American Madness

Intelligent Criticism in the Service of a Better Nation




The History of April Fools Day

Posted by Matt Cipriano | 3 Comments

The BBC has a story up (well, since 1998) about the history of April Fools day, it starts of with the line:

Every year on April 1 the unwitting, the gullible and the plain stupid are caught out by tall stories or practical jokes. But why do people play these jokes at all?

But we will get back to that quote a bit later.

Everyone has their favorite April Fools Day story. The BBC ran theirs- a 1957 BBC broadcast that discussed Spaghetti farming in Switzerland. At the time spaghetti was still relatively new to Europe so people called in to find out how to grow their own spaghetti bushes.

The Museum of Hoaxes lists the top 100 Hoaxes of all time (with the BBC’s coming in at #1). Some really good ones their, worth checking out.

Comments

3 Responses to “The History of April Fools Day”

  1. American Madness » Blog Archive » About Yesterday
    April 2nd, 2008 @

    [...] may have noticed yesterday we posted about the history of April Fools Day. I included the quote: Every year on April 1 the unwitting, the gullible and the plain stupid are [...]

  2. zach
    November 6th, 2008 @

    please send me this picture

  3. Sheila Newbery
    March 17th, 2009 @

    The truth is that back in Gregorian Calender days… Apr 1st was the real beginning of the year New Years Day. Then later the calender was changed to make Jan 1st as the New Year Day. So those who still celebrated Apr 1st as the New Year were called Fools…. therefore were called April Fools.

    This is the really story.

Leave a Reply





  • Trust us


    As with Anna Karina, we prefer to remember the U.S.A as she was in the 1960s.
  • Archives

  • RSS Matt Friedlander’s Tumblr Feed

  • RSS Josh Friedlander’s Twitter Feed