Among the royal treasures in Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen is a carefully preserved seventeenth-century armchair that once belonged to Christian IV. A hidden mechanism in the arms would pin the king’s guests in the seat, where they would be soaked with water from a container on the back. When they were released, a small trumpet tooted the news to all who cared to hear, thus proving that fart jokes have an ancient and royal lineage. Centuries later, the FartDroid app has been downloaded more than 2 million times, despite a “low maturity” content rating (Neat-O-Fun 2012). iFart, the equivalent app...

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;...

Various attempts have been made to categorize pranks, practical jokes, and their cousins. Marilyn Jorgensen divided them into malicious types (which she labeled “pranks”) or benevolent types (“tricks”) (1995). Richard Tallman suggested a classificatory scheme that took into account the number of tricksters and targets, whether the action was active or passive, the intent of the prank (benevolent, initiatory, or malevolent), and the result of the prank (1974, 262–265). Erving Goffman suggested an informal typology of deceits arranged in order of increasing scale and elaborateness: kidding, leg-pulling, practical joking, surprise parties, larks or rags, and corrective hoaxing (1974, 87-92)....

Practical jokes exist in the mind more than anywhere else. They begin as plans or recipes, predicative scripts that outline what is supposed to happen, but not all of them are enacted. Judging from their numbers, practical joke handbooks and websites are widely read, but it is likely that many readers enjoy them just to imagine the possibilities. When they are enacted, practical jokes are typically fleeting, onetime events, but participants often record them for future replaying and sharing. However, the most widespread way of replaying and sharing practical jokes is in the form of narratives. Whether told by the...

There is a close relationship between practical joking and legend. Both genres involve construction of truth claims: the practical joke is based on differential knowledge, whereas the legend is based on differential belief. The practical joke provokes its targets to say or do something that displays an erroneous belief¹ that is belied by the knowledge of the jokers. Similarly, legends make listeners and proponents state and debate their beliefs. “Telling a legend is the time to confess,” according to Dégh and Vázsonyi. “To confess, to ascertain, to argue for or against, to assert or refute: this is the time of...

Bernie and his fellow warehouse workers had a problem. It concerned one of their coworkers, Perry.

I’ll tell you a really good practical joke. Like one time there was this guy, he was actually the nephew of Rocky Marciano [the prizefighter], his name was Perry Marciano. And, he was kind of, kind of a built guy—not really athletic, but kind of a stocky guy. He’d eat anything—anything in sight. So we’d all have lunch, and you know, we’d have lunch and he’d scarf down whatever he’d brought and after everybody’s done he’d be, “You done with that? You...

There is plenty of morality and immorality, blame and justification to go around in practical jokes, but it is not just the joke targets who come in for scrutiny. Practical jokers also find themselves under a negative moralistic gaze. New Zealand columnist Rosemary McLeod expresses the opinions of many: “I’ve always seen people who play practical jokes as bullies in disguise,” she wrote. “Their humour is not about self-recognition, or even insightful recognition of the human condition; it’s just about humiliating other people” (2003, 6).

Some practical jokers themselves comment on the nastiness of their play. “Gosh, these are all...

The tin-foiled desk is currently a popular practical joke among the millions of people who spend their working hours in offices or cubicles. Any office worker who goes on vacation or even takes a day off might return to find desk, office, or cubicle lovingly wrapped in aluminum foil or newspaper, or otherwise adulterated by coworkers. Although not an original joke—videos, images, and detailed instructions are readily available on the Internet—tin-foiling still offers room for variation, style, and creative elaboration. Tin-foiling is an example of what I call the booby trap subtype of practical joke. An effective performance...

Time and again, practical joke victims respond to their discomfiture with retaliation in kind, leading to sequences of reciprocal trickery that may take on a life of their own. The typical dynamic is illustrated by the following stories from a Newfoundland paper mill. Our source is Bob Saunders (pseudonym), a fifty-one-year old steam plant engineer, who was hit one night with a practical joke by other shift workers. The story began when he took a catnap during his shift, a minor and common transgression that workers both winked at and considered fair game for playful exploitation. While he slept, three...

Practical jokes are about relationships, whether between individuals or between individuals and the groups to which they belong. The vernacular rhetoric of the genre emphasizes the role of individual personality as the engine that makes a fabrication work, and in most cases the joking spotlight is trained on the target while the individual trickster is surrounded, and sometimes entirely hidden, by a crowd of supporters whom he or she represents. Jokes between individuals grow out of and help to grow their personal relationships, and are treated as reciprocal (even if the reciprocity is a fiction). However, many other practical jokes...

Practical jokes are about relationships, even when they are anonymous and impersonal. Some of the most well-known examples of the genre are those that are set on the public stage—either on the streets or, in more recent times, in the mass media. These are communal tricks, pitting groups of usually anonymous jokers against collective targets and relying on the mass media to broadcast the results to mass audiences. Two groups in particular have adopted this style of practical joke as part of their expressive repertoires—journalists and university students.

The camera pans over a bird’s-eye view of Antarctic ice...

Soon after i arrived in Wellington to conduct research on this project, I had my fifteen minutes of fame. As a way of reaching people who have practical joke stories to share, I sometimes get in touch with the local press. In Wellington the local daily, theDominion Post, took the bait and sent a reporter and photographer to interview me. The next week it ran a story in the education section of the paper, including an address where people could write to me. Two days later, I received the following letter:

I read about your book inThe Dominion....

The post-play period in practical joke enactments is for evaluation, critique, and sometimes argument. It also provides a space in which participants can transition from the play world back to what passes for the real world, sometimes taking lessons with them that can be applied in other contexts. So, too, books need a cool-down phase where author and reader may look back with a longer view and think about what has been learned that can be applied more broadly. My initial research question was, when is a practical joke just a joke? Put another way, when does a practical joke...