April Fool's Day

 

Origins unknown - may be linked to the Saturnalia of Ancient Rome

14th Century text by Chaucer "The Canterbury Tales" mentions it.

Earliest mention of a trick: "On 1 April 1698, several people were tricked into going to the Tower of London to "see the Lions washed".

Countries with the tradition on April 1st include:
Armenia, Germany, the Nordic Countries, Poland and even Lebanon and Iran

 

Ireland

In Ireland, it was traditional to entrust the victim with an "important letter" to be given to a named person. 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".

Snakes in Ireland? April Fool from BBC Wildlife
https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/reptiles/snake-clare-island-ireland

France

In France it is known as "Poisson d'Avril" (mentioned in 1508 poem)
This is also true in Italy, Belgium and French-speaking areas of Switzerland and Canada.

In Britain you can do April Fool's tricks (known as "PRANKS" or practical jokes) until 12 pm. After this the fool is the one doing the joking.

PRANKS

These can often be merely verbal pranks - such as telling someone some unbelievable news and when they "fall for" (believe without question) your fake news, you cry: "April Fool" to say they have been fooled and that your story is not true.

Newspapers will often print some ridiculous story as if it were true then in the following day's paper reveal it was a prank. One example from the 1970s - The respected Newspaper "The Guardian" printed an advertisement about an island in the Indian Ocean which was offering incredible investment opportunities. The Island was called  San Seriffe. Thousands of people contacted the telephone number in the paper to take advantage of the offer, only to be told it that they were April Fools.

The most famous prank from the 1950s was carried out by the BBC. Their black and white T.V. news showed women in peasant's clothes, harvesting spaghetti from the spaghetti trees (which were actually olive trees without fruit, but covered in cooked spaghetti). The narrator said this was the "Swiss Spaghetti Harvest". The women were shown cutting the spaghetti from the tree and laying it on the ground to dry in the sun before packaging it.

Another from the period when everyone had black and white televisions involved a narrator saying the BBC were testing colour television broadcasts. Viewers were told that they would seen a man for thirty seconds and to test the system people should write to the BBC explaining what colour the man's clothes, hair and eyes were. The screen went blank, then a man was shown simply standing still for 30 seconds. Then "normal" service was resumed.

Of course the image of the man was still in black and white, but the BBC received hundreds of mails from people who claimed they had seen the colours of the man's clothes and his hair and eyes. The power of suggestion is very strong.

Similar pranks, years later, included BBC claiming to test the transmission of odours. Different images were shown and again hundreds sent emails claiming to have noted the smells.

In 2008, the BBC reported on a newly discovered colony of flying penguins. An elaborate video was shown, featuring Monty Python actor Terry Jones walking with the penguins in Antarctica, and following their flight to the Amazon rainforest.

BBC Radio also had a number of great pranks:

In 1976, British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore told listeners of BBC Radio 2 that a unique alignment of two planets (Jupiter and Pluto) would result in an upward gravitational pull making people lighter at precisely 9:47 am that day. He invited his audience to jump in the air and experience "a strange floating sensation". Dozens of listeners phoned in to say the experiment had worked.

Pranks are not limited to Britain, of course,

In 1969, the public broadcaster NTS in the Netherlands announced that inspectors with remote scanners would drive the streets to detect people who had not paid their radio/TV licence. The only way to prevent detection was to wrap the TV/radio in aluminium foil. The next day all the supermarkets were sold out of aluminium foil.

In 1993 , in the USA, a radio station in San Diego, California told listeners that the Space Shuttle had been diverted to Montgomery Field, a small, local airport. Over 1,000 people drove to the airport to see it arrive in the middle of the morning rush hour. Of course, there was no shuttle flying that day.

DANGER - PRANKS AHEAD

Sometimes genuine reports have been ignored because they were issued on 1st April. In one case this was a Tsunami warning in Hawaii that some people ignored and died as a result.

When the joke goes wrong and leads to genuine grief in the real world, the perpetrators may be dismissed from their jobs as happened to a number of radio and TV announcers whose fake news caused panic in the general public, for false reports of volcanoes erupting, aliens landing or else jokes that some famous person had died. When the person reported dead did not see the joke and sued the company, the perpetrators were sacked!

Another first of the month tradition (only applicable to months with a "R" in them) involves going up to someone you haven't talked to yet that day and pinching and punching them while saying: "Pinch, Punch, first of the moth. No returns!" the latter menas they can't ht you back or risk bad luck.

 

There is also a tradition (to be performed on the first day of the) which is to remember to say, out loud: "Rabbit, Rabbit!" as soon as you wake up. This is supposed to bring good luck (but should not be uttered in months without an "R" in them.