April 1st has been celebrated as April Fools’ Day for over 500 years. It is difficult to find one specific explanation for this long-standing day of pranks. It is likely the amalgamation of many Spring festivals like Hilaria (ancient Rome), Holi (India), Songkran (Thailand), Nowruz (Persia) and the medieval celebration of the Feast of Fools (festum fatuorum) during Saturnalia.
In 1582, the Gregorian calendar was adopted and moved the beginning of the year from April 1st to January 1st. In a time without the benefit of mass communication, many people just didn’t get the word or were confused by the new calendar and continued to celebrate the new year in April. They became the butt of jokes and hoaxes and were called “April fools.” These pranks included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as “poisson d’avril” (April fish), said to symbolize a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person.
Foolish pranks are mentioned on April 1st in the 14th century Chaucer’s Canterbury tales. There are mentions of April Fool’s in 17th and 18th century literature. In Scotland, the tradition became a two-day event, starting with “hunting the gowk,” in which people were sent on phony errands (gowk is a word for cuckoo bird, a symbol for fool) and followed by Tailie Day, which involved pranks played on people’s back sides, such as pinning fake tails or “kick me” signs on them.
The ‘WPA Folklore Project Life Histories’ from the late 1930s tell April Fool stories of sending new workers on a “Fool’s Errand” to find a left-handed wrench, which did not exist, and school children locking the teacher out of the schoolhouse.
In 1957, you may remember seeing the BBC report that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record spaghetti crop and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees. It made the news in the US.
In 1996, the Taco Bell fast-food chain announced it was buying the Liberty Bell and renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. In 1998, after Burger King was inundated by customers requesting a “Left-Handed Whopper,” after the April 1st advertisement. Google notoriously hosts an annual April Fools’ Day prank that has included everything from “telepathic search” to the ability to play Pac Man on Google Maps. Those Google April Fool pranks were avoided during the Covid years and have not returned to Google since.
Pay extra attention today to avoid falling prey to pranks.