(_b_) Another situation which is closely related to play is that of being teased. By “teasing” is here understood those varieties of attack which have in them an element of pretence, and do not cross the boundary line of serious intention to annoy. As thus defined, teasing enters into a good deal of child’s play. Tickling is clearly only a special modification of the teasing impulse. In some of the earliest nursery play, the game of bo-peep, for instance, there is an element of teasing in the pretence to alarm by a feigned disappearance, as also in the shock of the sudden reappearance. The teaser of a child, whether he threatens to pinch him or to snatch at his toy, carries out a menace; but it is a make-believe menace—a thing to be a wee bit afraid of for just a moment, yet so light and passing as to bring instantly the delightful rebound of disillusion, if only the subject keeps good tempered. On the teaser’s side (when it remains pure teasing) it is prompted by no serious desire to torment, by no motive more serious than the half-scientific curiosity to see how the subject of the experiment will take it. The explosions of a good-humoured subject under such gentle teasing are closely analogous to those of a tickled child: they spring from a sudden sense of relief, of elastic rebound, after repression. The swift alternations of moments of nascent fear and of joyous recognition of the fun of the thing are eminently fitted to supply the conditions of a sudden rising of the spirits. The child that likes to be {78} teased—in the proper way of course—is perfectly willing to pay for these momentary delights by the momentary trepidations. On the side of the teaser, the situation is also highly favourable to outbreaks of hilarity. If successful, he reaps the joy of the superior person, and glories in the cleverness of his experiments. The swellings of the sense of power as he watches his victim give just those experiences of “sudden glory” which a philosopher places at the base of all enjoyment of the laughable; and, alas, in the less kindly these risings of the pleasurable consciousness may continue and even increase after the teasing has ceased to be play and becomes indistinguishable from the behaviour of a tormentor.[51] (_c_) Much the same kind of remark applies to practical joking, which, when it is not weighted with the serious purposes of punishment and moral correction, is merely an expansion of this playful attack of the tickler and the teaser. When the victim reaches the moral height of being able to enjoy the performance, his enjoyment comes under the head of dissolved apprehension, or disillusion after taking things too seriously. By far the larger share of the pleasure of the practical joke certainly falls, however, to the perpetrator, who in this case, too, realises a “sudden glory,” an increased sense of power.