Practical Jokes: Good Fun or Evil?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I like to play practical jokes. I like to be the butt of them, too. (In both cases, my enjoyment is limited to practical jokes that are funny, and maybe even embarrassing for the patsy, though never cruel.)

However, today a very good friend of mine took extreme offense when I played a small practical joke at her expense. I’ll tell the story here, briefly: Amy and I attended law school together. While there, we worked with a guy named Alex. Alex is a nice guy and for awhile we thought he had a crush on Amy. Amy and I would kid around about this in private. I would also always remark on the fact that Alex has very pretty curly hair (he does). Alex had one strange quirk we would tease him about: he, for some reason, thought my friend Amy had been a nurse previous to going to law school. No matter how many times we told him this wasn’t true, he’d forget and start to “remember” that Amy was a nurse again. It was a well-known in-joke at the office.

Today, Amy emailed me and said she’d heard from Alex, and that his band had a new website. I checked it out. It has a fan forum. I registered under a phony email address and posted the following:

I figured the outcome of this joke would be that Alex would ask Amy, “What’s with the message?” and Amy would say, “That wasn’t me! It was Q.N.!” And we’d all laugh. Amy would be a little embarrassed, I’d be a little embarrassed (I admitted he had pretty curls), and Alex would be a tad embarrassed (and maybe pleased that the other guys in the band would think he had a secret admirer).

Amy is instead quite furious with me, and is no longer speaking to me. I wrote a really lame email to Alex, explaining exactly what I’d done, and that it was me, not Amy, but this has not helped.

Point: This got me to thinking about the nature of practical jokes. Are they wrong? Most people I know enjoy playing them, but not everyone likes being on the receiving end of them. In fact, some people–like Amy–get very upset because she’s very embarrassed.

What’s the point of a practical joke? Well, isn’t it to embarrass someone, at least a little? And isn’t it wrong to enjoy another person’s discomfort? I always chalked it up to “it’s not hurting anyone”, but as I learned today, some people are way more sensitive to being embarrassed than I am. (Hell, I don’t mind and now Alex probably thinks I’m a psycho with an unrequited crush on him.)

So…bottom line…are practical jokes inherently mean-spirited, or just good clean fun? Do you personally like being the butt of a practical joke? When you’re the victim, do you hold a grudge? I’d be curious to know how it breaks down, women vs. men. Do you agree that women play them less often, find them less funny, and especially hate to be the butt of them, whereas men tend to find them hilarious and let it roll off their backs when they’re the mark?

2

Practical jokes aren’t clean fun; no one would mind if they were. They aren’t mean either, or you would only do them to people you didn’t like. I’d say that practical jokes are a bit like sarcastic comments; you can only do them to people who can take it (not that this is a badge of honor by any means.)

I’m a man. Most of the practical jokes I’ve seen, been the butt of or been party to were done by and on men, but the ones that were really out there were done by women (e.g., the… er, uninhibited friend who on April 1st told our friends that she was carrying a rather hapless guy’s lovechild. They would have been a match made in hell, and they let everyone beg her not to marry him for an hour before they let the punchline drop.)

3

You know, one thing I’ve noticed is that while men tend toward the physical humor and the slapstick, women tend toward the more grotesque personal jokes, such as “I’m having Hapless Guy’s lovechild.” A female friend of mine “came out” to her incredibly religious parents and only dropped the “joke” when her mother had broken down sobbing in tears. I don’t find those “jokes” funny in the least.

I have, however, always considered it a badge of honor to be a person who can appreciate a good practical joke. I think more of my friends who can handle it. The people who can handle them have typically had a good sense of humor and were not overly self-important. I find myself thinking less of Amy for being so touchy about something that everyone else I’ve talked to thinks is both hilarious and harmless. I wonder, if she’s willing to stop talking to me over this, how mature and well-balanced is she, really? So I’m curious–why do you, cornflakes think it’s not a badge of honor?

4

Eh, maybe I should have said that there’s no shame in not taking a joke. I do them for fun, but I don’t want to lose friends over a joke.

5

The only prank I’ve ever pulled was slightly pulling out the network connection on one of the dozens of computers in our library, so it still looks like it’s in, but the net doesn’t work. I was in an evil mood.

6

Practical jokes are really something you can only safely pull off with a good friend. You’ve got to know just how far you can go with the mark, without being hurtful or offensive.

cornflakes said:

That’s the crux of it, I think. A friend you can “trash-talk” with, without either of you getting bent out of shape, is the guy you can set up for a doozie of a gag.

Hypothetical example:
One of you is a lily-white red headed Irish lad, and the other one is an ebony-dark African American. In junior high, he dated your sister, and you spent more time at his family’s backyard BBQs than at your own. In high school. you both called the other’s parents “mom and dad.” Nowadays, you routinely use racial epithets between yourselves, to your hysterical amusement, and the consternation of bystanders who don’t know that you’re best buds. This is the guy you can take compromising pictures of, with a farm animal, while he’s passed out drunk. He’ll be laughing too hard at the pictures the next day to even think of getting pissed at you. Plus, he’ll be busy thinking up some rotten gag to pull on you at your high school reunion.

Steve, that guy you’ve worked three cubes down from for two years, who’s last name you can never remember? Not a good target.

So I guess a practical joke is supposed to be good fun, but the definition of fun varies widely from person to person. Tailor the gag to the mark, so to speak.

[sub]And of course, something you and your friend would see as harmless and funny could be considered way beyond the pale to someone else and his friend. Pipples is diff’ernt.[/sub]

7

practical jokes are definitely Evil.

perhaps i should just walk into classroom one day, come up to some guy, smile and break his face in half. then laugh hysterically and say that it was my practical joke and whoever doesn’t laugh just has no sense of humor.

no matter how creative you get your joke is ultimately going to be no better.

8

you take your desire to hurt somebody and you disguise it as if it was a sense of humour. pathetic.

9

Okay… I had a really nice post all ready for the board… and then the hamsters mucked up so I’ll paraphrase.

IMHO the joke played wasn’t bad, but perhaps she has feelings that you are implying she would be better off in a more ‘woman dominated’ career. She may have recieved a lot of flack about it and she feels hurt that this is coming from a friend.

IME I can take jokes that generally have no connotations to lots of jibs I have recieved in the past. Women have problems taking some of these ‘jokes’ because they see them as just someone else laying into them about their choices/ideas etc. Men don’t have this problem so much as they are raised to ‘take it like a man’ and when they do have a problem they are seen as weak.

[sub]Disclaimer: Comments on men and women are general observations. Not facts, and come solely from my fractured observance of the world.[/sub]

10

Flutterby: Thank you, thank you, thank you. That was the point I was trying to get at, and I think I lost track of, in the middle of my post.

Certain things may set someone off all out of proportion to the “offensiveness” of the joke itself. If someone’s just gone through a miscarriage a few months (hell, even a few years) before, and the practical joke involves pregnancy (like cornflakes’ example earlier) it can hit a lot deeper than you intended.

For a practical joke to be funny to the person you’re pulling it on, it’s got to be far and away from whatever might be a hot button “issue” for them. Plus, they really do have to be able to laugh at themselves once in a while, generally speaking.

Some folks is just humorless about some things.

[sub]And some folks is humorless about everything.[/sub]

11

I think Amy’s overreaction indicates she doth protest too much. :wink:

I once mailed an admiring email to myself purporting to be from this girl, CCing some of my friends (including her). She was very embarrassed.

She’s now my wife.

:rolleyes:

12

Not everyone likes to be embarrassed. Some people don’t mind it, others positively hate it.

Ummm, is this correct ?
You don’t find one ‘type’ of joke funny at all.
You think good practical jokes are funny.
You approve of those who agree with your taste in jokes.

Could it just be that you have one sort of sense of humour, and others are different. What you find funny, some people don’t and vice versa. Instead of thinking less of those who have a different sense of humour than you, how about just understanding that people are different ? It’s not that those people who don’t like practical jokes aren’t fun or funny, they just find humour in different things.

Now, it’s different if they don’t find Monty Python funny. Those people need to be locked up :wink:

13

I wasn’t trying to pick on you, cornflakes, just curious.

I have always reserved practical jokes for my very best friends. I thought Amy would enjoy this joke, or I never, ever would have played it.

She’s been having some personal problems lately, though, and though her sense of humor had seemed unaffected, apparently it couldn’t handle this.

A couple of clarifications:

Re: Obsidian’s point: I’m a woman, Amy’s a woman, Alex is a man. We’re all lawyers. I doubt it could be that she thinks I’m trying to tell her to pick a more woman-dominated career. But I think you may be on the right track that there’s something else going on here. In fact, I think I know what it is–the aforementioned personal problems.

Re: Goo’s point about not finding certain jokes funny being a matter of taste: well, I suppose in some ways it is a matter of taste. But the important distinction to me is that the jokes about being a lesbian or being pregnant with Hapless Guy’s baby didn’t make anyone laugh and they weren’t exactly designed to, either. They upset people instead–sometimes a lot–and that seems to have been the joker’s very purpose. So no, I don’t find them funny–I doubt many people do, because making people laugh doesn’t seem to be the point of the “joke” (except with relief, in hindsight, maybe).

Goo makes a good point: some people hate being embarrassed, even a little. Amy seems to be one of these. Yet she has helped me play practical jokes on people in the past, and has laughed at all the ones I’ve played on others where she was on the sidelines.

Which leads me to question: is it wrong to enjoy practical jokes, or participate in them, if you can’t handle being the fall guy yourself once in awhile? I’m inclined to think that yes, it is. Your thoughts?

14
  1. Considering the amount of time and effort often needed to set them up, how are they ‘practical’?
  2. OP’s caper sounded pretty harmless - but we have all seen some that are pretty hostile.
  3. If you can’t handle being the fall guy, you have no business participating in any way.
    In the dim mists of the past I remember giving a friend a heads-up about a PJ of which he was to be the victim. Perp very angry at me, but I don’t regret it.
15

As others have said it depends on both the nature of the joke and the nature of the mark. Given that the emal the OP sent is simply reiterating old inside jokes I think Amy over-reacted. Especially since she has been a participant in other practical jokes. If you’re going to indulge in practical jokes it’s hypocritical to expect that you will not be the butt at some point.

16

Personally, I hate to be embarrassed. I can’t watch movies or TV shows where someone gets embarrassed. “Sympathetic embarrassment”? Sheesh.

Anyway, the difficult part I think, relates to what Skeezix said:

You might just hit a hot button for someone. And, benign intentions or not, that’s not nice to do. It comes off as mean, in my book. I have a good sense of humor (so I’m told), and I take things generally not too seriously, but the wrong topic for a PJ would just piss me off. I can’t think of what that would be, but it could happen.

There just seems to be an undercurrent in PJ of meanness. You want to laugh at someone who is getting mad when they don’t need to, or getting a pie in the face before the big meeting, getting embarrassed in front of the whole office (yuck). Why do that to someone? And this could just be me, but what if it’s not just me?

17

If one of my friends did that to me, I would laugh. We play tricks on each other all the time, but we all know each other well enough to do so. If I played a trick on a friend and they took offense to it, (even if I thought they were over-reacting) I would apologize and not include them on either end of a joke any more. I think you may have just touched a nerve with her (is it possible she actually does have feelings for this guy? Or perhaps she is sensitive to it if she thinks he has feelings for her but she does not want him to think she feels the same way.)

She might have reacted better to a different type of joke, one less personal. I know some people can take a joke like a rubber snake, for example, but not an emotionally manipulative one. Or maybe she just had a bad day. Either way, apologize, and just try to be more careful in the future. Practical jokes can be great for those that like to participate, though. My friends and I have a great time with them, but no one is really humiliated, because we all know that we all really respect and love each other, and we’re not really laughing at them to be cruel. YMMV

18

I think that practical jokes are funny, in general. As long as no one gets hurt or terribly embarassed. Sounds like Amy was just really sensitive about this man and was mortified at your joke and can’t see where you thought it would be funny. It also sounds like she can dish it out but can’t take it. I’ll tell you one thing- I NEVER practical joke with someone and don’t expect reprecussions. I know it’s coming, which is part of the “fun” of joking with someone who can take it.

As said above, it’s cruel to pull a stunt on someone who hates to be embarassed. You MUST know the person’s sense of humor well enough to pull it off and get them to laugh at themselves. This is why I’ve only ever pulled practical jokes on people like my sister and others I’m very close to.

I can’t imagine that an apology by you won’t undo this damage. I think she really overreacted, personally. I’m wondering if he didn’t e-mail her after seeing the comment or if there is something more to the story.

19

Amy’s never shown an aversion to humor that leads to mild embarrassment in the past. She also seemed to have no hang-ups about jokes involving Alex. She is not interested in him romantically–I’m fairly confident of that (she’s married). I thought I knew her well enough, but I guess I didn’t.

Unfortunately, my apology has not undone the damage. I think this is in part because while I apologized for her embarrassment and for misjudging what her reaction would be, I did tell her she was overreacting. (She is borderline hysterical, claiming that she’s afraid Alex will now torpedo her admission to the bar–he’s a character reference for her. This is ludicrous.)

Furthermore, when she said “I can’t believe you did that, it was so thoughtless” for about the 20th time, I brought up the fact that she practically goaded me into doing it. The exchange of emails between us went something like this:

Amy: I talked to Alex. His band has a new website.
Me: Really? Interesting. Gimme the URL. I wanna take a look.
Amy: Only if you promise me you won’t post anything crazy on the message board there. I’d be sooo embarrassed. <giggle>

Mind you, this has been the prelude to me playing jokes in the past (often with myself as the one who gets embarrassed, but sometimes also Amy). Amy teases me like this, saying “Don’t do it, don’t do it,” and I do it, and we giggle. Furthermore, the idea of playing a joke on Alex was first brought up by her.

Me: (after doing my thing) Here’s the link to my post!
Amy: Okay, I’m going to look! <giggle> What did you do, Ms. Evil?

Clearly, she was enjoying the idea…until a little embarrassment came her way. Then it was wrong and thoughtless and humiliating.

As I’ve said, Amy has serious personal problems that I’m not at liberty to describe, so that’s probably why she went nuts this time. I have yet to hear from her today, but I suspect everything is not all right, nor will it be anytime soon.

Zette, I know that Alex had no clue about the message until I wrote him the email explaining. He hadn’t seen it yet. I could tell by the number of views on the message: one for me, one for Amy. And she hadn’t emailed him about it–in fact, she told me she was busy trying to figure out if there was a way to delete the message before he saw it. When she went bonkers, it was totally because of her own reaction.

20

Wow, that is a weird situation. For what it’s worth though (and I don’t blame you for saying it, either, believe me) when someone is really pissed, sometimes you just gotta say “I’m sorry”. Period. Not “I’m sorry but…”. It sounds like she’s going through some shit and is just irrational now. Hopefully it will blow over soon.

Sorry to hear of your troubles with her and the rest of your start to 2003 (from the Pit). Take care, OK?