practical joke

Obviously they had decided to treat the whole matter as a practical joke and to brave it out, for outside the gates in an open fly were the whole party.

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.

Sir Dinadan the Humorist was the first to awake, and he soon roused the rest with a practical joke of a suffi- ciently poor quality.

Candy, the doctor, on the sore subject of his profession; and he plays you a practical joke, in return, with a dose of laudanum.

What a cruel practical joke old Nature played when she flung so many contradictory elements together, and left the man face to face with the perplexing callousness of the universe.

Ellmother had supposed she was in earnest, when she was guilty of no more serious offense than playing a practical joke.

He thought his uncle had been playing a practical joke on him.

My father was, in fact, a singularly good-natured man, and I think quietly enjoyed nature's practical joke.

Had any one met with a fall, or suffered a practical joke at the hands of one of the other girls, or lost a powderpuff, it was at once the fault of the ghost, of the Opera ghost.

"It was a joke, my good sir--a practical joke, nothing more," he whined incessantly.

Harris said he thought that map must have been got up as a practical joke, because it wasn't a bit like the real thing, and only misleading.

The secretary was inclined to take the affair as a practical joke, but Peter Winn, after an examination of the pigeon, thought otherwise.