April Fools’ Day
Keep your wits about you today. There’s a very good chance that you’ll see an announcement or headline that looks somewhat odd or suspicious.
Today is the first day of April: April Fools’ Day.
But where do we get the strange custom of playing pranks on 1 April? The short answer is that nobody knows for sure, and this ambiguity has in fact long been acknowledged.
“The first of April some do say, Was set apart for All Fools’ Day: But why the people call it so, Nor I nor they themselves do know,” begins an article in the San Francisco Call from 1 April 1900, discussing the history and customs of “April Fools’ Day”.
Some have proposed that the modern custom originated in France, with the Edict of Roussillon (promulgated in August 1564), in which Charles IX decreed that the new year would no longer begin on Easter, as had been common throughout Christendom, but rather on 1 January. Because Easter was a lunar and therefore moveable date, those conservatives who clung to the old ways were referred to as the “April Fools”.
There are variations between countries in the celebration of April Fools’ Day.
In Ireland, it was traditional to entrust the victim with an “important letter” to be given to someone. That person would read the letter, then ask the victim to take it to someone else, and so on. The letter when opened contained the words “send the fool further”.
In France, the fooled person is called poisson d’avril (“April fish”), perhaps in reference to a young fish and hence to one that is easily caught. On this day it is common for French children to pin paper fish to the backs of unsuspecting friends.
The timing of the prank is relevant. In many countries, a person playing a prank after midday on 1 April is considered the “April fool” themselves.
Newspapers and other media throughout the world often get into the trickster spirit and participate with false headlines or news stories. In one famous prank in 1957, the BBC broadcast a film in their Panorama current affairs series purporting to show Swiss farmers picking freshly grown spaghetti, in what they called the “Swiss spaghetti harvest”. The BBC was soon flooded with requests to purchase a spaghetti plant, forcing them to declare the film a hoax on the news the next day. Decades later CNN called this broadcast “the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled”.
Two more examples:
The National Geographic announced via Twitter in 2016 that they would no longer be publishing photographs of naked animals.
In 1978, newspapers and radio stations were abuzz when Australian businessman and adventurer Dick Smith towed what appeared to be an iceberg into Sydney Harbour. He said he’d towed it from Antarctica to solve Sydney’s water shortage.
When genuine news is reported on April Fools’ Day, there is a risk, of course, that it will be misinterpreted as a joke and ignored. The lesson there is to try not to be born or to die on the first day of April, if you can possibly manage that.
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