Interestingly, there is no definitive origin story for April Fool’s Day.
The commonly repeated tale is that on this day, people play hoaxes or pranks for fun, how far back to 1582 when France made the transition from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as dictated by the Council of Trent in 1563.
Before Pope Gregory XIII introduced his updated calendar in 1582, Europe was following the Julian calendar, implemented by Roman Emperor Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. The new year in this calendar began with the spring equinox around April 1. Those who didn’t make the switch and continued celebrating the new year on April 1 later became the targets of jokes and earned the satirical title of “April fools.”
Two other theories also exist. One connects April Fools’ Day to the ancient Roman festival of Hilaria or Festival of Joy, which was observed from March 25 and dedicated to the goddess Cybele. The other associates April 1 with the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere, where the changing, unpredictable weather can be amusing and misleading.
Pranks over the years have seen individuals being labeled with paper fish on their backs, known as “poisson d’avril” or April fish in French, indicating gullibility. Modern-day pranks have a wide range, with establishments such as airlines, museums, and zoos all participating in the tradition on April 1.
In 2010, Denmark’s State National Historic Museum released a handout featuring a skeletal version of the famous “The Little Mermaid” tourist attraction. The next year, staff at the Bristol Zoo Gardens performed tasks naked, presenting it as a fictional experiment to study the sensory sensitivity of gorillas. In 2017, London’s Madame Tussauds Wax Museum showcased a special installation of “The Invisible Man.”
The press, traditionally considered the providers of truth, also participates in April Fools’ Day by temporarily releasing their inner fiction writers. Notable examples include the BBC’s April Fool’s Day in 1957, where their flagship current-affairs program Panorama aired a video of a family in southern Switzerland supposedly harvesting a “spaghetti tree.” Many viewers subsequently called the BBC inquiring about growing their own spaghetti trees.
In the current era where news can spread virally through social media, there is a risk of jokes being mistaken as true news and making global headlines, potentially damaging the credibility of the media and worsening the already prevalent issue of fake news. For example, the website Futurism.com published an article in 2017 headline “Pluto Has Been Officially Reclassified As A Planet!” without the audience realizing it was an April Fool’s joke.
In recent years, many publishers and media organizations have had to carefully consider whether participating in April Fool’s pranks could potentially be perceived as spreading misinformation. This has led to a decline in the tradition of publishing April Fool’s stories.
Magnus Karlsson, the editor-in-chief at Swedish daily Smålandsposten, stated on the newspaper’s website, “We deal with real news. Even on April 1st.” Dictionary publisher Collins’ decision to name “fake news” the 2017 word of the year also led to various newspapers worldwide forgoing the tradition of publishing April Fool’s stories.
Purposefully abstaining from the tradition since 2020, Google explained that considering the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a time of misinformation, it felt jocularity was not appropriate.
Nonetheless, notable pranks continue to make headlines. For instance, in 1977, the British Guardian reported on the tenth Independence Day of the fictional tropical island of San Serriffe, complete with a map of the archipelago with places, ports, and spots that were all word plays of fonts and typefaces. In 1993, a German radio station announced that joggers could only run at a maximum speed of 10 kilometers (six miles) per hour through the city’s parks to avoid disrupting squirrels in their mating season.
In 2009, the Taipei Times claimed that the pandas at the Taipei Zoo were not what they seemed but were actually brown forest bears dyed to resemble pandas. In 2011, low-cost airline Ryanair’s press release promised to introduce “child-free” flights from October 2011, a concept which gained traction online. In 2016, National Geographic tweeted that they would no longer be publishing photographs of naked animals.
In 2023, US public broadcaster National Public Radio aired a segment about a supposed archaeological dig at the “Roman Ridiculum Amphitheater” where university students found an ancient papyrus scroll featuring dad jokes. With fewer media outlets participating in pranks, brands have been stepping up to announce fake-yet-plausible new products on April 1.
Source: https://www.dw.com/en/april-fool-s-day-why-the-press-is-now-avoiding-pranks/a-65171337?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf
