Fake News You Can Believe

by Calla Jones Corner

The fin de siècle newspaper, 1894

April Fools meet up with Poisson d'Avril 

The French claim authorship of April Fool's Day, or at least with the idea of an April Fool by having observed a week-long celebration of Poisson d’Avril (fish of April) in the Middle Ages. Back then, folks celebrated the arrival of the New Year for an entire week, ending on April 1. Those who celebrated the year’s beginning on January 1 – according to the new calendar – made fun of those who still went by the old calendar, which had been changed. A paper fish was attached to the diehards’ backs and hence, Poisson d’Avril.

The Flemish think they own the holiday, since one of their poets would always send his servants on foolish errands. Then, there are the Dutch, who claim that in the 1950s, the tower of Pisa had fallen (well, I would have believed that)!

 In 1962, Swedes claimed that one could turn a black and white TV into a color TV by putting a woman’s stocking over the screen (and these are the people that made IKEA such a world-wide phenomenon) …

I can’t come up with any childhood memories in the U.S. of April Fool’s jokes I played on someone, or someone played on me. But I do recall some gems that happened while we were living in Lausanne, Switzerland that have become part of family lore.

La Feuille d’Avis de Lausanne always came up with a spectacular front page April Fool’s joke, sucking us and most of the canton de Vaud. One of the best was a front-page headline announcing – complete with an engineer’s drawing – that an Italian company was planning to install a revolving restaurant on the top of their side of the Matterhorn, that most sacred of Alps.

The outcry apparently was country wide. What made the ruse so convincing was that just such a restaurant had been built on the top of the Shilthorn, another famous peak, above the tiny town of Murren in the Bernese Oberland. It was a feat of Swiss engineering and was featured in one of the James Bond movies. But the Matterhorn?  This was beyond Swiss acceptability, although the idea may have appealed to the Italians.

There was no way to reach the summit of that iconic peak, except by climbing it, as did Edward Whymper on July 14, 1865. Thousands of people have since done it, not a few falling to their deaths (as did three of Whymper’s companions). It is still a rewarding, albeit risky, feat.

Spaghetti Trees

Another April Fool’s joke in family lore, came through the BBC in 1957. The gist of the hoax was that while the Swiss were harvesting their spaghetti trees, they had discovered a weevil and the crop had been devastated. Many listeners called the BBC to find out where they could buy spaghetti trees. The story had been accompanied by a doctored photo of spaghetti strands growing on trees that made the whole hoax even more believable. Richard, my British husband, remembered the hoax and while on a trip to Italy on an April Fool’s Day, he told the kids to keep their eyes peeled for spaghetti trees.

The Brits probably top the list for some of the best annual gags. Could it be because it’s said that the origin of these jokes goes back to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, published in 1392? The tale to which the first April Fool’s joke was attributed is The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, said to have happened, however, on March 22, not April 1. Many scholars argue that this is a typo by the famous author. We’ll never know, and since Chaucer’s vain cock in the Chanticleer is tricked by a fox, the joke may well be true.

 Another: A ticket was printed in an April 1, 1857, newspaper admitting readers to the Tower of London to witness the “Annual Washing of the Lions.” I can just imagine the queues for that one. Did anyone think there were lions in the tower? Jewels and Beefeaters yes, but not lions! 

In 1965 the BBC reported that they had developed “smell-a-vison.” Many viewers called in to tell the station that their invention was indeed a success. Odor over the airways? Were Brits just smelling steak and kidney pie from the kitchen?

 Americans too have contributed some wild and wily April Fool’s jokes. In 1996, for example, Taco Bell took out a full-page ad in The New York Times announcing they had purchased the Liberty Bell, to do their part in reducing the country’s debt.

Burger King announced that on April 1, 1998, they would be serving left-handed Whoppers, in which the condiments would dribble out of the right side of the burger. Sales for that day took off. Customers bit into that whopper! I see Madison Avenue’s hand in these jokes. 

 The profit motive was probably on some nerd’s mind when Think Geek came up with the Tauntaun Sleeping Bag. It was based on a well-known scene from “The Empire Strikes Back.” There was so much demand for the cuddly bag that the company ended up manufacturing it.

Water on Mars

Usually, Government and private business don’t mix, but one April Fool’s joke shows that, believe it or not, they do occasionally, and can do it successfully.  In 2005, NASA and Mars Bars got together, posing on NASA’s website, announcing that running water had been found on Mars. The joke was a gem.

All news on April 1, should not be dismissed, however. There are a few tales of real news not being taken seriously because of the date. One was the earthquake and following tsunami that hit the Aleutian Islands on April 1, 1946, that killed 165 people in Hawaii. Something good did, however, come out of that disaster. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center was established as a result. That disaster is now known as “The April Fools’ Day Tsunami.”