In my opinion, there is comedy and there are April Fools’ jokes. Comedy comes in all forms, any day of the year. April Fools’ jokes come one day a year and the only good ones are immediate and physical, or slow gotchas. The immediate ones are like putting tape on the water fountain with a pinhole in it, or whoopee cushions. Timeless classics that make you want to punch someone in the face because the joke is retarded AND you fell for it like a giant dumb-ass. The slow gotchas are the best though… present something that is just bordering on too far, plausible but not totally probable, and once you’ve hooked them with enough detail and spin, shove it over the edge and make people feel silly for believing you.
The problem with that second form is that you are literally getting people’s hopes up and then crushing them with comedy. Strangely, people don’t like that. So, most people who pull April Fools’ pranks usually just start over the edge and try to be funny from the get go. While I don’t doubt that many people put a lot of effort into their creations for this particular day and I admit that many of them are in fact funny, the art of the April Fools’ con is lost to most.
Thanks to living in Atlanta for a number of years, I had the good fortune to experience some truly inspired April Fools’ pranks at the hands of the old 99x morning show. A few examples:
- Releasing information about a new theme park under construction in the Atlanta area called Magic Island, which was to be entirely underground.
- A control room mishap that resulted in accidentally giving out Leonardo DiCaprio’s home phone number.
- Firing one of the Morning X DJs because she wasn’t pretty enough to be on the new Web Cam that the station was setting up.
Each of these were well done because they did their homework… they got buy in from management, from sponsors, from actors, and they sold it to the audience, remaining in character even in the face of being called liars. The joke wasn’t dumped on you in the space of a few seconds, it was slowly built over the course of two or three hours, the kind of investment into a prank you just don’t see that often. Sadly, 99x is dead and the Morning X is long gone. But I’ll always have my memories…
Anyway, I’m not going to link to any particular site for jokes today, but over at April Fools’ Day On The Web they keep a running list of all the jokes that people report. Wikipedia will run a list also. Very few of them will really fool you, but some of them are funny.
