The Greatest April Fools’ Pranks in History
No one knows for sure when the concept of April Fools’ Day originated. It may have sprung from the Roman spring festival of Hilaria, a time of merriment and mischief-making when even local magistrates were subject to ridicule. Another possible starting point was the Catholic Church-decreed shift of the new year from the end of March to January in 1582, with those who continued to celebrate the old date derided as “April fools.”
Whatever the source, the practice of pulling a prank on April 1 is by now well established across different cultures. And it isn’t simply a matter of the average Joe or Jane zinging their friends with a mild gag — prominent companies have been known to partake in the action on a far larger scale, too. Here are six cases where a well-executed idea blew past the boundaries of the garden-variety April Fools’ Day prank to earn widespread attention.
The Lung-Powered Aviator
In April 1934, The New York Times, the Daily News, and the Chicago Herald & Examiner were among the American newspapers to publish an eye-opening photo of an airborne man wearing skis and clinging to a pair of bulky tubes. The caption explained how the contraption’s pilot was able to power rotors in the tubes by simply blowing into a box, making him the first man to achieve flight with his own body’s energy.
What the editors of these publications didn’t realize was that the picture, distributed by the International News Photos, was from a fabricated story in the April Fools’ edition of the German news magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. The Americans also missed out on the joke by misspelling the pilot’s name, which was “Koycher” — a play on the German word for wheezing.
You may also like
More from our network
The Great Spaghetti Harvest
In what may have been the first television-based April Fools' prank, the BBC in 1957 decided to have some fun with viewers by way of its investigative series Panorama. Those who turned in to the April 1 episode were greeted by footage of smiling people plucking "spaghetti" from trees, with narrator Richard Dimbleby explaining how it was a banner year for the crop in this Swiss village thanks to the mild winter and the eradication of the pesky spaghetti weevil.
Apparently, spaghetti was still something of a novelty throughout much of the United Kingdom in that time, which explains why the BBC's switchboard was lit up by callers inquiring how to grow their own trees. Meanwhile, those who wrote to the station with that question received the cheeky reply, "Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."
The Gravity-Defying Planetary Alignment
The BBC was up to its April 1 tomfoolery again in 1976, when astronomer Patrick Moore instructed radio listeners to be ready for an extraordinary cosmic event. At 9:47 that morning, Moore explained, Earth would be directly lined up with Jupiter and Pluto (then still a planet) to produce an unusual gravitational pull; those who jumped at the exact moment he directed would find themselves temporarily floating.
The segment was actually a dig at a recently published book called The Jupiter Effect, which cited dubious scientific principles to detail how the eventual alignment of all nine planets would produce terrible earthquakes and the destruction of Los Angeles. Of course, there were an untold number of listeners who took Moore's tongue-in-cheek announcement quite seriously. One caller described how she and 11 friends had all floated around a room together, while another demanded monetary damages for soaring too high and banging his head on the ceiling.
The Sydney Iceberg
Heading into April Fools' Day 1978, Australian businessman Dick Smith announced that he would tow in an iceberg from Antarctica and carve the frozen mound into cubes that were guaranteed to enhance the flavor of any drink. While he originally intended to haul over a real iceberg, Smith instead settled for a prank in which he draped plastic sheets over a barge and applied a mountain of shaving cream and firefighting foam on top.
On the morning of April 1, Smith had the barge towed into Sydney Harbor, while some 300 of his employees called local radio stations and newspapers to breathlessly describe the "iceberg" bearing down on the city. Even when the hoax was revealed with the onset of rain that washed away the foam, Smith cheerfully kept up the ruse by handing out ice cubes from the barge's beer refrigerator.
Sports Illustrated’s Sidd Finch
Normally known for his realistic accounts of competing against professional athletes of various sports, writer George Plimpton took a new angle for the April 1, 1985 edition of Sports Illustrated by creating a fictional baseball player. As described in his story "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch," the titular ballplayer was a reclusive 28-year-old Harvard dropout who had been trained by Buddhist monks, was fluent in Sanskrit, and played the French horn. He also could throw a baseball at the unheard-of speed of 168 miles per hour, and as such had earned a secret tryout with the New York Mets.
The Mets went along with the story, allowing players and coaches to be photographed with the middle school art teacher who was posing as Finch. Even though Plimpton hinted at the joke with the first letters of the words in the article's subhead — "He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yoga" (spelling out "Happy April Fools' Day") — the well-executed deception reportedly led to other teams contacting the Mets to learn more about this mysterious pitcher.
The Left-Handed Whopper
Burger King proudly bills itself as the home of the Whopper, which makes it fitting that the fast-food chain sprung a whopper of a prank on April Fools' Day in 1998. That day, a full-page advertisement in USA Today trumpeted the launch of the "Left-Handed Whopper," with a helpful diagram showing how BK's signature sandwich was "rotated a full 180 degrees" to ensure a "better grip" and "maximum enjoyment" for lefties. The company's vice president of marketing even described how the product was only being sold in the United States for the time being, but would possibly become available in "other countries with large left-handed populations."
Neither the publication date of the ad nor the head-scratching premise raised red flags among the masses; a follow-up release from Burger King described how thousands of customers had gone to their restaurants to request left-handed Whoppers, with others specifying that they still preferred the right-handed version.
