Sometimes I want to join the fun, or “fun,” when April Fool’s Day rolls around. In theory, it’s a chance for fun—a day where it’d be okay to run a made-up article to make people laugh:
Oxford English Dictionary details all 1,227 meanings of the word “smurf”
New slang term “conzoomers” is extremely popular with middle-aged, upper-class marketing staffers
Meet nine-foot-tall puzzlemaster Will Longz
Wordle launches its presidential campaign with work-week of answers: TRUMP, BIDEN: WRONG, HATED, ANILE.
OpenAI releases new “DadGPT,” capable of groanworthy puns in response to any prompt
But I always feel awkward about joining the crowd of merry liars. In the early days of the internet, a lot of online culture was a little jokey. When Jon Stewart joined The Daily Show, the program could call itself “fake news” with an untroubled grin. But nowadays fake news is a real problem, and putting deliberate falsehoods online feels like adding to it, even if the only aim is laughter.
Poe’s Law says that without a clear indicator of intent, any parody of extreme ideas can be mistaken as sincere. Likewise, a parody headline can sometimes look enough like a real one to be confusing. I feel like the five headlines I tried above are mostly silly enough to “register” as false, but the DadGPT idea gets more plausible if you know about Witscript, and there are people online trying to make the word “conzoomers” happen.
Today, a lot of the April Fools’ experience boils down to watching companies make bogus product announcements like the Pokemon Sleep World Champions Tournament and Confident: The Video Game (a fictional spinoff of Issa Rae’s TV series Insecure). Sometimes they’ll announce what seems to be a joke but is in fact real—that’s how Gmail got started, twenty April Fool’s Days ago.
But the emphasis on pranks still feels like it belongs to a culture that’s no longer ours, a world where our real relationships outnumbered any virtual ones, and a few playful misdirections couldn’t touch the trust that underlay them. Maybe that was never our world, but it was easier to tell ourselves it was, once upon a time.
A few years ago, Jesse David Fox suggested switching April Fools’ focus from pranks to comedy and jokes that announce themselves as such. I think there’s something to Fox’s idea. Down with bogus headlines trying to imitate The Onion, up with comedy film festivals and sitcom binge-watch parties. If the companies need something to sell, try some small joke books or greeting cards. Greeting cards are usually better when they’re funny, anyway.
Of course, there’s no shortage of comedy in our lives—it’s a category in our streaming networks, for a start. But there’s no shortage of candy in our lives either, yet we still make that a part of our Halloween celebrations. And our Easters. And our Valentine’s Days, and our Christmases if we’re being honest…
Okay, maybe we have a bit of a junk food problem. Still, in today’s high-stress world, setting some time aside to laugh is a much healthier habit than processed sugar. And it’s probably healthier than trying to figure out how to lie to people just right, too.