independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-big-question-how-did-the-april-fools-day-tradition-begin-and-what-are-the-best-tricks-1658944.html


Why are we asking this
now?
Because it's that day again:
after another boring 364
days of sober honesty all
round, the beloved annual
festival of practical jokery is
upon us once more. If you're
reading this before midday,
it's your one chance in the
year to pull the wool over
somebody's eyes with
impunity.



So why are the rules
different on 1 April?


The stories surrounding the origin of April
Fool's Day are widely various and it's hard to
be certain about the truth – especially when
you consider that people feel they have
carte blanche to make things up when it
comes to this subject. Still, whether it's true
or not, one popular tale dates the tradition
to 1564, when France formally changed its
calendar to the modern Gregorian version,
and thereby moved the celebration of the
New Year from the last week of March to 1
January. In this version of events, those who
continued to celebrate the end of New Year's
Week on 1 April were derided as fools – or,
as they are known in France, poissons
d'Avril. The problem with that story is that
the adoption of the new calendar was a
gradual process that took place over a
century, making the ridicule of those who
continued to celebrate the old date seem
unlikely.

Are there any other explanations?

Lots. Alex Boese, the curator of the online
Museum of Hoaxes, points to a worldwide
tradition of "renewal festivals", which can be
found in many different cultures, and
frequently involve ritualised chaos. It seems
likely that the modern version is a mutated
variant of these predecessors. In ancient
Rome, for instance, the Hilaria festival
celebrated the resurrection of a demigod
with the donning of disguises; and the
medieval Feast of Fools, wherein a Lord of
Misrule was elected to parody Christian
rituals, endured centuries of church
censorship.
There is even a British legend, which places
the festival's origin in the Nottinghamshire
town of Gotham. The story goes that in the
13th century, the town's residents heard
that King John could claim any road on
which he stepped as his property and so
they accordingly refused the monarch entry.
When his soldiers arrived to force their way
in, the residents of Gotham pretended to be
lunatics, and King John decided that their
madness meant that the punishment that
would have otherwise been meted out
would be inappropriate. According to this
story, April Fool's Day celebrates their
sneakiness. It is, unfortunately, totally
uncorroborated by hard evidence.


Why does the tradition expire at noon?


That feature probably relates to the
customary boundaries of the old renewal
festivals, which limit the mayhem to a very
strict timeframe. The source of Britain's
deadline might be the 17th century's well-
named Shig-Shag day, when celebrants put
oak sprigs in their hats to show loyalty to
the monarchy, in reference to Charles II's
hiding in an oak tree. Those who failed to
observe the custom could only be ridiculed
until midday. These days, anyone who plays
a prank after noon is supposedly an "April
fool" themselves; this nice observation may
not seem so crucial to anyone who has been
custard pied at 12.01pm, but it
distinguishes our version of the ritual from
that found in other countries.


Do people really still play April Fool's
tricks?


The problem with the modern April Fool's is
that pranks are so thoroughly embedded
into our culture that a day specifically
devoted to them can almost seem
redundant. Television shows like Beadle's
About and Candid Camera and their
successors have made most of us so inured
to the prospect of a practical joke that
whenever anything goes wrong we are liable
to start looking for a hidden camera.
One (totally unscientific, it should be noted)
survey in 2004 found that just 23 per cent
of people had been part of a prank at work.
A similar exercise last year found that 60
per cent of those who did not play tricks
avoided doing so because they were
concerned about the gag backfiring. If that
seems unduly cautious, consider the fate of
poor old Glenn Howlett, a Canadian council
worker who was sent a joke memo by
colleagues that notified him that he had to
present a major report in two weeks.
Howlett, failing to notice the date, rushed
back from a holiday to start work on it – and
promptly suffered heart palpitations, went
on full-pay leave as a result of stress, and
eventually took early retirement. In our
litigious age, it's not surprising if many
people decide that the risks are simply too
great.


So does the April fool live on at all?


Certainly. In place of the domestic japery
that once brightened up the first of the
month is a cheerful new tradition of media
pranks, which stand every chance of success
thanks to the supposed authority of the
perpetrators. In this format, astonishingly
convoluted stunts, which may be the results
of significant amounts of work by a large
team of people, are perpetrated every year;
every now and then, one of them enters our
modern April Fool's folklore.


How did this new tradition begin?


The first great April fool of the media age,
arguably not beaten to this day, came from
the unlikely source of the BBC's
documentary strand Panorama. In a
magnificent 1957 jape that drew much of its
power from the fact that no one would have
believed that such an august programme
would stoop so low, it reported on
Switzerland's spaghetti farmers, who
tended long, thin fields of the pasta-based
crop. "Many of you, I am sure, will have seen
pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in
the Po valley," the voiceover intoned, before
adding that this year had seen a record crop
thanks to "the virtual disappearance of the
spaghetti weevil". The item provoked an
avalanche of letters.
Have there been similar tricks since?
These days, it's hard to get through a
newspaper on 1 April without encountering
one. And while it's hard for any to have
quite such an impact as that first effort, the
media-savvy public are still occasionally
duped. Our friends at The Guardian scored a
notable hit with its 1977 effort – a special
report on the republic of San Serriffe, an
Indian Ocean nation that consisted of the
islands of Upper and Lower Caisse, with the
capital of Bodoni – while this newspaper's
finest hour arguably came in 1990, when a
report claimed that the Mona Lisa's smile
had been revealed by a careful cleaning
process as a later overpainting hiding the
original picture's sulking frown.
These days the most elaborate hoaxes tend
to be perpetrated by corporations, which see
in them priceless publicity potential. The
modern standard-bearer is surely Google,
which has in recent years unveiled a pigeon-
based search algorithm, a research centre
on the moon, and a broadband system that
runs through the toilet.