April Fool’s Day

What the day is

April Fool's Day is observed on April 1, a day for hoaxes and practical jokes across much of the world. Its origin is genuinely unknown, which is less satisfying than the story most people have heard, and considerably more honest.

Origin and background

The popular explanation says that when France moved the start of its year from late March to January under calendar reform, people who carried on celebrating at the old date were mocked as fools. It is a tidy story and it is almost certainly wrong. The change to the year's start was neither sudden nor uniform, different regions of Europe had begun their years on different dates for centuries, and the explanation itself only appears in print long after the custom was already established. That pattern is the signature of a later rationalization rather than a record of what happened.

What survives instead is a scatter of early references. A sixteenth-century Flemish poem describes a nobleman sending a servant on absurd errands on April 1, and a seventeenth-century English antiquarian noted the day as an established observance without bothering to explain it, which suggests his readers already knew. Neither tells us where it began.

Scotland kept a two-day version. The first day involved sending someone on a fool's errand, and the second concerned pranks directed at the back of the body, which is where the tradition of pinning something to a person's back comes from.

The modern form is the media hoax. A 1957 British television report showing Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from trees remains the standard, and it worked precisely because it was delivered in the register of ordinary news by a trusted broadcaster. That is also why the genre has aged badly. The same techniques now run every day of the year without the punchline, and a great many people have simply stopped finding the corporate version funny.

The rule that pranks must stop at noon is widely cited in Britain and widely ignored everywhere.

How to take part

• Keep it small and keep it kind. The good ones are gentle.
• Never fake an emergency, an illness or a death.
• Look up the spaghetti harvest broadcast, which holds up.
• Treat anything startling online today with more suspicion than usual.
• Remember that nobody actually knows where the day came from.