A day that needs no introduction! Young or old… and whichever part of the world! Today’s the day for pranks! April Fool’s Day is a day marked in everyone’s calendar to play practical jokes, hoaxes, jokes of varying sophistication on friends, family members, teachers, neighbors, work associates, etc.

While some countries such as New Zealand, Ireland, the UK, Australia, and South Africa, the jokes only last until noon, others extend it to a whole day of laughter!

Do you know that in 1708 a correspondent wrote in to the British Apollo magazine to ask, “Whence proceeds the custom of making April Fools?” The question is one that many people are still asking even today.  While the origins of this day are still obscure… the most commonly cited theory holds that it dates from 1582, the year France adopted the Gregorian Calendar, which shifted the observance of New Year’s Day from the end of March (around the time of the vernal equinox) to the first of January. While some folks out of ignorance, but others out of stubbornness, or maybe both, continued to ring in the New Year on April 1, they were made the butt of jokes and pranks on account of their foolishness! This continued ultimately spreading throughout Europe and today has become an annual tradition! However the difficulties with this explanation was that first it didn’t fully account for the spread of April Fools’ Day to other European countries – this calendar being adopted by England only in 1752, but April Fools’ Day already well established there at that point. Another one being there is no direct historical evidence for this explanation, only conjecture, and that conjecture appears to have been made more recently.

Another explanation of this day’s origins was provided by Joseph Boskin, a professor of history at Boston University. According to him during the reign of Constantine, a group of court jesters and fools told the Roman emperor that they could do a better job of running the empire. Amused Constantine, allowed a jester named Kugel to be king for one day. Kugel passed an edict calling for absurdity on that day, and the custom became

an annual event.  Prof Boskin’s explanation was brought to the public’s notice in an Associated Press article printed by many newspapers in 1983. The only catch being: Boskin made the whole thing up. It took a couple of weeks for the AP to realize that they’d been made victims of an April Fool’s joke themselves.

Well whatever be the tradition, this day has seen its share of gags and laughs but did you know that if you look up the top ten pranks played on people it’s the BBC that secures the number one position in kidding around! It came up with the greatest media hoaxes of all time, when it reported on its news program Panorama that Switzerland was experiencing a bumper spaghetti harvest that year thanks to a favorable weather and the elimination of the dreaded “spaghetti weevil.” The staged video footage showing happy peasants plucking strands of pasta from tall trees was so convincing that many viewers actually called the network to ask how they could grow their own.

Other notable pranks include the “Taco Liberty Bell”…when in 1996, Taco Bell ran a full-page ad in the New York Times announcing it had purchased the Liberty Bell and would rename it Taco Liberty Bell! ‘Left handed whopper’ by Burger King was another success… it actually had people calling asking for the same! Burger King announced in the rollout of its Left-Handed Whopper that it was “supposedly designed so that condiments would drip from the right side of the burger rather than the left.

On the Internet too hoaxes have become such standard fare that April Fools’ Day is barely distinguishable from any other, though a few notable pranks stand out and tend to be reposted year after year. In 1996 an announcement was made that every computer connected to the World Wide Web must be turned off for “Internet Cleaning Day’, a 24-hour period during which useless “flotsam and jetsam” would be flushed from the system.

And who can forget the Three-dollar coin in 2008, when CBC Radio program As It Happens interviewed a Royal Canadian Mint spokesman who broke “news” of plans to replace the Canadian five-dollar bill with a three-dollar coin. The coin was dubbed a “threenie”, in line with the nicknames of the country’s one-dollar coin (commonly called a “loonie” due to its depiction of a common loon on the reverse) and two-dollar coin (“toonie”)!

In New Zealand, the radio station The Edge’s Morning Madhouse enlisted the help of the Prime Minister on April 1st to inform the entire country that cell phones were to be banned in New Zealand, leaving hundreds of callers upset at the NEW LAW!

Other pranks include the one pulled by Dutch television in 1950, claiming that the Tower of Pisa had fallen over thus shocking people! While in 1980, the BBC reported a proposed change to the famous clock tower known as Big Ben, stating that the clock would go digital!

From being called poissom d’avril (literally “April’s fish”) in France to prima aprilis in Poland or Hunt-the-Gowk Day in Scotland, this day is surely a favorite across the globe, a day to fool or be fooled & a day to sit back and indulge in a few laughs!