Sure, it’s not the most beloved holiday of all, but there’s a certain charm to today, aka April Fools’ Day. Whether you’ve been trying to make people laugh or just hating on today just a little bit, this informal holiday has long been celebrated every year on 1st April and it’s all about playing practical jokes and hoaxes on each other.
Image: French postcards for Poissons d’avril (wikipedia.com)
So why does today even exist? Origins vary, ranging from precursors such as Roman and Medieval festivals and Chaucer’s 1392 ‘Canterbury Tales’ telling the story of a vain rooster named Chauntecleer who is tricked by a fox. Another story links to French poet Eloy d’Amerval’s poem that refers to a poisson d’avril (literally, April Fish) which tells the tale of a nobleman who sent his servants on foolish errands on 1st April. Other legends include people being tricked to go to the Tower of London to ‘see the lions washed’ and weeklong New Year parties starting on the 25th March and ending on the 1st April.
While the origins of today may be a little fishy (ha ha), the holiday has been continually celebrated for years in different countries all over the world. In Scotland for example, April Fools’ Day is celebrated for two days (the second day revolves around pranks involving people’s butts, which is how the ‘kick me’ sign came to be), and if you’re tricked, you’re called an ‘April Gowk’ (FYI, Gowk means cuckoo). In Poland, the custom is to splash people with water, while the Portuguese enjoy throwing flour in victim’s faces. Meanwhile, and clearly drawing from Amerval’s poem, countries like France, Italy, Belgium and even French-speaking areas of Canada and Switzerland refer to today as ‘April Fish’ day. The prank is to attach fish-shaped paper cutouts onto victim’s backs without being noticed.
In keeping with the light-hearted and genuinely foolish attitude of today, One Small Seed decided to compile a list of our Top 5 best April Fools’ Days jokes ever played:
1) The Spaghetti Harvest
In 1957, the BBC aired a three-minute report about a spaghetti harvest. Many people expressed interest in buying the spaghetti. This is one of the first times that TV was used as an April Fools’ Joke.
2) Taco Bell buys Liberty Bell
In 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times announcing that they had purchased the Liberty Bell to ‘reduce the country’s debt’ and renamed it the ‘Taco Liberty Bell’. Hundreds of outraged citizens called the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the bell was housed to express their anger.
Image: twitter.com
3) Google MentalPlex & Google Nose
Google’s first April Fools prank was ‘MentalPlex’, a search engine that read your mind. Also, in 2013, Google told the world it had launched a new product called ‘Google Nose‘, complete with its own “aromabase”, using the tag line “smelling is believing”. What do wet dogs smell like? Google Nose!”
Image: Screen Shot
4) YouTube Hiatus
On 1 April 2013, YouTube announced that it would stop accepting videos and go into a decade-long hiatus to judge which clip submitted to the site should be awarded the title of “Best Video on the Internet”.
Image: www.timeslive.co.za
5) The Left-Handed Burger
In another case of marketing genius, fast-food chain Burger King announced a new left-handed Whopper in 1998 with a full-page ad in USA Today with ‘the condiments rotated 180 degrees’. The burger, it said, would be easier to hold for the 10 per cent of the population who are left-handed.
Image: www.ikonet.com
Keep a close eye out for April Fools Jokes today. We’ve already spotted the Cape Argus headlines ‘Shock Cape Bid for Winter Olympics’, the DA’s announcement that Helen Zille is planning to extend her house with a proposed budget of R246 million for inevitable cost overruns, and Varsity Newspaper shared the fact that the University of Cape Town is planning to open a Burger King on Upper Campus. Keep sharp today.
Here’s a video for some other top rated April Fools’ Pranks:
