Teasing and "Kidding"

We all know teasing and kidding when we see it. Teasing and kidding in textual form are not so easy to recognize, since they depend for their interpretation on body language, facial expression and voice tone. In writing we might have to append "just kidding"in order to keep from being misunderstood.

Some forms of teasing are really forms of verbal abuse and bullying. I'm not talking about that kind of teasing now. For the purposes of this article, I'm referring to the kinds of things we say and do to people with whom we are friendly.

We want the teasing of friends not to be taken seriously. Frequently the content of a tease is on the edge of meanness or hurtfulness. In fact, it has to have the potential of being hurtful to meet the requirements for a tease. If a tease were totally irrelevant to the person being teased, there would be no point in it. In fact, the person being teased would be perplexed by it. A tease is an apparently hostile statement intended not to be taken seriously.

What are the rules and requirements for teasing, and what purpose does it serve in relationships? I'll start with the last question first. When we tease someone, we expect them to know us well enough to know we mean no harm. We rarely tease strangers.
Generally, the tease could literally be taken to be hurtful; it is the fact that hurtful intent is contradicted by the solidity of our relationship that makes it "funny". It is as if we were saying when we tease "You know I don't mean this because we like each other". In a way, the fact that one of us can tease the other reaffirms that our relationship is a positive one. Teasing is a way of increasing the trust in a relationship by reaffirming that we do not mean to hurt or cause harm. Sometimes teasing is a way of testing a new relationship in order to build it.

When we tease we have to send a duplex message (in the language of Transactional Analysis). The literal content of the tease is a critical statement. The covert content, carried by body language and tone or exaggerated content, is that we do not mean the message to be taken as true. The response, to be appropriate, must acknowledge that the recipient does not take the message to be true and is therefore not offended. The relationship has then survived a minor "test" and is shown to be a positive one.

The content must be relevant to the person teased, in the sense that it has to be a critical statement that could possibly be true. It has to have the potential to be harmful; the teasee affirms his trust in the teaser by not taking it seriously when he easily could do so. The relationship is therefore strengthened to a small degree. A tease that is totally irrelevant to the person being teased is simply meaningless.

Teasing may also be a form of flirtation. Sexual teasing is a way of indicating sexual interest in the other person which is at the same time plausibly deniable. If the person being teased isn't interested in a sexual relationship with the teaser, the teaser can easily retreat into the classic teaser position of "just kidding", or "I didn't really mean it that way". While it shares the overt intention of "strengthening the relationship" with regular teasing, the sexual tease is only aimed at strengthening the sexual aspect of the relationship, and if that is rejected by the person being teased, the relationship may well be weakened.