April Fools' Day: The best gags, the worst lies, and the history of prank season
Pic: iStock
Though many holidays have cloudy origins, the history of April Fools’ Day is particularly blurry. Several competing claims for the day’s invention exist; some see the holiday’s sources in a storybook, while others consider it an evolution of joy by way of the springtime harvest.
One possible precedent is in the Greco-Roman festival Hilaria, a time which was celebrated on March 25. The festival honoured Cybele, an ancient Greek Mother of Gods, and its celebrations included parades, masquerades and jokes to celebrate the first day after the vernal equinox.
With the shift from the Julian calendar to Gregorian in the 16th century––named for the switch up from Julius Caesar to Pope Gregory X111––this date changed to April 1, and jocular times ensued. (Another origin story involves the Tower of London in 1698, where unsuspecting tourists were convinced to observe the “washing of the lions”; a hoax that carried on for years, despite no felines ever setting foot in the capital’s tower.)
A historical prank which leads us to believe that April Fools' Day, or some iteration, was celebrated as far back as 1508, was "poisson d'avril," or "April fish,” a trick which included having a paper fish placed on a person's back. One of the first known references to this term is found in a 1508 poem written by Eloy d'Amerval.
Then, in 1561, an early, clear-cut reference to April Fools' Day appears in a Flemish poem written by Eduard de Dene. In the poem, a nobleman sends his servant out on a series of wild errands. The servant eventually realises that these are "fool's errands" because the date is April 1.
This tradition has evolved over the years with modern forms of media upping the ante on pranks, gags and tricks to differing results. Newspapers, radio, TV stations and websites have all participated in the tradition, making April 1 a day when everyone needs to be on their guard.
However, not all pranks are created equal. “I have a weird relationship with April Fools' Day,” author, journalist and Irish Examiner columnist Séamas O’Reilly shared.
“Because it often seems like a funny idea that's been done to death by the least funny people on the planet. Perhaps the one silver lining of covid is that it killed dead the Foolsmania that gripped the whole internet for a decade or so, where every different branch of say, Google, would have its own increasingly prolix fake announcement or product launch––a situation that was untenable and increasingly bereft of humour. I'm struggling to think of the last one that really 'hit'.”
As for the day that’s in it, O’Reilly insists the date is unimportant. “Pranks are for every day of the year, not just April 1.”
An example of this would be O’Reilly’s former commitment to the Metro Newspaper’s Rush-Hour Crush column. The segment, which featured in the newspaper’s sidebar, saw singles submit details on the strangers they fancied while en route to work, in the hopes that they would see it and contact the paper for their details. O’Reilly regularly sent submissions when bored in his former workplace, with “20 or so,” published. But arguably the best one reads thusly: ‘To the guy who got on at Bank dressed like Mr Chips from Catchphrase. Your cheeky smile reminds me of popular sayings. - Girl in Bring Back Hanging T-Shirt’.
When it comes to pranking in public, few personalities in Irish radio commit like Carl Mullan. The RTÉ broadcaster, whose relationship with hidden cameras is closer than some family members, just recently attempted to convince tourists in Dublin 2 that the famed Molly Malone statue was replaced with a clay replica of Late Late Show host Patrick Kielty. He was dressed as the sculptor.
“You know, with that kind of thing, you can get really bogged down with plastic prosthetics,” he says. “And you’re actually better off to go without. People either recognise you or they don’t, and lucky for me, a lot still don’t.”
His most elaborate prank, he says, involved a light case of car embellishment.
"There was this guy I used to work with who used to prank me the whole time, there was one time he swapped all the letters on my keyboard, that sort of thing. He had a Honda Civic and was obsessed with it. So one April Fools', we decided to polka-dot his car, which is essentially exactly as it sounds. I called up a business that made stick-on wraps for cars that business owners would use for their vans and asked the owner if he had any cut-offs that he could cut into circles and send me.
"He was so into the idea that he didn’t even charge me. Then one lunchtime, a group of us put hundreds of these stickers all over his car, including ones that said stuff like ‘Playa,’ or whatever, on the back.
"And the thing was, we knew he would have had to do at least one journey with these on because you needed a hairdryer or something with heat to take them off. He actually sold the car soon after and I think a few might still have been on.
"But yeah, he ended up getting a car he had wanted for a long time after, and if we had gone for that one, there would've been war. So we picked our battles, and that battle was polka dotting a Honda Civic."
Pranks on unsuspecting others are among the most enjoyable. But when it comes to someone you’re dating, the sky can really feel like the limit. When Kevin Twomey, former Weekend cover star and one-half of the podcast I’m Grand Mam was dating someone back in 2018, it was his turn to plan a date, so he decided to go fully unhinged.
"He was getting the bus to back London and I surprised him at the station with a bouquet of flowers,” Twomey shares.
"I then told him that to find out what we were actually doing for the date he would have to ask the barista of a nearby coffee shop for the clue––he just had to tell her the password which was Victoria (I met him at Victoria Coach Station.) I hadn’t planned this in advance, I remember just thinking it would be a scream. The boy went in and I watched the chaos unfold from outside the window.
"They both looked so confused and I was breaking my shit laughing. He came out and was not impressed at ALL unsurprisingly. Fortunately, I did have a really nice date planned after all but he was half allergic to me for the rest of the day.”"
And finally, when comic Fiona Frawley went in to work on April Fools' Day 2022, she and her team decided to take Irish food reviewing to a new level.
“I work at a food reviewing site, where we embark on painfully Irish quests like the search for the best chicken fillet roll in Dublin, the best spice bag in Ireland, you know yourself,” she says.
“Being long-time observers of the superiority of the soup served at Irish funerals in comparison with non-mourning themed broth, for April Fools' last year we pretended to be launching a new series, in which we’d travel the country tasting and reviewing the best funeral soups around. Most people didn’t bat an eyelid, to be honest. It does sound pretty real.”
- In 1940, the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia had its spokesperson, William Castellini, deliver a joke press release that read, "Your worst fears that the world will end are confirmed by astronomers of Franklin Institute, Philadelphia. Scientists predict that the world will end at 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time tomorrow. This is no April Fools' joke." Mass terror spread in Philadelphia, emergency lines were flooded, and Castellini was fired.
- In 2015, Manchester’s Police Department sent an April Fools' Day tweet that read: "Know someone in prison? You can get them released early by voting for them on here. The prisoners with the most votes also wins a holiday." Many took issue with it, especially because some of the people pictured had reportedly been convicted of violent crimes.
- In 2002, radio hosts in Kansas City created panic among listeners by reporting that local tap water contained high levels of dihydrogen monoxide. They warned that this naturally occurring substance could lead to frequent urination and wrinkling of the skin. (Dihydrogen monoxide is the chemical name for water.) The police received more than 100 calls from worried residents and a city official likened the hoax to a terrorist act.
- In 2010, Amman-based newspaper Al Ghad reported that an alien spacecraft had landed near the town of Jafr, Jordan, which led parents to keep their kids home from school and the mayor to nearly evacuate the town. The paper's editor Moussa Barhoumeh was forced to apologise, telling the Telegraph, "We meant to entertain, not scare people."
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