Happy April Fools Day!

Pulling pranks on April 1st is a tradition that dates back more than 500 years and its become not only a day that we tolerate fake headlines, pranks and practical jokes, but we’ve come to expect it. In honor of this day of the naive and unsuspected, I thought I’d share with you a few of my favorite April Fools pranks. They’re sure to put a smile on your face 🙂

The British Media is notorious for their attempts at duping their audiences and I’d have to say that this video from 1957 on harvesting spaghetti from trees in Switzerland is priceless. The BBC was rushed with inquiries from people wanting to know how to cultivate their own spaghetti trees. You can watch the video here on You Tube.

Even during World War I, April Fools was honored. On April 1, 1915 a French pilot flew over a German camp and dropped what appeared to be a huge bomb. Immediately the German soldiers started scattering in all directions, but then no explosion happened. Carefully the soldiers crept back and approached the bomb, only to discover that it was actually a large football with a note tied to it that read, “April Fool!”

Taco Bell once got in on the action, announcing that they had bought the Liberty Bell and would be renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. National Historic Park in Philadelphia was flooded with calls from outraged citizens, but all was calmed down when a few hours later they revealed that it was a practical joke. When the White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale he was quick on his feet and responded that they had also sold the Lincoln Memorial and it would now be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.

On April Fools Day in 1965 a Copenhagen newspaper, reported that the Danish parliament had passed a new law requiring all dogs to be painted white to increase road safety by allowing dogs to be seen more easily at night. 

 When readers opened up their newspaper on April 1, 2997, they were quick to discover that all of their favorite comic strips looked a little weird, as characters from other strips were popping up all over the place. The Great Comics Switcheroonie, the brainchild of Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott (the creators of the Baby Blues comic strip), involved 46 comic strip artists taking over each other’s strips for the day. For example, Dagwood was taken over by Jim Davis of Garfield, who showed his famously overweight cat eating one of Dagwood’s sandwiches, and Scott Adams of Dilbert took over Family Circus with a little of his corporate flair (see above).

In 1976 the BBC were at it again, this time with British astronomer Patrick Moore announcing on BBC Radio 2 that a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. At 9:47 AM the planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity. Moore told the listeners that if they jumped in the air at that exact moment, they would experience a strange floating sensation. At 9:47 AM the radio station began to get a flood of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room. Reminds me of a scene out of Mary Poppins.

Once on April Fools, Australia’s This Day Tonight news program revealed that the country would soon be converting to “metric time.” Under the new system there would be 100 seconds to the minute, 100 minutes to the hour, and 20-hour days. Furthermore, seconds would become millidays, minutes become centidays, and hours become decidays. They even included an interview with Deputy Premier Des Corcoran who praised the new time system and changed the Adelaide townhall clock to have a new 10-hour metric clock face. The picture above shows Adelaide reporter Nigel Starck posing with a smaller metric clock. They received numerous calls from viewers who fell for the hoax, including one frustrated viewer who wanted to know how he could convert his digital clock to metric time.

In 1978, Dick Smith, a millionaire businessman and adventurer from Sydney, was proudly promoting a scheme that he would tow an iceberg from Antarctica. On April 1st, it appeared that he had succeeded when a large barge appeared in Sydney Harbor towing a giant iceberg. Smith said that he would carve the iceberg into small ice cubes that locals could purchase for 10 cents each, promising that because the water was so fresh the ice cubes would make any drink taste better. As the iceberg slowly made its was into the harbour it started to rain, and the firefighting foam and shaving cream that it was really made of washed away, living white plastic sheets underneath. Everyone had been duped, even the local radio stations that had been running a play-by-play.

As the final joke of the day, here is a great little video clip that the BBC put together a few years ago, about some interesting penguins that they found 🙂