My two favorites from yesterday:
Brady Center rescinds award given earlier to Piers Morgan.
And Spirit Airlines introduces free super-luxury features.*
So, now that we’ve safely escaped the madness and made it onto the island of sanity that is April 2 … what were some of your favorite April Fools jokes? Post them in comments.
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* If you don’t know, Spirit has a reputation for treating passengers like cattle and charging extra for every tiny thing. The best part of this April Fools joke is its source.
I got snared in two pranks this year, both from places I wasn’t expecting. In the first, the intended victim was a client. Her son had called her in a panic saying his dog was hit by a car and needed help getting her to the vet. Of course she called our clinic and we kicked in to emergency high gear expecting to receive a critical patient in moments….After about 15 minutes the embarrassed client called back…this was her son’s idea of an April fools day joke. The second came from my own first born son. As Claire knows, this kid is a straight A student, and will graduate top of his class this spring from the local community college doing dual enrollment as a high school student. Always the responsible, sensible kid. This, I wasn’t expecting. He and his Dad are on a road trip visiting colleges over his spring break. He calls to tell me he checked his end of the quarter grades and probably won’t have to give that speech at graduation any more. Of course, figuring he bombed a final exam, I ask what happened? He went to explain he was getting a B in Calculus and had messed up his perfect 4.0 GPA.
Mind you, he had the top score in the class going into the final exams. I remained puzzled. Was it mathematically possible for him to bomb a test that bad? As I tried to find the words any supportive mother would, say… well a B isn’t so bad… Are you sure it was recorded correctly? He broke out laughing….April Fools…
Reason’s take on how a border patrol checkpoint SHOULD go, if the driver refuses to answer the citizenship question. Not that there should BE any internal border patrol checkpoints.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB_l6sLxNj4
Bill — That’s FABULOUS. Too bad it’s only an April Fools joke. 🙁
furrydoc — I hope your client went home and had a “little talk” with her son. I hope she managed to refrain from talking to him while wrapping an electrical cord around his neck and beating him about the head and shoulders with a phone book. Jeez, what a stupid guy!
As to #1 son … I have to laugh at that one, knowing how that boy excels at everything and knowing how much you and dad are invested, emotionally, intellectually, and in every other way in his achievements. Gotcha, mom!
The best one was my friend Curtis changing his birthday status to 1 Apr on Facebook as an April Fools joke… and now FB won’t let him change it back.
I am glad I live in a place that does not have this tradition. However as I have US based clients, I find myself having to explain to my staff several times that email X was a joke. It is tiring and annoying. I really wish that people (mostly Americans) would learn that others, especially non-native English speakers, will not understand that statements like “we are canceling all outsourcing contracts” (an actual one from 2 years ago) are a joke.
I think next year I will have a meeting on 31 March and warn everyone that the idiots will be out in force on 1 April.
Love the Brady Center one.
The older I get the less April Fools jokes are interesting. I just don’t believe anything for a day, LOL. I think the Cheetos perfume one was about the stupidest I saw all day.
I did get a chuckle out of Magpul’s misfire (ok bad pun) of an AFJ tho: https://www.facebook.com/magpul/posts/754869914525360
I don’t enjoy April Fools jokes. I don’t click on any “exciting” links all day- and am suspicious of any that might be lingering for several days. It just seems too many of those “jokes” hurt people, emotionally, in some way- either by scaring them or by getting their hopes up. I’m not saying you are wrong if you enjoy and play the jokes, just that I don’t usually find them funny.
I have always loathed practical jokes. When I betray the revolution and set myself up as President-for-life, I will carefully arrange to do it on April 1. That’ll give me a solid day to consolidate my position. All my political enemies and half of Hollywood royalty will be dead before April 2 dawns, to the sound of weary chuckles. “Sure, sure. Soldiers are breaking down your door, uh huh. You woke me up for this?”
Seriously, it’s overdone.
I have fun with it and don’t mind. And with the first affirmative action president who’s given a pass that no other president in the country was ever given, and mostly likely never will again, isn’t fools day all day every day? As we near the end I suspect we all need a good laugh and not to take stuff seriously, cuz what’s happening with our overlords in DC is reason to assume that April Fools Day is every day from now until we’re all being paid in grain.
There was a time when I was considered a dreaded prankster. I usually didn’t bother with April Fool’s Day because everyone expects that. But somewhere, sometime, along the way II lost interest in most pranking. Not sure when, but I think it probably tracks with the growth of the online world…
…..because it just got too hard to compete with morons who consider The Onion, News-Hound, The Daily Currant, Jon Stewart, and CNNNBCCBSADCFOX to be reliable data sources.
And when you’ve got “real” (for some values of reality) politicians named Weiner flashing their weiners, a President who can’t remember that he’s married nor how many (or the gender) offspring he has without a teleprompter, Carolyn “Shoulder Thing That Goes Up” McCarthy… “my own” Dim Senator whose priority in DC (as declared on her own dot-gov website) is animal rights, or “my” House representative who… who… sob dear Bog, just google “Ann McClane Kuster”… When the ,lamestream muddia is interviewing a senile old man best known for shotgunning his lawyer (OK, so he had one redeeming quality) suffering severe brain damage due to heart attach induced oxygen deprivation on foreign policy…
When you’ve got that, how can you sort out the hoaxes? I wasted time and space on my website yesterday debunking cloned dinosaurs and 3D printed complete loaded ammunition because I’d already seen idiots falling for both. Heck, someone once told me that I was probably responsible for one iteration of the email postage hoax. and I wasn’t even trying to do that.
Haha! I got had. Usually, I’m pretty watchful on April Fools Day. But when NPR’s movie critic Bob Mondello did an entire, completely straight-faced review of the new remake of Citizen Kane (starring and directed by Keanu Reeves), I totally bought it.
Wish I’d have seen the movie poster first: http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297284760/its-not-a-sled-anymore-remaking-a-cinematic-classic
But it was soooooo complete and detailed. Now I wonder how Mondello got through it without cracking up.
http://muckrack.com/link/oyIiG/its-not-a-sled-anymore-remaking-a-cinematic-classic
Actually Piers could well increase gun sales. If he lived near me I’d certainly want to shoot him!
Joel,
I thouth the whole point of the revolution was to appoint you President for Life or until we lose interest. April 1 would make a fine coronation day.
My youngest (21 yrs) got me good this year, by sending a photo to my phone of her getting a tattoo on her face. It didn’t go well for her, as I did a Dad freak on her and wouldn’t even talk. The Queen finally got the real story – that it was a prank.
Hell, the company I toil for will happily follow that Spirit Air biz model once they hear about it (but I won’t send that up the food chain) 🙂