April Fool’s Day: The spaghetti is ready to harvest
Tartan paint and glass-headed hammers are a must on your April 1 shopping list.
APRIL Fools’ Day is celebrated on April 1 every year. It is widely recognised and celebrated in various countries as a day when people play practical jokes and hoaxes on each other.
In Italy, France and Belgium, children and adults traditionally tack paper fishes on each other’s backs as a trick and shout ‘April fish!’ in their local languages. Such fish feature prominently on many late 19th- to early 20th-century French April Fools’ Day postcards.
The earliest recorded association between April 1 and foolishness is an ambiguous reference in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392). In the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, the vain cock Chauntecleer is tricked by a fox, but there is doubt as to whether Chaucer dated this incident 32 days after the beginning of March (April 1) or after the end of March (May 2). Precursors of April Fools’ Day include the Roman festival of Hilaria (March 25) and the mediaeval Feast of Fools (December 28), which is still a day on which pranks are played in Spanish-speaking countries.
In the UK, an April fool joke is revealed by shouting ‘April fool!’ at the recipient. A study in the 1950s found that in the UK and in countries whose traditions derived from the UK, the joking ceased at midday. A person playing a joke after midday is the fool himself.
In Scotland, the traditional prank is to ask someone to deliver a sealed message requesting help of some sort. In fact, the message reads: ‘Dinna laugh, dinna smile. Hunt the gowk another mile’, gowk being the local word for ‘cuckoo’. The recipient, upon reading it, will explain he can only help if he first contacts another person and sends the victim to this person with an identical message, with the same result.
In Iran, jokes are played on the 13th day of the Persian new year, which falls on April 1 or 2. This day, celebrated as far back as 536 BC, is the oldest prank tradition in the world still alive today.
The most famous of all April fool pranks was pulled by the BBC in 1957, when they broadcast a film of farmers picking freshly-grown spaghetti. The BBC was later flooded with requests to purchase a spaghetti plant and was forced to admit on the news the next day that the film was a hoax. Did you spot OUR April Fool’s Day story?
