April Fool's Day
- GutBer English
- Apr 1
- 4 min read
What in Spain is known as Día de los Inocentes and celebrated on 28th December is celebrated on the first day of April in most other countries and, in the English-speaking world, it is known as April Fool's Day.
April Fool's Day is celebrated in a similar way to our “Día de los Inocente”s: newspapers publish news stories with crazy, completely unreal headlines, radio and television programs try to deceive people with some funny, false detail, and friends and families play tricks on each other. The joke is to spot the fake news and program headlines and not fall into the traps set by those close to us, otherwise we'll be called "April Fool!" (equivalent to our cry of "Inocente!").
Although the general idea is basically the same for both celebrations, the details vary from place to place. In the United Kingdom, for example, pranks are only played until 12 (noon/midday) on April 1st. After that time, it is considered bad luck to cheat, and whoever plays a trick on someone else will be the April Fool, not the person tricked, so we have to start early or we will be the “innocent” ones. In Scotland, it was originally called "Huntigowk Day," from hunting the "gowk," the Scots word for cuckoo or fool, or in Gaelic Là na Gocaireachd, or Là Ruith na Cuthaige. Here, the traditional trick is to ask someone to deliver a message that says "Dinna laugh, dinna smile. Hunt the gowk another mile." Whoever receives the message sends the person to another one, and that person to another one, and so on. Other English words for fool could be "noodle," "gob," "gobby," or "noddy." The court jester in Shakespeare's plays is also known as a fool. He is an intelligent and cultured character who adds to his jokes a clairvoyance that others lack by pretending to be an idiot, although some are particularly cruel.
In other European countries, instead of April Fool's, it is called April Fish (poisson d'avril) and the tradition consists of hanging a drawing of a fish on the back of the person, as we do with the stick figures on our backs in December.
The origin of April Fool's Day is unclear. Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales is often mentioned as one of the oldest references to the celebration, but some calculations based on this work place the day on 2nd May instead of 1st April. It is also thought to be connected with the change of the New Year to 1st January 1 (previously March) in the 16th century, which led to those who still believed that April marked the beginning of the new year being called April Fools, but this explanation is unlikely because the tradition is believed to have existed earlier. Some theories place the origin of April Fool's Day even in ancient times. The misleading change in weather is also attributed as the origin of this tradition.
Typically, on this date, the media cover memorable historical jokes, as that in the XIX century, when the public was tricked into getting tickets to the Tower of London to attend the annual ceremony of the washing of the lions guarding it. Apparently there were crowds trying to attend the fabricated ceremony.
Although in today's world it may seem that fake news is neither newsworthy nor funny, the truth is that these are the kinds of jokes that are typically made in the media on this day: obvious to many, but they deceive many others by creating comical situations, always with a harmless air where no one is really fooled into believing anything serious. A famous British television program from the 1960s described how Swiss farmers harvested fresh spaghetti from their fields. This is what truly differentiates April Fool's Day in the media from the fake news phenomenon: the humour and the lack of significance of the news, also easily verifiable.
Other typical pranks among friends might include swapping the cream in Oreo cookies for toothpaste, swapping sugar for salt or vice versa, or others involving substituting one ingredient for another in food. In reality, these are simple, innocent, and approachable pranks that bring a smile to our faces, develop our creativity, and return us for a few hours to a sweet innocence where we can fall for other people's jokes, knowing they're not malicious and are merely intended to create fun communal moments.
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