April Fools Day Humor

I’ve never been a fan of random pranks, especially the ones where someone tries to get you to believe something that isn’t true just to make you look stupid.  Do people really get enjoyment out of that?  I assume you would have to be trying to prove for 10 seconds that you’re smarter than someone else to play a prank like that.  Or maybe you just have no sense of humor and it’s your best attempt at being funny.  If you can pull off a real prank, like something from Punk’d or Candid Camera, you have my respect.  Just tricking someone into believing something horrible or ridiculous for a few seconds is not a prank, it’s actually called “being annoying.”

So, in an attempt to find some actual humor in April Fools Day, I found some pranks that have been played over the years on a larger scale — here are some of my favorites that actually involved planning and creativity.

*In 1997, Alex Trebek and Pat Sajak switched television shows.  Trebek hosted Wheel of Fortune while Sajak hosted Jeopardy!.  Pat Sajak and Vanna White also appeared as contestants on Wheel of Fortune.  That night’s episode of Wheel of Fortune also used Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as an answer on one of their puzzles.

*The TV show “Panorama” on the BBC ran an episode in 1957 which showed the Swiss harvesting spaghetti trees.  They said that they were once again able to harvest spaghetti from trees now that the spaghetti weevil had been eliminated.  People were contacting the BBC asking how they could harvest their own spaghetti trees before they found out it had been a hoax.  (See video above.  I love how serious it is.)

*National Public Radio creates a ridiculous news story every year for April Fools Day.  They start off very serious and then continue to become more and more unbelieveable until people begin to realize what’s going on.  Last year they did a full report stating that the IRS was going to send consumer products instead of rebate checks to make sure that they were going back into the economy.  Hmm, that one doesn’t sound too unbelieveable…

*In 1985, L.A. Weekly printed an entire page of fake events that they said were going on that day in the city.  People showed up at the events to find that they didn’t really exist.  They were just stuck with a group of other confused Weekly readers.

And my favorite from last year…

*YouTube redirected all their main page videos to go to Rick Astley’s music video for “Never Gonna Give You Up,” a popular prank called “Rick Rolling.”  The song gets stuck in your head for days after hearing about two seconds of it, which makes this the most annoying yet entertaining prank to pull on anyone.