Yes, it’s that time of year again. Unfortunately.
So in order to keep from cringing, let’s also make it the time to look at the ancient fertility rites (allegedly) behind April Fool’s.
Personally, I find April Fool’s to be rather corny and tiresome, which probably guarantees it’s due for a mass revival, underwritten by the entire Fortune 500.
But pranks have gotten harder and harder to get away with in the Age of Surveillance and AI, when anything can potentially be fact-checked, filmed or traced.
Which means we’ll never again see the like of one of the best-ever April Fool’s pranks, which aired on a Boston TV news show back in 1980:
WNAC-TV ended its 6 pm news broadcast with a bulletin reporting that Great Blue Hill in Milton had erupted and was spraying lava and ash onto nearby homes.
The report showed footage of lava flowing down a hillside (taken from the March 27 eruption of Mount St. Helens) and edited remarks from President Jimmy Carter (who expressed concern) and Governor Edward J. King (who called the situation “serious”).
According to reporter Jan Harrison, the disaster had been caused by a geological chain reaction set off by the eruption of Mount St. Helens a week earlier. At the end of the bulletin, Harrison held up a card that read “April Fools!”
Legendary. I think everyone involved got fired though. Some people just can’t take a joke.
WHO ARE THEY FOOLING?
Anyhow, let’s have another look at the precedents to this pseudo-holiday. This explanation seems to be the consensus favorite, though it’s still not set in stone:
(One theory) relates to the European transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. At the Council of Trent in 1563, Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull decreeing that Christian countries should adopt a new standardised calendar.
Now the internationally accepted calendar in the Western World, the Gregorian calendar was adopted due to its greater accuracy compared to the Julian calendar.
One consequence of the transition however, was that New Years Day moved from 1st April to the 1st January.
Although resisted by the Protestant countries in Europe, the new calendar was officially adopted by the Catholic states reasonably quickly. However, presenting the news of the transition across largely rural populations was a much slower task.
People who continued to celebrate the New Year at the end of March became the targets for jokes, pranks and hoaxes. This included having paper fish attached to their backs, and being called ‘April fish’, in reference to their supposed gullibility. — New Historian
The cityfolk always gotta dump on the rurals; that’s just the way it’s always been. Why else would you put up with living in a human zoo, right?
Read the rest here,
on the house.