Opinion |

Wake me up on April 2

The one day that gives people an excuse to be stupid

By Eryk Salvaggio

Posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007, 12:00 am

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Psych majors of the world, file my report under “Aphrilophobia.” The technical term for a fear of April Fools’ Day, it’s the only crippling fear I find myself wishing upon friends.

April Fools’ Day has come and gone, proving just how annoying all of your friends, co-workers and students are willing to be. It’s a day without a moment of peace, from the moment you wake up to find a prankster super-gluing the shower door shut, to the moment you go to bed to find that your pillow has been filled with marbles. In between is a laugh parade of charlatans, liars and wannabe pranksters that make a deranged hack like Carlos Mencia look like a refreshing night of comedy.

In fact, this column was inspired by a search of the online news feeds. Scouring the Web for a hot-button news item with which to delight and inform the reading public, I was instead force-fed “news stories” designed to trick me into thinking Google was offering free printing services. Here’s the thing, people – that’s not even funny.

On April 1, I’m terrified of hearing anything remotely interesting because I know the moment I inquire about it, some kid with a clown wig and a noisemaker is going to jump out and scream about what a jerk I am for believing it.

If you want to own up to something horrible you’ve done, you should have done it last Sunday. No one will inquire too deeply into whether you’re telling the truth, because if you look like you believe it, you’re a sucker. Fact is, that’s the whole reason we have the tsunami alert system in place – because when a tsunami warning was sounded in 1946, everyone thought it was just ‘party guy’ not knowing when to stop.

This is the problem with humor, of course. We all know a majority of people think they have “above average” intelligence, even though it’s literally impossible. Apparently, a majority of people also think they’re a laugh riot. So we live in a world full of Michael Scotts, the clueless boss and self-styled comedian of “The Office” whose attempts at humor usually cause widespread awkwardness and painful apologies.

Speaking of awkward and painful, did you pick up The Maine Crapus last week? Don’t worry, no one did. The April Fools’ edition of college newspapers is a perfect example of the kind of misguided attempts at humor that I’m talking about. According to the Student Press Law Center, an organization that provides legal advice to school newspapers, April 2 is their busiest day of the year, as frantic editors-in-chief wonder whether or not concepts as extreme as pro-rape sex columns or inserts filled with racist jokes about poor members of the college community are legally protected as satire. That’s for the lawyers, but you don’t need a law degree to know that none of that is funny.

Of course, I like a good joke as much as any breathing human. But April Fools’ Day seems to have magically transformed into “tell an unclever lie with a straight face day,” which is basically only half as funny as, say, “sucker punch a stranger day” or “steal something essential to your friend’s health” day. It’s only funny if it’s unbelievable and someone still falls for it. Why not ask people to solve difficult math problems while laughing at them?

Let’s go back to the gentle days of Switzerland’s Spaghetti Trees. In 1957, the BBC perpetuated a hoax on the public that was absurd enough to be a joke, while still trapping the gullible citizens of the world. In response to a question about the origins of spaghetti, the BBC ran a news report explaining the profession of spaghetti harvesting and how the eradication of the spaghetti weevil was responsible for a new abundance of the Italian pasta. Brits nationwide reportedly planted spaghetti into cans of tomato sauce in the hopes of growing their own trees.

That’s funny, because it doesn’t involve someone putting too much water in my coffee, hiding my keys, putting saran wrap on the toilet bowl or fishing line on a dollar bill that gets pulled away by Captain Yuks-a-lot when I go to pick it up.

Eryk Salvaggio is bitter for being burned too often.