clown around

Example: “Stop clowning around and help me set the table.”

Origin: "Clown" itself started out with no comic meaning at all — it comes from Low German and Scandinavian words like Icelandic klunni or Swedish kluns, meaning a clumsy lump of a person, and by the mid-1500s it named an unsophisticated country peasant rather than an entertainer. Only around 1600 did "clown" pick up its stage sense, the rustic fool or jester providing comic relief in a play. "Clown around," for behaving foolishly or playing the fool outside any actual theater, developed out of 19th-century circus and theatrical slang for performers joking behind the scenes, becoming an established phrase by the late 1920s.