Horse around

Can we quit horsing around and get some work done?

Stop horsing around with the controls, before you break something.

As Norah Jones coos sweet nothings on the soundtrack, the happy couple—played by Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler—canoodle through a Manhattan montage, making pasta for two, swimming through a pile of autumn leaves, and horsing around at a fruit stand.

A novel about writing a novel; a narrator who is and is not the author; general metafictional horsing around reflecting both the author’s and reader’s ambivalence about the novel.

"Genghis Khan! Abe Lincoln! That’s funny until someone gets hurt." But Genghis Khan and Lincoln keep horsing around.

I told him that if I passed out before we got to a hospital I wanted him to see to it that no quack horsed around with my leg.