The tradition of pranking and fooling

What’s going on in this photo? Explanation below! photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

Amidst all the flap about the total solar eclipse coming up next Monday – since our area in Southern Ontario will lie in the path of the totality and up to a million visitors are expected for the event (many of us local residents will be hiding from the onslaught in our own yards) – it turns out that the city of Niagara Falls is going to shut off the Falls so their spectacle doesn’t compete with the spectacle in the sky above.

Just kidding on the last part! Shutting off the Falls (which would be impossible) was a joke by Niagara Falls Mayor Jim Diodati, who was just having a little fun on April Fool’s Day. I thought it was a welcome bit of cheekiness amid weeks of alarmed news articles in our regional media (everything from keeping your pets safe to whether birds will fall out of the sky – no joke on either of those).

We writers love to mess with readers’ minds, to surprise you, particularly if there’s a mystery involved. Red herrings (“a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion”, Wikipedia) are a classic method of misdirection. If you were wondering, as I was, where that term came from, apparently a 19th century journalist and pamphleteer named William Cobbett said he’d used kippers, smelly smoked herrings, to divert hounds from chasing a rabbit.

Media journalists have a long tradition of coming up with ridiculous stories for April 1st – especially in Great Britain, it seems. Some of their pranks have become downright famous.

In 1957 the BBC used its rather serious show Panorama, which bills itself as “Investigative documentary series revealing the truth about the stories that matter”, to deliver an April 1st story about a bumper crop of spaghetti grown by Swiss farmers on trees. According to the report, which was delivered by anchor Richard Dimbleby (a revered figure in broadcasting at the time) to lend a greater air of authenticity to the broadcast public, the combination of an unusually mild winter and very few spaghetti weevil pests had produced a really good harvest. There was even a video showing Swiss farmers picking the sticks of spaghetti delicately off trees and putting them into the sun to dry out.

The idea was created by one of the cameramen for Panorama, Charles de Jaeger, who was known for his cheeky sense of humour and affinity for practical jokes. One of his old school teachers used to tease his class with the remark “”Boys, you’re so stupid, you’d believe me if I told you that spaghetti grows on trees”, and for years de Jaeger had wanted to create a hoax along those lines. At the BBC he found a colleague who loved the idea, and they pitched it to the show’s editor, who gave them a budget of £100 to carry it out.

Well, a lot of people didn’t find the hoax very funny, as it turns out. The BBC was bombarded with calls to either a) settle family arguments about whether spaghetti actually grew on trees, or b) where could spaghetti trees be bought so that people could plant one in their yard. One of the people taken in by the story was Sir Ian Jacob, the BBC’s director-general, who’d been sent a note about the fake broadcast but hadn’t seen it. Oops. (Eventually he became a fan.)

Over the years, appreciative fans carried on the silliness. In 1967, for example, Australian reporter Dan Webb for one of the TV stations said that the country had its own spaghetti-growing region, but the farmers were facing financial ruin because of the proliferation of the “spag-worm”, which unfortunately kept eating the unripe spaghetti from the inside.

My all-time favourite April Fool’s prank completely tickles me as a writer. It occurred in 1977 when the Guardian newspaper published a 7-page “special report” about travelling to the tiny republic of San Serriffe in the Indian Ocean. Consisting of several islands, the main two, “Upper Caisse” and “Lower Caisse”, were in the shape of a semi-colon. The capital city was called Bodoni.

Front page of the Specia Report. source: https://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/3/30/1333125088930/San-Serriffe-front-page-001.jpg

Astute readers recognized that everything about “San Serriffe” was taken from printing terminology. “Serif” is the term for typefaces that have little decorative extensions on their letters, while “sans serif” refers to typefaces that don’t, such as the one I use. Bodoni is a particular typeface still in use today. Everyone who creates computer passwords nowadays will know the difference between ‘Upper Case’ letters and ‘Lower Case’.

But the imaginative perpetrators didn’t stop there. They created a location “northeast of the Seychelles Islands”. It had a size of 9,724 sq. mi., and figures for population, climate, currency (the San Serriffe Corona – re the famous typewriter brand). They divulged some of its history, from its discovery in 1421 by an English adventurer making a landing in the ‘Shoals of Adze’, its colonization by Portugal and Spain, and independence in 1967. As a result of all this activity, it had a mixed population consisting of Europeans, Creoles, Malaysians, Arabs and ‘Flongs’, who spoke their own language of Ki-flong.

There were articles about the politics, including one about the young President-for-life, Maria-Jesu Pica (a font size). San Serriffe was eventually going to crash into Sri Lanka because its islands kept drifting eastwards at the rate of 1,400 metres a year.

They even recruited well-known advertisers to place ‘ads’ in the supplement.

Guinness ran one commenting on the uniqueness of their beer in San Serriffe, where the barley farmers mistakenly planted the seeds upside down, which resulted in a brew that tasted the same, but with a white body and a black head on it.

Kodak said it was running a contest for the best photos people had from San Serriffe, showing the “evanescent beauty of these fabulous islands”. The Guardian itself placed a fake employment ad for a “Reader in Lunar Spectroscopy. With special emphasis on the extraction of energy from moonbeams”. (Quite a few people sent in their résumés.)

A Guardian writer later described the office on publication day as “bedlam”. Phone calls alternated between people wanting more information on the beautiful place and travel agencies and airlines trying to convince people that San Serriffe didn’t actually exist. Hundreds of letters came in, including a group that called itself the San Serriffe Liberation Front and complained about the newspaper’s pro-government slant!

Ever since, the hoax has continued to gather fans all over who’ve embroidered on the tale. A man in Pennsylvania, Henry Morris, published a series of books about San Serriffe, such as the inimitably-named The World’s Worst Marbled Papers: Being a Collection of Ten Contemporary San Serriffean Marbled Papers Showing the Lowest Level of Technique, the Worst Combinations of Colors, and the Most Inferior Execution Known Since the Dawn of the Art of Marbling Collected by the Author During a Five Year Expedition to the Republic of San Serriffe.

Visual hoaxes are just as much fun. I captured a surprising one in the Church of Santo Domingo in Lima, Peru. It’s one of the tiled floors inside, and so effective a piece of trompe-l’oeil that I included some shoes in the photo at the top of this post to help you understand the optical illusion.

Mother Nature isn’t above having a little fun with us as well. In this photo taken in Luray Caverns, Virginia, how much of this small cave is real? It’s not a trick

The tradition of April Fools jokes go way back. Some attribute it to the medieval writer Chaucer, who in his The Canterbury Tales wrote of a vain Chauntecleer rooster being tricked by a fox on a day with this description: “Since March began thirty days and two,” which would possibly mean April 1st. Others, though, think it goes back to the tine of the Great Flood – seriously. The theory is that Noah sent the first dove too soon to search for land, on the first day of April, and therefore the custom arose of commemorating this colossal boo-boo by making fools of people on the same day.

Not everyone is a fan of the April Fools tradition because it can create some serious misunderstandings. A number of times over the decades genuine news  published on April 1st have been mistaken for a prank, as when singer Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father in 1984. Several of Gaye’s friends didn’t believe the news initially because of the date, including Smokey Robinson and Jermaine Jackson, until they called others and received the sad confirmation.

But all in all, I think light-hearted, playful and clever pranks bring some much-needed levity into our lives.

You can read the entire delightful 7-page San Serriffe spread online at Scribd.

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