because they were paying special attention to him. By pinning a tail to his coat, they had temporarily transformed him into an unwitting performer, like an actor strutting on a stage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Practically Joking by Moira Marsh. Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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