ABSTRACT
Most grown-up people regard an inveterate practical joker as an affliction. They call him a “wag,” by which they mean, I think, that he behaves like a dog’s tail, endeavoring to keep up a laughing-process in the wrong place, and all the time, and without any dimples. They are quite right about this. A practical joke in the accepted sense of the term, an elaborate playful perpetration at the expense of someone not in the game, is a laborious kind of humor. It takes too long; it is too self-conscious, too other-conscious; it requires serious effort; it lacks the catching ease and spontaneity of genuine play. It is not so much a jest as an enterprise. Moreover when the playfulness is a pretense and serious cruelty the real preoccupation, it is, as Mark Twain said it was, a puerile or decadent pursuit.
