practical joker

 ' Wally Shirra . . . was quite popular. He was a stocky fellow with a big wide open face was given to pranks, cosmic winks, fast cars, and all other ways of "maintaining an even strain," to use a Schirraism. He was a practical joker of the amiable sort. He would call up and say, "Hey, you gotta come over here! You'll never guess what I caught in the woods . . . A mongoose! I'm not kidding---a mongoose! You gotta see this thing!' And it would sound so incredible, you'd go over and take a look. Up on a table Wally would have a box that looked as if it had been converted into a cage, and he'd say: "Here, I'll open the top a little, so you can see him. But don't put your hand in, because he'll take it off for you. This baby is vicious." You'd lean down to take a look and---bango!---the lid flies open and this huge gray streak springs toward your face---and, well, my God, veteran aviators would recoil in terror, dive for the deck---and only then realize that the gray streak was some sort of fox-tail rig and the whole thing was a jack-in-the-box, Schirra-style. It was a broad joke, strictly speaking, but the delight Wally took in such things came in a wave, a wave so big that it swept you along in spite of yourself. A smile about a foot wide would spread over his face and his cheekbones would well up into a pair of cherub bellies, St. Nicholas-style, and an incredible rocking-druid laugh would come shaking and rumbling from his rib cage, and he'd say "Gotcha!" Schirra's "gotchas" were famous. Wally was one of those people who didn't mind showing their emotions, happiness, rage, frustration, whatever. But in the air he was as cool as they made them. For all his cutting up, Wally was absolutely serious about his career. '
     
--- 1979. TOM WOLFE. The Right Stuff. "Chapter 4 -- The Lab Rat." (Page 68). Bantam Book edition (ISBN 0-553-27556-9).