April Fool’s Day

I’m not actually all that fond of April Fool’s Day on the Internet. I'm not seriously opposed to it or anything, I just don't love it. The problem is two fold and I’ll explain both here. The first is that there isn’t much originality going on. As my own deliberately straight faced and not funny gag exposed, rickrolling was the official APD prank for April 2008. This is sad because it’s at least a month or two since I first saw it and it wasn’t all that funny the first time. I suppose it’s nice and harmless that way, but not all that funny. At least I didn’t spend any time on my lame non-joke though. I got the link from someone else.

You can only hope to trick someone by being the first joke they see, or by being so clever that you can bend spoons with your fingers and trick people into thinking you did it with your mind. I like funny gags, but the same gag over and over doesn’t do anything for me. I couldn’t think of anything beyond a retread of my famous* spring-snakes gag so I went with that. It wasn’t funny, and that was the point.

The second problem is a bit more difficult to explain why it’s a problem. News sites tend not to delete their old April Fool’s Day articles when the day is done. So you’ve still got gags like this one from Cinematical floating around years later. The problem then becomes when someone, looking for information about something, stumbles upon one of these jokes later. Granted this example can be easily refuted, by simply clicking the last link, but they’re not always so easily decoded.

Hol once found an article about some new fabric or other that was supposed to go into production sometime. Now, it was January when she read this story, but the article was dated April 1^st, so she couldn’t tell if it was meant as a joke or if it was just a piece of vaporware or what. It makes anything posted with an April 1^st date suspect the rest of the year.

I think I prefer pranks that are more dependent on the person actually being there and coning you. It’s like a magic trick in a way. I don’t want a description of a magic trick, even watching a video is somewhat underwhelming. What I really want is to be right there while the trick is being done, preferably while looking the practitioner in the eye. For me, a lot depends on the veracity of the person pulling the gag, and how they handle the joke.

Anyway, if you want to read about some famous jokes, there is a list of the Top 100 APD Hoaxes at the Museum of Hoaxes you can read.

*It will be famous after I write it. It seems I’ve never told this story before.