joke vs mess about

joke

verb
  • To dupe in a friendly manner for amusement; to mess with, play with. 

  • To do or say something for amusement rather than seriously. 

noun
  • An amusing story. 

  • The root cause or main issue, especially an unexpected one 

  • A laughably worthless thing or person; a sham. 

  • Something that is far easier or far less challenging than expected. 

  • Something said or done for amusement, not in seriousness. 

mess about

verb
  • To play with; to toy with; to waste the time of (a person). 

  • To misbehave 

  • To be in a casual non-committal relationship 

How often have the words joke and mess about occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )