April Fool's Day

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An April Fool's joke is the custom of misleading (“cheating”) people on April 1st with invented or falsified, mostly spectacular or fantastic stories, narratives or information and thus “ fooling them”. The shout "April, April" is usually used to resolve the fraud. The April Fool's Day tradition exists in most European countries as well as in North America.

In newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations and sometimes on websites, it is also common practice to “send readers or listeners into April” with believable-sounding, invented articles; often exaggerated details of the messages provide indications of the lack of truthfulness.

Origins

The saying “send in April” is first handed down in Germany in 1618 in Bavaria. With the European emigrants, this tradition also reached North America. However, the term April Fool's joke was not used until the second half of the 19th century. In Grimm's German dictionary from 1854 the April Fool is recorded, but not the April Fool's joke .

How it came about that April 1st became the day for special jokes is still unknown. According to the theologian Manfred Becker-Huberti , the only thing that is certain is that there were a large number of alleged unlucky days in ancient folk beliefs (see Friday, the 13th ), which regularly included April 1st.

Often these (unsecured) explanations are also given:

  • At the Augsburg Reichstag of 1530, among other things, the coinage should be regulated. However, due to time constraints, this did not happen, so a special “coin day” was announced for April 1st. When April 1st came, this coin day did not take place after all. Numerous speculators who bet on this coin day lost their money and were also laughed at.
  • Allegedly on April 1st, a sixteen-year-old girl, whose name is unknown, asked the French King Henry IV , who was inclined to the young women, in writing for a secret rendezvous in a discreet pleasure palace. When Heinrich appeared for the tête-à-tête, he was surprisingly greeted by the assembled court, presided over by his wife Maria de Medici , who is said to have humbly thanked him for accepting her invitation to the “fool's ball”.
  • Another possible origin of the custom can be traced back to an event during the Eighty Years War in the Netherlands. On April 1st, 1572, Brielle was the first Dutch city to be conquered by the Wassergeusen . The hated Spanish governor Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba , “then turned a nose”, which is still evident in Dutch history books today: “Op 1 april lost Alva zijn bril” (On April 1st, Alba lost his glasses! ).
  • In some traditions, April 1st is the anniversary of the birth or death of Judas Iscariot , who betrayed Jesus of Nazareth . In addition, April 1st is said to be the day Lucifer entered hell and therefore an unlucky day on which one must be particularly careful.
  • The French King Charles IX. carried out an extensive calendar reform through the Edict of Roussillon in 1564 and moved the official beginning of the year to January 1st. In some regions of France, however, people continued to celebrate at the end of March - partly out of ignorance. They are said to have been ridiculed as "April fools".
  • The well-known April weather ("April, April, he only does what he wants ...") is used as an explanation.
  • A theory about the origin of the April Fool's joke, which is mainly known in the Islamic world, albeit a purely speculative one, traces the origin of the custom back to the conquest of the last Moorish bulwark in Granada by Spanish Catholics , which allegedly took place on April 1st. This was a "prank" because the Catholic attackers had undermined the piety and thus the morale and fighting power of the defenders over the years, which then resulted in the "prank" on April 1st.

Examples

A selection of well-known examples of April fools staged by the media are:

  • Numerous international news agencies issued warnings on April 1 against the environmental toxin dihydrogen monoxide (H 2 O), a major component of acid rain, which can be found in tumors and nuclear power plants and is fatal if inhaled. It is simply water. Unlike a normal April Fool's joke, nothing wrong was said here. It can only work through the ignorance of those affected.
  • Often, on April 1st, the news is circulating that right-hand traffic will be introduced in Great Britain or Northern Ireland . In the 1980s, a (West) Berlin daily newspaper brought a variation, which emphasized with a photo montage of a complicated motorway entrance at the sector border that left-hand traffic should actually be introduced in the British sector of the city.
  • The British broadcaster BBC showed a joking documentary on April 1, 1957, on the invented spaghetti tree . The show was seen by around eight million viewers, hundreds of whom subsequently called the BBC to make sure that spaghetti really grew on trees, and others even wanted to know how they could grow it themselves.
  • Parodies of such documents can be found regularly in the technical and organizational documents on the Internet as of April 1st .
  • The announcement of so-called vaporware on April 1st, which has already been announced countless times, is particularly popular . For example, on this day there was suddenly a specific date in numerous forums on which the most famous vaporware game Duke Nukem Forever should appear. Likewise, other products outside of technology and programs that are a long time coming are often announced as April Fools joke.
  • In 1980, the Great Blue Hill eruption prank in Milton, Massachusetts caused a mass panic.
  • A hot-headed ice borer , a carnivorous, mole-like species common in Antarctica, was featured in Discover magazine on April 1, 1995 . The alleged zoological sensation met with unprecedented public interest.
  • On April 1, 1996, the Taco Bell fast-food chain published an April Fool's joke claiming it had bought the Liberty Bell in an advertisement and announcing that it would be renamed the Taco Liberty Bell .
  • New functions are regularly discovered in the 3D software Blender on April 1st, but they do not exist.
  • In 2007, the artist Dan Baines published the photo of a self-made elven mummy on his website and labeled it real. This ensured worldwide coverage.
  • In 2008 the BBC reported the discovery of allegedly flying penguins on King George Island.

Comparable occasions

In Spain and Latin America this is practiced on December 28th, the Día de los Santos Inocentes ( Day of the Innocent Children ).

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: April Fool's joke  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Commons : April 1st  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Joke collections

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Daniel Lingenhöhl: Where does the April Fool's joke come from? Spektrum.de, April 1, 2015, available for a fee on April 7, 2019 (Spektrum - Die Woche: April 2, 2005)
  2. ^ Dictionary network - German dictionary by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm. In: woerterbuchnetz.de. Retrieved April 1, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Customs in summer - April Fool's joke. In: religioeses-brauchum.de. www.religioeses-brauchum.de, accessed on April 1, 2016 .
  4. ↑ 1957: BBC fools the nation . BBC
  5. ^ The Taco Liberty Bell . In: Museum of Hoaxes . ( hoaxes.org [accessed May 1, 2018]).
  6. ↑ Blender Nerd, 3D Tutorials. (No longer available online.) In: blendernerd.com. Archived from the original on March 5, 2016 ; Retrieved April 1, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.blendernerd.com
  7. ↑ Blender 2.70 Hidden Function: Simulate Bear. In: blendernation.com. BlenderNation, accessed April 1, 2016 .