Why do we pull pranks on April Fools' Day? A history of record-breaking hoaxes

Pranksters and practical jokers will be in seventh heaven on Wednesday, 1 April – April Fools’ Day. Once again, it’s open season for tricks and elaborate hoaxes, an annual opportunity to pull the wool over someone’s eyes. So join us, as we dip into a fool’s paradise of record-breaking ruses and jaw-dropping japes.

When did it all begin? Short answer: no one really knows, but we’ve been dedicating a day to duping each other for centuries. One possible source for April Fools’ Day is Hilaria, an ancient Roman festival devoted to general merriment. Centuries later, the French poem Le livre de la deablerie, or The Book of Deviltry (1508), by Eloy D’Amerval, refers to a poisson d’avril – someone made to look a fool (literally an “April fish”), though not necessarily on 1 April.

As far as we know, the oldest known reference to April Fools’ Day comes in a poem from 1561, the title of which translates roughly as: “Refrain on errand-day / which is the first of April”. Written by the Flemish author Eduard de Dene, the comic piece describes a servant whose master asks him to perform a string of pointless tasks. The unlucky lackey knows these are “fool’s errands” because the date is 1 April.

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Whatever its origins, April Fools’ Day offers a welcome break from the serious side of life. Conventionality takes a brief holiday, much as it does during carnival season in many countries.

On April Fools’ Day 2000, the first Google hoax – aka the “MentalPlex Hoax” – dropped. It invited users of Google search to stare at an animated gif on its homepage and project a mental image of what they wanted to find on the world wide web. Want to try it for yourself? You’re in luck: Google has archived the site, which you can access here. Clearly, the tech-heads behind the world’s largest search engine are fond of a spot of tomfoolery. On 1 April 2002, Google announced that it had developed a new algorithm – “Pigeon Rank” – that used trained pigeons to rank search results. Needless to say, Google’s claim of using “low-cost pigeon clusters (PCs)” was pure coo-coo!

On April Fools’ Day 2008, YouTube – the largest video-sharing website – linked all of its front-page-featured videos to the vid for “Never Gonna Give You Up”, by UK singer Rick Astley. Although many other websites followed suit, this remains the largest online rickroll – a portmanteau inspired by Astley’s name.

In 1998, fast-food franchise Burger King pranked customers with the idea of a “Left-handed Whopper”; Cottonelle mined a similar vein in 2015, tweeting that it was introducing loo paper for left-handers. Even the respectable BBC isn’t immune to practical jokes. Famously, on 1 April 1957 its current-affairs show Panorama included a feature about Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from trees. On April Fools’ Day in 1976, they reported that gravity on Earth would decrease for a short time, owing to an unusual alignment of the planets. (Hordes of people phoned up the broadcaster, claiming to have felt the effects!) Four years later, the BBC World Service astonished listeners with the news that Big Ben’s faces would be updated to make them easier to read: henceforth, the famous bell tower would be known as “Digital Dave”! 

But why wait until 1 April to play tricks?

Big Ben didn’t really go digital. Photo by Marcin Nowak on Unsplash

On 30 October 1938, the American Columbia Broadcasting System radio network aired an adaption of H G Wells’s novel War of the Worlds by the Mercury Theatre repertory company, produced and directed by all-round genius Orson Welles. Much of the programme featured simulated news announcements about an invasion by Martians. The result? Widespread public panic. What’s more, the fake reports were cleverly introduced into the show, as if interrupting another programme, and this – coupled with a completely coincidental power failure in Washington State at the same time – made them seem all the more real. In fairness, Welles had signed off the programme by reassuring his audience that the whole thing was just a play (“and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian – it's Halloween!”). But by then, the damage had been done. Terrified citizens abandoned their homes, while radio broadcasters and police stations were deluged with phone calls. The momentous reaction to the Mercury Theatre’s hoax had generated some 12,500 articles in the newspapers within one month of its transmission. Still regarded as a landmark of broadcasting history, Welles’s War of the Worlds radio show generated the most successful fake news bulletins of all time.

Han van Meegeren (Netherlands, 1889–1947) was a highly skilled painter who profited hugely from his talent. But not in the conventional way. He specialized in faking works by the Dutch Golden Age masters Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch; so convincing were his copies that Meegeren eventually secured the highest career earnings for a forger. Estimates of his earnings vary, but it seems that by 1943 he could have netted upwards of £20 million ($26 million) in today’s money, while his property investments may have added more than 10 times that amount again. One of Meegeren’s master fakes – Vermeer’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery – was found in the collection of the high-ranking Nazi Hermann Göring. Meegeren confessed to this forgery after World War II, to avoid being thought of as a traitor. In fact, having fooled Göring reflected well on the master faker in the post-war world: although Meegeren was put on trial, he was condemned to just a year in prison. He died of heart failure on 30 December 1947, before serving his sentence. 

All of which suggests that hoaxes and pranks are wired into human psychology. So keep your wits about you this 1 April. Things may not be quite what they seem…

Header image: Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash