Practical Jokes

A practical joke or prank is a play activity in which one party (called the trickster or tricksters) arranges things so that another party (the target or targets) is led to have a false idea about what is currently going on. The targets of practical jokes may also be called dupes, butts, or victims. When practical jokes are played on large groups of people in public settings, they are often called hoaxes.

Practical jokes may be divided into several types. Put-ons or leg-pulls are intended to fool the targets only momentarily. Booby traps trick the targets into treating an adulterated part of their environment as if it were untouched, often causing them mess and inconvenience. Physical humor may be part of the enjoyment in this type of practical joke. Fool’s errands go further by encouraging targets to act on their erroneous beliefs; as they do so, their error is revealed for the amusement of a hidden audience. Any situation in which individuals have differential [Page 593]knowledge may become fodder for the practical joker. A tall tale, for example, may be enacted as a practical joke on the greenhorn, leading to such traditional amusements as the snipe hunt (a futile search for a fictitious snipe).

Theories about metacommunication help to explain the operation of practical jokes. Both play and joking are accompanied by metacommunicative signals that tell participants that what is going on is not serious. In Erving Goffman’s extension of the theory of metacommunication, practical jokes are a type of benign fabrication in which these signals of play are hidden from the targets. The incongruity between the targets' and tricksters' framing of the same strip of activity is an important source of the humor of this genre.

Practical jokes are “practical” in the sense that they are enacted rather than being told. They are miniature plays in which the central characters—the targets—are ideally unaware that they have been contained in a strip of framed activity. In this state, they are the unwitting objects of close attention by an audience consisting of the jokers and others. Many verbal jokes have targets, but the targets of practical jokes are live people. Many, but not all, practical joke targets eventually find out that they have been made fools of, at which time they must decide whether or not to treat their discomfiture in the same way that the jokers and their audiences do—as just a joke. In this respect, practical jokes resemble teasing and jocular insults. The remainder of this entry focuses on acceptable occasions for practical jokes and the impact practical jokes can have on social bonds.