The History of April Fools

DeVon — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:21:00 GMT

April Fools’ Day is coming up really soon and there’s no better way to prank people than with our April Fools’ Day Prank Assistance Hotline (413-497-0033). Tell your friends that your phone is dying and you need them to call you back at this number. Be creative! You can send your prank ideas to feedback@humorhotlines.com and you could find them awkwardly featured in this obscure corner of the website.

Now, many of you have written me asking “Why do we celebrate April Fools’ Day?” and “How did this tradition of pranking and general mayhem begin?” I may be paraphrasing just a little, but that’s because most of the emails I get nowadays are either from Nigerian princes or they’re so loaded with l33t that even the people writing them don’t know what they’re saying. Anyway, the story of April Fools Day is long and contrived. It begins long ago in a strange, far away mythical land called Europe.

One cold winter day, an evil king decided he wanted to throw a really kickass holiday party because European winters were a real bummer without central heating or cable. New Year’s was the next big holiday, but back then New Year’s was celebrated on April 1. So the king decided he would change the calendar so that New Year’s Day would be January 1 which was a hell of a lot sooner than April 1. He could do this because he was king and back then being a king was pretty damn close to being God. Kinda like being a humor blog writer these days. Anyway, when the king made the decision to change the calendar, lots of people didn’t get the memo. You see, back in those days, people didn’t have cell phones or CNN, so it was really hard to get information out to lots of people at once. When all the people eventually learned about the change, most of them shouted “Oh no he didn’t!” in perfect unison, snapped their fingers, shook their heads and went on celebrating April 1 as New Year's. It turns out that the king had a really good P.R. person, though, and those who didn’t make the switch over to the new calendar came to be known as “April Fools.” Every year on April 1, people would send them invitations to imaginary parties, pin paper fish on their backs, and paint dots on their skin while they were sleeping so they’d think they’d caught the Bubonic Plague (which was the medieval version of Swine Flu). Apparently, medieval Europe was a lot like high school. The tradition caught on and has survived to this day to become the festival of dickishness that keeps the Silly String companies in business.

So that’s where we get April Fools’ Day. Kind of. I’m sure some of that is true, but I read it a long time ago and I didn’t feel like fact checking. I think there was a dragon in there somewhere… Let’s just say the dragon ate the evil king at the end. Yeah, that sounds right.

Until my historian's license is revoked,

DeVon

HumorHotlines.com Blog RSS Feed

The History of April Fools