The ancient Romans celebrated Hilaria, the last day of the Festival of Cybele. It was a feast of joy that followed a period of fasting and mourning, a spring festival of celebration and merrymaking. Hindus celebrate Holi, a spring festival of colors that lowers the strictness of polite behavior and fills the atmosphere with excitement, fun and joy as participant throw colors onto one another. Medieval villages celebrated the Feast of Fools, a time when serious religious leaders were mocked in plays and satire was celebrated. Geoffrey Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales, describes the vain cock Chauntecleer tricked by a fox on the 32nd of March. It turns out to be a misinterpretation of the date, but April 1st became from Chaucer’s time forward a day of harmless pranks, practical jokes, and hoaxes.
Practical jokes can become a way of affirming group solidarity. Good jokes, ones that do no harm and that clean up after themselves, become a community’s sense of pride. MIT celebrates such great ‘hacks’ as a police car reassembled atop the large dome on campus (complete with a PI squad number). Google pranks users of its calculator (convert to units in Beard-seconds, Potrzebies , Smoots, or donkeypower), its search bar (type in “the loneliest number”) and news outlets (Google announced in 2005 a ficticious drink Google Gulp that would increase inteligence and in 2008 Project “Virgle,” a mix of the Virgin Group and Google with a mission to colonize the planet Mars to make it suitable for human living).
Sir John Hardgrave authored the creative Mischief Maker’s Manual and sponsors the web site www.mischiefmakersmanual.com where you can find ideas for foaming toilets, fake alien landings, and a massive catapult among other things.
I invite you to check out my Pininterest board of April Fool jokes and send me some images to add. Watch for news of a joke underway at Baden Academy soon! Let me know what pranks befall you and remember to teach your children to limit themselves to jokes that do no harm and clean up after themselves.
Shhhh… one I am playing on my son (who never reads my blog…)… I plan to stick a message into his computer’s system clock
Head into Control Panel –> Region and Language –> Additional Settings –> Time, and change the AM or PM symbols to whatever you want.
I’ll let you know if he notices (and of course the calamities that await my April 1). Happy Easter!
