For a guy named Gatto — Italian for “cat” — Joe Gatto sure loves dogs. “We have four now,” says the Lynbrook resident, one of the stars of truTV’s hidden-camera prank show “Impractical Jokers,” which begins its eighth season Thursday at 10 p.m. He and his wife, Bessy, “were up to five,” he says, “but we’d also adopted a senior” who has since died. “We rescued him from North Shore Animal League,” Gatto, 42, says. “We always adopt a senior to give him some love on his way out.”

This softer side of Gatto isn’t one we readily see on “Impractical Jokers,” in which he and his lifelong friends James “Murr” Murray, Brian “Q” Quinn and Sal Vulcano — collectively the comedy troupe The Tenderloins — assign themselves public pranks that more often than not involve embarrassing themselves rather than other people. Whoever does most poorly at it gets an even more miserable comic punishment.