April Fool’s Day Demonstrates Resentments With Each Other

I’m not much for April Fool’s Day to begin with. It just seems like kind of a crappy holiday. No day off, no food, no love, nothing. Just a bit of humor. I dig humor, but April Fool’s Day kind of leaves me cold in most years.

I started thinking about it, though, and I think it’s actually worse than that. I started thinking about the April Fool’s Day gags I tend to see. Most of them seem to involve at least a certain element of cruelty. Granted, a lot of humor does as well. Still, though April Fool’s Day is supposed to be about a laugh…I think it demonstrates our underlying resentments with each other. We seem to be kind of pissed.

Think about various April Fool’s Day pranks you’ve seen. There are some that delivery fake bad news only to make people happy when the truth is revealed to be different. However, most are the opposite. The joke is held within news so good people want to believe it, and then a laugh is had when people are taken in.

But…that still leaves people with the disappointment that the good news wasn’t real.

I vaguely remember hearing about one where someone was jokingly misinformed that they won the lottery…and then told that it was just a joke and they hadn’t. Ha ha. So funny. That almost makes up for the crushing disappointment I now face in going from thinking I was set for life to realizing I’m not. Way to make my normally happy life seem crappier. What a good joke.

See? Contrary to the holidays that are at least supposed to bring people closer together, there seems to be an aggressive motivation behind April Fool’s Day. It’s buried in humor, and humor at least makes some people feel better, but the thorns are always there.

I suppose we’re only human, though.