Everyone hates April Fools’ Day — so why does it endure?

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I hate April Fools’ Day. I’m not alone, either — in fact, I’m probably among the majority of people. So why does such an unpopular holiday persist?

“You can go right back to the beginning of the earliest records of it, and people always hated it.”

Well, it’s positively medieval, says Alex Boese, the curator of the museum of hoaxes. “One of the interesting things about the holiday is that you can go right back to the beginning of the earliest records of it, and people always hated it,” Boese says. “It’s one of the least-liked holidays there is. There’s a large group of people that just despise it. For literally centuries, people have been predicting that April Fools’ Day must be on its last legs, and surely this awful celebration is going to die out soon, but it just keeps on going.”

Boese isn’t a hoaxster himself, I should note — rather, he’s a cultural historian with an interest in folklore. And April Fools’ began as a folk holiday, though its most popular origin story is, fittingly, also a hoax. The faux-origin is French, and posits that the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar confused some people, who could be tricked into celebrating the New Year on the wrong day. But references to April Fools’ Day predate the calendar change, Boese says. And those earliest references are Dutch, and they come as early as 1564, nearly two decades before Gregory introduced the new calendar in 1582. The Dutch version of the holiday was a “fools’ errand” day, encouraging the unwary to go gather — for instance — pigeon milk. It’s not certain the holiday is Dutch in origin, but since all the earliest references are from the Netherlands, we probably have them to thank for this tradition, Boese says.

April Fools’ Day follows mostly predictable rules, according to Alex Boese, the curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. Here’s how to spot the obvious pranks.

  • Is it before noon? Traditionally the pranks are carried out then.
  • Have they hoaxed before? If a company has run an April Fools’ prank before, they likely will again. NPR, Google, and BMW are known for their hoaxes.
  • Has this prank been played before? Sometimes, the old pranks win out, like a rock radio station telling its listeners it’s switching formats to classical. Don’t kick any hats and be skeptical about money lying in the street.
  • What name is that? Hoaxers will often include a version of April Fool in the joke — a spokesman named Lirpa Loof, for instance, or Avril Folle.
  • Does this sound like a tall tale? The classic April Fools’ prank has a Baron Munchausen-like quality, Boese says. Though tall tales are out of fashion, they do make a comeback once a year. The 1980 BBC prank report of Big Ben going digital is a prime example.

Scotland also had an April Fools’ tradition: hunting the gowk, or cuckoo. An enterprising prankster would give the unwitting victim a letter to deliver to someone else. The person would open the letter and find the following: “Never laugh, never smile. Hunt the gowk another mile.” So the recipient would know the letter was part of a joke, and tell the messenger “Oh, you have the wrong address,” before sending them to another part of town. “You’d send the person all over town with this stupid letter until they finally realized that they were on a fool’s errand,” Boese says.