When the Joke’s on You, Blame Hostility or Playfulness
Ever the prankster, Leonardo da Vinci took a lizard, mounted it with wings shaped from reptile skin, infused them with mercury to make them tremble and painted eyes, ears and a horn on its head. He told the demon-phobic folk of the 16th century that he had captured a little Satan.
A scientist at Caltech has been known to telephone anxious colleagues when Nobel Prize winners are being announced, feigning a Swedish accent and delivering bogus good news.
Engineers at Sun Microsystems, a Mountain View, Calif., company with a long tradition of April Fools’ pranks, dismantled a co-founder’s beloved Porsche, reassembled in his office and turned its interior into a fish pond.
From innocuous pie-in-the-face stunts to elaborate practical jokes, experts say, pranks are a childlike expression of mischievous spontaneity, playfulness, tricksterism and a toying with reality.
The urge is strongest on April 1.
Jokes that get the biggest laughs are often rooted in hostility, Freud claimed. Others say a prank can be driven by friendly competition. Unlike its darker cousin the hoax--which can involve fraud, ego-inflation of the hoaxer and degradation of the target--pranks are not usually committed for personal gain or fame.
“The prank is a free-spirited humor, liberating us for a moment from having to act properly,” says Harvey Mindess, a professor emeritus of psychology at Antioch University in Marina del Rey who has written extensively on humor. “Some will say the prank is mean. That is true unless you are willing to have a trick played on you. It’s similar to when children tickle each other. It’s a give and take.”
Mindess comes from a family of harmless pranksters. On April Fools’ Day, his mother used to make him a sandwich with a slip of paper in it that said “April Fools’.” As a child, Mindess would tell his father that a Mr. Bear had called. When his father dialed the telephone number, of course, he got the zoo. And when Mindess’ daughter was a preteen, he would offer her a beautiful gift bag. When she looked in, his hand poked up through the bottom, where a can of whipped cream was primed to squirt her face. “We did it because it was fun,” he says.
Other psychologists take Freud’s position.
“Pranks are a way to express hostility and they range from a form of mild competition to extreme hostility,” says Peter Desberg, a professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills who has studied humor. “There is the joker, the butt of the joke and the neutral judge [the audience]. The butt always knows he’s been attacked. The joker will do it just to see the look on your face. People laugh because they are relieved [that they are not the butt]. If I can disguise my hostility in a joke and everyone laughs, then I am OK, I won’t experience the guilt.”
Desberg says that pranksterism seems to be a guy thing.
“There is clearly a gender gap,” he says. “Pranks seem to be a part of that wonderful male one-upmanship and competition.”
Others suggest that the successful prankster has been primed by a chaotic universe, and learned to use the trick to gain the upper hand.
“Life is a series of tricks and deceptions perpetuated by outside, unseen forces. As we grow up, we try to become the tricker and deceiver, or the powerful one,” says Roderic Gorney, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Gotcha! You were the weak one and I was the strong one.’ ”
*
Pranks have been celebrated in mythology and in practice for centuries. The ultimate prankster in Native American myth is the coyote, says Betsy Brandt, an anthropology professor at Arizona State University. Among the Pueblo, clowns pull pranks during dances and other ceremonies. At a dance in New Mexico, Brandt recalled, a clown grabbed a state trooper’s spectacular looking Stetson hat, tapped out a Mexican hat dance upon it, then returned it.
The human species is not alone in its penchant for pranks. Roger Fouts, a University of Central Washington psychologist who studies the intelligence of chimpanzees and apes, says that primates are pranksters too. Our closest relatives in the animal world will throw their feces at humans and let out a breathy heh heh heh.
“They play tricks on us, set us up . . . pull our chain,” says Fouts. And they aren’t below laughing at stupid human tricks. “A chimp I worked with had learned sign language for the word ‘funny’ and she would sign ‘funny’ when we did a pratfall.”
The good news is that even for those on the receiving end, there is a way to come out of the experience with dignity intact. Desberg says the fooled should remember the words of George Bernard Shaw: “The more sophisticated you are, the more gullible you are.”
In other words, if you are taken in today by an April Fools’ prank, it’s only because you believe anything is possible.
