April Fool’s Day and I have an understanding: I don’t like it, and it doesn’t care.
Every year on April 1, I wake up already suspicious. I don’t trust the news. I don’t trust my email. I don’t trust the weather. If someone tells me the sky is blue, I look up just to confirm they’re not setting me up for something involving a camera phone and public humiliation.
I am not a prank person. I don’t enjoy being the subject of jokes, and I don’t particularly enjoy playing jokes on others. This puts me at a philosophical disadvantage on April Fool’s Day, which appears to be designed specifically for people who enjoy confusion, mild cruelty, and the phrase, “Relax, it’s just a joke.”
I have never liked that phrase.
For one thing, jokes should end with laughter. April Fool’s jokes often end with someone feeling foolish, which seems less like comedy and more like an unannounced lesson in trust issues. I don’t like surprises in general, unless they involve cake or an unexpected day off.
The problem with April Fool’s Day is that it requires participation. Even if you don’t want to play, you’re still playing. You are forced into a world where nothing is real for 24 hours, and everyone feels obligated to try to be clever.
Now, I will admit there have been some famous April Fool’s jokes that were genuinely impressive. The gold standard is the 1957 spaghetti tree hoax aired on the BBC program Panorama, in which viewers were solemnly informed that Swiss farmers were harvesting spaghetti from trees. Thousands of people believed it. This was a simpler time, when people trusted television and did not immediately Google things like “tree spaghetti real?”
That was a prank with effort. Research. Commitment. A straight face. Compare that to today’s April Fool’s jokes, which usually involve changing someone’s phone language to something obscure and then watching them panic.
Most April Fool’s jokes today involve someone screaming, someone spilling coffee, or someone announcing life-altering news and then laughing while the other person tries to restart their heart. I don’t find that funny. I find that medically irresponsible.
Another issue is that April Fool’s Day assumes everyone enjoys being fooled. I don’t. I like clarity. I like knowing where I stand. If you tell me something, I would prefer it be true, or at least mostly true, with only a small footnote explaining the lie.
I have friends who love April Fool’s Day. They plan for it. They think about it weeks in advance. They get that look in their eyes — the one usually reserved for game show contestants and people about to yell, “Gotcha!” These are not my people.
I also don’t like pranking others because I worry about unintended consequences. What if the joke goes too far? What if someone cries? What if the prank backfires and I end up apologizing for the rest of the day? That’s not a prank. That’s a part-time job.
So on April 1, I lay low. I avoid practical jokers. I double-check everything. I assume every headline is fake and every announcement is a setup. Frankly, I think that might be the healthiest approach.
If April Fool’s Day must exist, I would like to propose a compromise: jokes that are harmless, obvious, and quickly resolved. No fake engagements. No pretend firings. No jokes that require therapy afterward.
Until then, I will spend April Fool’s Day doing what I always do — minding my business, trusting no one, and waiting patiently for April 2, when the world becomes unreliable in its normal, everyday ways again.
My View From the cheap seats 