10 classic April Fool’s jokes

April 01, 2010

Cathal Kelly

The key to a great April Fool’s prank is you and your crushing gullibility.

It’s April 1st, for the love of Pete. It happens every year. How do you keep getting fooled? It’s not like any of this stuff passes the most basic sniff test.

Except for No. 10. Right, you know who? Right? Wrong.

1. Naked Ice Borer: Why is the best? Because unlike all the others, it’s not just baffling. It’s terrifying. In 1995, Discover unveiled a ferocious looking Arctic creature that could move through ice at astounding speeds and fed on penguins. Long before anyone could get Kurt Russell on the phone, the prank was revealed. Sadly for Discover, this is the best known of all their articles. And they were the first people to spot the moon.

2. Circles for Dummies: Since the value of pi is difficult to remember, the legislature in Alabama decided in 1998 to carve off an infinite number of decimal places and reduce the pivotal measure to plain ol’ 3.0. According to physicist Mark Boslough, who authored the article on the change, this also had the pleasant side-effect of reducing pi to its “Biblical” value. The article was meant as a joke, but the Internet gave it life. The state of Alabama still gets stick over this one. Not their fault. However, they haven’t come up with an excuse for inspiring this.

3. Sandwich stupidity: This prank was greeted with widespread mirth. It should have inspired a gang of vigilante vandals to burn down every public school in the Western hemisphere and then demand that they be built again – but functional this time.

Burger King announced in 1998 that it had finally solved that whole left-handed burger problem by moving the condiments 180 degrees. Sigh. It worked. Thousands asked for one — and we let them get away and breed. Many more demanded a right-handed version. Ditto. This is the sort of thing that would prompt a bankruptcy in Japan.

4. The real Kings: Britain’s Daily Mail is the undisputed champion of April Fool’s hoaxes. There’s the time the Queen went to bet the horses, the decision to move Stonehenge and potato chips that make no noise (Hey, why isn’t anyone working on that one?)

Their best? How about the 1982 installment, where they warned readers that a defective batch of bras, made with copper, were interfering with TV signals across the country?

According to legend, the chief engineer at British Telecom was snookered, and demanded that all female employees do a bra check. At least, that’s what he told the disciplinary inquiry later.

Don’t look so smug, Daily Mail. The reason your gags work is that all of your stories read like April Fool’s jokes.

5. Sidd Finch: A British orphan, a yogic guru and a man capable of throwing a baseball so hard it emitted a sonic boom on the way to the batter’s box, Finch was created by George Plimpton for a 1985 edition of Sports Illustrated. Two thousand readers responded, most notably the New York Mets, who were reported to have the inside track to signing Finch and his “168 m.p.h.” fastball. That is, if he agreed to give up his career as a professional player of the French horn.

A week after printing Plimpton’s piece, SI reported that Finch had suddenly lost the ability to hit the plate. A week after that, they admitted Finch was an April Fool – after the Mets gave him a $125 million (U.S.) signing bonus.

6. Gravity temporarily suspended: Proving that radio listeners really should get out more, the BBC’s 1978 audience was told that a temporary realignment of the planets was going to reduce Earth’s gravity for a few moments. Many phoned in to say they’d felt the change — by jumping up and down. One household claimed to have floated around the room. Today, these are the same people cashing out their life savings in anticipation of 2012.

7. Er, radio again: What is it about radio? If there’s something you should take out of this piece, people, it’s that you can’t trust radio. Or TV. Or the Internet. Stick to newspapers. We lie straight to your face, but don’t try to weasel out of it later with the old, “Oh, I don’t think that’s what I said.”

Anyway, San Diego DJ Dave Rickards told listeners in 1993 that the space shuttle was about to make an emergency landing at a local air strip. Thousands showed up because, you know, what’s a space shuttle crash unless it has a large crowd to crash into?

8. Lung buster: It’s 1934. As far as you’re concerned, science makes about as much sense as black magic. The only thing you really believe in is The New York Times. So when The New York Times tells you that a German inventor has created a flying device that he can strap to his body, you believe them. And when they tell you that this device works by blowing into it, you shrug and say, “Okay,” because there’s a picture. Later, you bother people at dinner parties by wondering why the troops aren’t already in Tokyo, since we have those blow-flying thingies.

9. Spaghetti Trees: The granddaddy of them all. The BBC tells viewers that the 1957 spaghetti crop has been devastated, then shows a thriving spaghetti farm in Switzerland, complete with rustic pickers removing cannolis and such from trees. Ha, ha. Many later questioned the intelligence of the British. Unfair. This only proves exactly how backward they are about cookery. Sadder still is the fact that the British didn’t learn to boil pasta before 1985. This also explains their teeth.

10. Enright v. Carter: As April Fool’s jokes go, this 2001 prank wasn’t barn-burning stuff. CBC Radio planted host Michael Enright on one side of the mic and comedian Ray Landry, posing as former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, on the other. Tepid fireworks over (yawn) softwood lumber ensued, but the joke achieved epic status when one of this nation’s newspapers of record (note: not this one) played the story straight-up on the front page the next day.

Source: San Diego’s http://www.museumofhoaxes.comMuseum of HoaxesEND