The not-so-funny Valentine

Why men and women feel so differently about practical jokes

While waiting for my daughters outside their after-school program last week, I saw a patch of dandelions that had gone to seed. My first thought when I see a puffy dandelion is a certain trick that you can do with them, and I said as much to a mom who was also waiting nearby with her toddler. 

“A trick?” Her eyes lit up. She wanted to know more. 

“So you pick a nice big one,” I said, “and you tell someone that it’s your magic wand. And that if they hide a penny anywhere on their body, you’ll be able to find it with your wand in three guesses. You point your wand anywhere for the first two guesses: at their hand, their front pocket, wherever. And then for your third guess, you say, ‘I know! It’s in your mouth.’ And when they open up to prove it’s not, you pop the dandelion in.” 

“Oh!” she said, looking a little shocked. “That sounds like a prank!”

Now, I do not have hard evidence of this, but in my experience men love pranks and women hate them. Mark Twain claimed that Harriet Beecher Stowe loved to sneak up behind people and startle them with a war cry, but she was suffering from dementia then, and so the anecdote proves nothing. The simplest explanation may be the difference between men and government bonds (only one of those actually matures). But I think there is more to it than that. As the father of two girls, I’d like to better understand where my own penchant for pranks comes from and whether this impulse is as harmless as I’ve always thought it to be. 

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to know that pranks are, at their root, about power. If you want the academic treatment, you can read about how practical jokes fall under two broad categories: bullying or belonging. Either the prank is meant to make someone feel powerless and alone or it is meant to be inclusive. The difference can be a matter of interpretation. Good-natured teasing can be experienced as harassment. It pays to know your audience.

My oldest daughter loves to hear about my college pranks. For some years, this was the only way I could get her to hike any distance: Put her in the lead and tell her about the good old days. I now see most of those stories as rituals in shared meaning, the kind of memory that all participants would now recall fondly at a college reunion. 

There was, for instance, the ridiculously loud mechanical clock that we took turns hiding in each other’s dorm rooms. One of us would wind it up, slip it above the drop ceiling or into a corner of someone’s closet, and they’d be oblivious to it until the lights were off and they were trying to fall asleep, at which time the thing would sound like Poe’s tell-tale heart. They would curse, ransack the room until they found it, and then get their revenge the next day. The fact that our R.A. participated in this harmless fun by leaving his door unlocked only helped him win our trust. 

The college had a long tradition of practical jokes, which often illustrated a low-stakes rebellion against authority. It was rumored that a group had once disassembled a small airplane and reassembled it in the cafeteria. A common prank in the dorms was spreading glitter between someone’s sheets. They would then find it impossible to wash off and would sparkle wherever they went. Inspired by such lore, I conspired one evening with some friends to heist a pile of butter knives from the cafeteria. After dark we let ourselves into the sanctuary and slipped the knives into many of the hymnals. The next morning there was a delightful ruckus as all of the knives fell to the floor before we could sing “Be Thou My Vision.” I still can’t hear that song without cracking an irreverent smile. 

If pranks shift power to the prankster, they might also be a way of compensating for insecurity or trauma. My Grandpa Herman was known by his peers as a world-class jokester, hiding lunch pails at the sawmill where he worked, and so on. Could this have been because the high school football team nicknamed him Mighty Mouse (he was short, but fearless)? There was still some racism toward Eastern Europeans back then, and Grandpa told me that he instantly saw red if anyone called him a Bohunk. His own father was an alcoholic who sometimes deliberately drove on the wrong side of the road, laughing as the oncoming cars swerved around him. My grandfather might well have tried to heal himself with humor. But he never pranked me, perhaps because he had no reason to establish dominance over his grandson. 

There is a long tradition of fathers initiating their sons into manhood through tests that are not terribly different from pranks. My father once crept away while we were fishing to see what I’d do when I discovered I was alone in the woods. One of my friends said that when he was ten years old, his father left him with a canoe and a map on an island in northern Minnesota. He was to navigate his way to their next campsite without any help. This kind of learning can be meaningful, if framed as a collective challenge: let’s see if you can do this hard thing, and I’ll be here if you need me. But fathering in this way can also look more like throwing a child into the river to see if he can swim, and it teaches boys that they are alone in the world. Which may well be one reason why fathers, not mothers, are the ones who show this video of the ghost car to their children around Halloween. 

It does not take many steps along this road to see how pranking is a close cousin to other forms of harassment between boys and girls, men and women. I suspect that this strikes near the root of why many women develop a visceral aversion to practical jokes. I saw it in a stranger’s face when I reached the punch line of the dandelion trick. Too often, what men find funny reminds women of all the times they’ve been tricked in bad faith or made to feel powerless and alone. 

Yet humor is often what women find most attractive in men. Being funny, according to Christopher Hitchens, is how men overcome their considerable disadvantage at the outset of courtship. Mishaps, misunderstandings, and low-stakes humiliation are all staples in romantic comedies. The trope of the jerk who turns out to be a catch works in the rom-com plot because it aligns with the “good” version of pranking, in which absurdity creates closeness. 

Take, for instance, The Berenstain Bears’ Funny Valentine. Sister Bear has a crush on dreamboat Herbie Cubbison, but the only boy who shows her any attention is Billy Grizzwold. Billy pranks Sister so incessantly that she imagines giving him a Valentine that reads, “Daffodils are yellow / Roses are red / I need you like a hole in the head!” But Billy confuses the hell out of Sister by getting her a beautiful Valentine. Sister shares her bewilderment with Mama Bear and learns that her mother was tormented by a similar jerk in school – and that this jerk turned out to be her father. Billy’s jokes are just his clumsy way of showing his love, and he wins her over in the end. 

As a father of daughters, I don’t like this ending. It shows that boys mask their fear of emotional vulnerability with pranks, and it normalizes an unhealthy equation of dominance with intimacy. It tells my daughters not to trust their gut, to consider that the boy harassing them on the playground might actually be thinking I’m stuffing leaves down the back of your shirt, but really I like you. Which leads to questions of body autonomy and consent that will matter a great deal to my daughters as they grow up.

Hitchens posits that men use humor to deflect the depressing truth of mortality, and that women, “who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco[,] simply can’t afford to be too frivolous.” According to his reasoning, women hate pranks because they feel instinctively protective of children. But I think this is wrong. The women I know tease each other when they are among friends, give each other nicknames, and prank with the best of them. Two of my college baseball teammates returned from an away game to discover that their girlfriends had spent hours covering their dorm loft, the ladder steps, and every other surface in the room with paper cups filled with water. The only way to clean it up without launching a flood? Carefully emptying one cup at a time.

No, I think women who hate pranks associate them with men who have betrayed their trust. The answer is not to give up trying to be funny so much as it is thinking carefully about whether a prank will leave someone feeling ashamed and alone or whether it will create a good memory, like those we recall with friends. Perhaps April Fools’ Day is beloved by all because we’re all in on the joke, all part of a shared story.