I know what you’ll be doing tomorrow morning, at least a few of you.
You’ll be grabbing your phone and punching in the numbers for Lincoln Park Zoo or Brookfield Zoo. When someone answers, you’ll say, “Mr. Lion, please” or maybe “Can I please speak to Mr. Bear?”
Good one, eh? That’s debatable, I suppose, but this joke is one of the many ways in which people have celebrated April Fools’ Day, that strange but lively April 1 “holiday.”
It is not a public or federal holiday, but still it manages to cause an explosion of antics, as people here and across the planet feel compelled to play pranks, jokes and hoaxes … and to call zoos.The origin of April Fools’ Day is hazy and questionable. Some reputable sources will tell you it sprang from a late March festival known as Hilaria (Latin for joyful) and featured people dressing up in disguises and mocking other people. Others will tell you that the day and its playfulness were inspired by an Egyptian legend. Others speculate that it was inspired by the vernal equinox, or the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, when Mother Nature fooled people with changing, unpredictable weather.
If the first April Fools’ Day stunt is lost to history, there is no doubt that once the media — newspapers, radio, television — got in the game, it expanded, forcing ever more creative and elaborate pranks and fueling ambitions to fool ever larger groups.
In 1957, the British Broadcasting Company had news of an “exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop” in Switzerland, showing a film of Swiss farmers pretending to pick freshly-grown spaghetti from plants.
In 1989, a story appeared on the front page of a newspaper in Nairobi, Kenya. It told of a nonexistent multimillion-dollar plan to put tons of rocks on top of the country’s Mount Kenya, enabling it to take the title of the tallest mountain in Africa from 19,340-foot-tall Mount Kilimanjaro.
In 1992, NPR ran a segment that featured “former President Richard Nixon,” falsely announcing that he was running for president again. It wasn’t Nixon, of course, but thousands of listeners believed it was.
You will find dozens, hundreds of internet rabbit holes on this matter.
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I liked this one, in 2016, when National Geographic jokingly announced via Twitter (now X) that it would no longer be publishing photographs of “naked animals,” elaborating by stating that it would “no longer degrade animals by showing photos of them without clothes.” Featured in a photo gallery were some puppies and kittens dressed in clothes. (Turns out that National Geographic has been a frequent participant in April Fools’ Day.)
What remains my favorite took place on April 1, 1985, when Sports Illustrated published a story by bestselling author George Plimpton. It detailed, in thousands of words across 13 pages, the fictional tale of a Buddhist baseball pitcher who was able to throw a 168 mph fastball. It showed (in photos) his spring training tryout with the New York Mets, pitching with one foot bare and the other in a work boot. “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” now considered one of Plimpton’s best works, was a sensation and was turned into a book. If there were such a thing as an April Fools Hall of Fame, it would deserve a prominent spot.
Closer to home, in 1906, this very newspaper printed an intricate two-page feature article about the supposed invasion of Chicago by “hordes of prehistoric monsters.” My colleague Kori Finley has written about this before, and no wonder, it’s wonderfully wild. Illustrated with “photographs” of dinosaurs wreaking havoc throughout the city, it began like this: “Hordes of gigantic beasts swarm down from the north and overwhelm the city, leaving it a mass of wreckage, tangled iron, piles of brick and stone. Killing thousands of the inhabitants. Parks turned into deserts, great skyscrapers leveled by blows from the tails of the monsters, and the entire population threatened in the panic and pestilence that followed the invasion.
“The last dinosaur had been slain. The people of Chicago crept out into the sunshine from the cellars in which they had been living for weeks and gazed, amazed and helpless, at the debris of demolished skyscrapers and factories, and wandered aimlessly through ruined, disheveled parks and boulevards.”
Clever idea, lively writing, but, of course, there is no one around who can detail the public reaction. But many remember Plimpton’s Sidd Finch escapade and most regard it in the harmless manner it was intended. A letter written to Sports Illustrated after the story captured what I think should be the reaction to any good April Fools’ Day prank. It read: “You lousy, good-for-nothing blankety-blanks. You got me hook, line and sinker, and I loved it.”
So, got any good ideas for tomorrow?
Having read about so many creative tricks and pranks, I think I’ll just sit this one out. Have fun.