Don't Make Me Laugh

This is just a guess, but I think Benedict Carey is a guy.

You probably don't know Mr. (?) Carey, but he writes about health and medicine for the NYT, including today's piece on, oh boy!, pranks.

Here's the part that makes me think Carey is a mister:

“Being duped holds up this mirror to people,” Dr. Vohs said, “and may in fact show them where they are on the scale” — too trusting or too vigilant. Paranoia, too, has its costs, and it can sour relationships.

Running back the tape mentally, in this case meditating on how an embarrassing event might have turned out otherwise, is known to psychologists as counterfactual thinking. “The feeling of ‘I should have known better’ is the sort of counterfactual that serves to highlight your own shortcomings,” said Neal Roese, a psychologist at the University of Illinois. “A good deal of research has shown that these counterfactual insights can kick-start new behaviors, new self-exploration and, ultimately, self-improvement.”

Those observations may not leap to mind if you just showed up in go-go boots and an Elizabeth Taylor wig to a bogus 1970s cross-dressing party. Or if you fell for the e-mail message announcing you had won an award and should forward a draft of your acceptance speech to a supervisor.

But a good prank is, in the end, a simulation of a crisis and not the real thing. And it serves as a valuable reminder that not every precious box contains precisely the treasure you might expect.

What. The. Hell.

Here's a crazy, crazy thought: What if you just didn't pull any pranks? What then? OMG! Catastrophe! Disaster! People not being forced to discover they are too trusting!

Perhaps it's baldly sexist to say so, but I don't think most women pull pranks. Even among the institutions with the worst reputations, pranking is not the done thing. No, in our darker moments, my gender goes in for straight up, knife-in-the-back cruelty.

I've known women to do many, many shitty things to other women, but none of them fell under the casual veil of a prank. Stealing a boyfriend, us vs. them ostracizing, systematically humiliating a coworker -- this is the stuff of months, if not years in the making, not some one-day-a-year whimsy. It's far worse than cellophane over a toilet, and once it's discovered, the object knows well that the next step is to get far, far away from her tormentor.

As an Aries, I have a certain affection for all things April, with the strong exception of April Fool's Day. But upon reflection, I think my problem isn't that April Fool's is unnecessarily cruel. No, what I hate about April Fool's is that it's amateur hour, with short-lived pranks that suggest there's nothing worse lurking in the shadows. That, I think, really is foolish.

Edited to ad: No, wait. New theory. Women don't do pranks because we're really, really bad at it. This is just sad.