Greatest April Fools Jokes Ever: Post here

[1monster]

My entry was the BBC's Swiss Spaghetti Harvest Documentary done for April Fools Day, 1957.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/spaghetti.html

"The spaghetti harvest here in Switzerland is not, of course, carried out on anything like the tremendous scale of the Italian industry." (snip)

"Another reason this may be a bumper year lies in the virtual disappearce of the spaghetti weavil, the tiny creature whose depradations have caused much concern in the past." (snip)

"For those who love this dish, there's nothing like real home-grown spaghetti."

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[Gabi Hayes]

1. President Bush

that is all

[1monster]

3. If only that were an April Fools joke!!!!

[glarius]

2. Burger King is now serving "Whoppers" made for left-handed customers!

April Fool!........hahaha

[RC]

6. Hey, that's not funny...

I'm left handed. Do you have any idea how hard it is to eat right handed made food?

[glarius]

8. My son is left handed and he has learned to do it....so can you!

LOL...:toast:

[RC]

15. Both my parents were left handed.

My youngest daughter is. I can cope.

[HamDon]

9. Not only that

Left handed hammers and screwdivers are REALLY hard to find.

[RC]

14. But left handed pens are becoming more common place.

[mwooldri]

24. About time they made left handed keyboards.

One where the letters across the top go POIUYTREWQ instead.

Mark.

[NYC]

4. I saw the spaghetti harvest on television.

It was well done. (I don't mean that it was convincing; it was well presented as a news piece.)

Long strands of spaghetti were draped over tree branches, and women were picking them, and placing them in baskets. It was hilarious.

[TahitiNut]

18. That bit dates back at least 35 years.

I recall first seeing it as a part of the nightly network (I think it was ABC) news, presented straight just like a regular news story. I damned near fell on the floor laughing. They just slipped it in like a human-interest news story - it was a beautiful spoof.

[crispini]

5. I really liked the Taco Bell Buys the Liberty Bell.

Still got the ad somewhere. Full-page, must have cost 'em a mint.

[erpowers]

7. Bush Twins Join Military-Going to Iraq

I wish I could take credit for this one, but it was a British newspaper. I posted on this already, but once again you can read the story at www.huffingtonpost.com.

[1monster]

11. Yeah, but that one was so improbable, I knew it had to be a April Fools

joke...

[Rufus T. Firefly]

10. NPR has one story every year.

I think it's usually on "All Things Considered." Last year they did a full story on how dangerous it could be in Vermont if the maple trees weren't tapped for the syrup - complete with sound effects of explosions and stories of people killed by exploding trees.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4571982

April Fool's on NPR
April 1, 2004
Post Office Calls for Portable 'Vanity' Zip Codes
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1805651

April 1, 2003
Shellac, the Sound of the Future
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1216161

Federally Funded Flea Dips for Fluffy?
http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2002/apr/pethealthcare/

LunarCorp Proposes Ads on the Moon
http://www.npr.org/programs/watc/features/2001/010401.lunar.html



They always go all-out to make the story believable.

I think this is the one for this year:

A Perilous Encounter with the I-Bod
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5317505

Weekend Edition - Saturday, April 1, 2006 · Scott Simon gets a laugh and a little love out of the new i-Bod. The i-Bod is said to help users regulate major body functions: heart, respiration, even cholesterol. But it seems foolish to test it with rat poison.

[hootinholler]

12. The Starbucks transcontinental coffee pipeline.

A few years ago on NPR. Sucked me right in for the first few mins.

-Hoot

[TheCentepedeShoes]

13. So lame, but

several years ago a co-worker got a call at lunchtime. It was from his wife although she didn't identify herself and the receptionist-of-the-week didn't recognize her voice. The co-worker wasn't in and the wife knew it, because they were having lunch together at home and she was calling from the bedroom. She left a number and asked him to call "Mr Bear." So, when he got back to work he called and yeah...it was the zoo.

[VelmaD]

16. One from right here at DU

Trumad convinces everyone that Will Pitt got hired by Air America :)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=961912

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1324599

[1monster]

17. That one WAS good!

:D

[muriel_volestrangler]

19. San Serriffe: The Guardian invents an entire nation

Remember that, in 1977, the printing terms they were using were far less widely known than they are no in the days of desktop publishing.

The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement describing the tenth anniversary of the small island of San Serriffe. The island's geography appeared to be named after printing terms. For instance, its two islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its leader was General Pica, and its capital was Bodoni. Articles described the eccentric culture of the island. One strange island custom was the Festival of the Well Made Play, during which islanders would perform the complete cycle of plays by playwright William Douglas-Home in English, Caslon, and Ki-flong (languages of the island). Strangely enough, the islanders did not appear to understand the plays themselves. It was merely certain ritual aspects of the plays that they appreciated, as evidenced by the fact that they would "applaud widely whenever an actor appears wearing a Harris tweed hacking jacket with a centre vent and cavalry twill trousers and a paisley cravat." Adding credibility to the supplement was the fact that many eminent people were quoted in it, referring to their experiences in San Serriffe. Authentic advertisements also accompanied the articles and played into the hoax. For instance, Texaco offered a contest for which the first prize was a two-week trip to Cocobanana Beach in San Serriffe. Kodak also ran an ad in which it said, "If you have a picture of San Serriffe, we'd like to see it." The Guardian reported that its phones rang all day as people called up requesting more information about the island. The success of this hoax was largely responsible for the flood of April Fool's Day jokes that appeared in other papers in succeeding years. At the Guardian itself the island of San Serriffe became a running gag in the years to follow. The island reappeared on April Fool's Day in 1978, 1980 and 1999. Moreover, each time it reappeared the island had changed location. It began in the Indian Ocean, moved to the South China Sea, and ended up in the North Atlantic.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/af_1977.html

The leader's rise to power in San Serriffe

Spiking the cultural roots

However, no one who worked for the Guardian at the time would willingly accept the verdict of the Museum of Hoaxes that spaghetti was top of the shop. The BBC's was a momentary excitement: the April Fool hoax that the Guardian launched on the world in 1977 has achieved immortality. The notion came from a man called Philip Davies, who ran a department called Special Reports, which produced from time to time a page or pages where a theme, perhaps a country or region was chosen, advertisers responded, and unenthusiastic editorial writers were persuaded to produce the copy. These were often dicey occasions. I remember on one occasion a set of pages hymning some Middle Eastern state of a kind whose government would not normally have been commended in the Guardian. As the pages were about to be printed the features editor rose from his desk with a strangled cry and rushed off to halt them. Some austere editorial person given the copy to check had written across the text: "Are we really sinking so low as to print this tendentious rubbish?" These words had duly been set in type and appeared among the advertisements.

For April 1 1977, Davies suggested a set of pages commemorating a wholly imaginary island. Advertisers, he reckoned, would gladly join in the joke. And they did, in profusion. But the true architect of the project was a famously deft, adroit and inventive leader writer called Geoffrey Taylor, who thought up a group of islands called San Serriffe, the principal constituent parts being Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse, which together formed a shape like a semicolon. The capital was Bodoni: the president (ie dictator), a man called Pica, had been victorious in the latest in a string of three coups. (Nearly all the names of places and people were taken from printing terms.) One of the curious features of San Serriffe was that the islands kept moving from ocean to ocean. At the time of the survey, Taylor decided, they were somewhere off Tenerife. But fact is sometimes as strange as fiction, which is one reason why hoaxes work. Two days before publication, a ghastly air crash occurred on Tenerife and San Serriffe had to be hurriedly switched to the Indian Ocean.

The impact of the seven-page survey was quite astonishing. The office all day was bedlam as people pestered the switchboard with requests for more information. Both travel agencies and airlines made official complaints to the editor, Peter Preston, about the disruption as customers simply refused to believe that the islands did not exist. Veterans of that time say there's never been a day like it in terms of reader response. Over the past 30 years, San Serriffe has entered the language as a kind of flawed utopia and one American writer has published a series of erudite books about its publishing industry. Geoffrey Taylor now lives in New Zealand, and messages reaching the Guardian early this morning suggest that San Serriffe is floating today just off the South Island.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1744583,00.html

[SalmonChantedEvening]

20. A fictional one from M*A*S*H

It was a practical joke episode, but if used as an April Fool's joke, it would be perfect as well. Someone is going through the camp pulling pranks on everyone until the only one left unharmed is Hawkeye. He goes in to such a state of hyper-awareness and paranoia that he becomes the practical joke, all by himself.

:D

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. A very well timed one this year, that fooled a lot of people

especially the British freeper types, whose heads explode with the thought of something European replacing something British.

The true background: BBC Radio 4, which is the national news, speech, drama and comedy radio channel (the quintessence of the BBC, many would argue) has started at 5:30 each morning with the same piece of music for the past 35 years: the "Radio 4 UK Theme Tune", which is an orchestral medley of various traditional British tunes (Rule Britannia, Danny Boy/Londonderry Air, Scotland the Brave, Men of Harlech, Greensleeves, The Drunken Sailor, Early One Morning). The new head of Radio 4 has decided that having the same piece of music every day is boring, and has announced it's about to be replaced with longer news headlines. A huge number of people, the vast majority of whom I suspect never hear this tune at 5:30 am, are up in arms about "tradition" being junked, and newspapers are running campaigns to save the tune.

The Today programme, which is the Radio 4 early morning news programme, beginning half an hour after the tune, ran a story on Saturday that the tune will be replaced by a Euromedley, with tunes from the 25 member states worked into an overall theme based on 'Ode to Joy', the section of Beethoven's 9th that is already the EU's official anthem (to the annoyance of the right wing Europhobes). I swear you could hear the cups of tea being thrown at the radios across the land.

audio of the piece on Saturday

audio of a few emails they received ("Europropaganda!" "Too sick to finish my breakfast!")

[mwooldri]

23. Well, I didn't fall for the joke... but scrapping the UK theme....

.... now that _is_ diabolical. I used to go to sleep to it! Personally I hope the Uk 'freeper' types manage to help save that theme from being axed from the airwaves. Besides, it's not as if anyone misses the news - at 5:01 there's a 6 minute world news summary, usually followed by another half hour of world news commentary and analysis because the BBC World Service airs overnight when Radio 4 is closed down.

But the BBC, and its various bits, have always participated in April Fool's Day. I too participated at work by producing a 'training flash' that was leaked to me by a contact I have who makes up new products for the company I work for (American Express). In it, I announced that American Express was now going to issue cards that would work on the Visa and Mastercard networks too. To add plausibility of it, I selected certain card graphics that were available on the Internet to add to the credibility of this (American Express has co-branded credit card arrangements with Delta Airlines, Hilton and Starwood. They also have other co-branded credit card arrangements with other banks outside the United States - so it was easy to go to those banks and get a copy of a Delta Skymiles Visa card from Japan, Hilton HHonors Mastercard from the UK, and a Starwood Mastercard from Canada.).

I guess I'll see the reaction to it today when I go to work!

Mark.

[shadowknows69]

22. The newsletter website I run

has been down for redesign for a few weeks. I've had a splash page up explaining the reconstruction and directing people to our discussion forum for updates. a few days before the first I changed the splash page to read that we decided to change our paradigm and we were going to relaunch on saturday as a local amateur porn site, giving a 10 day free trial and then taking subscriptions. needless to say I let most of our regulars in on the joke but come saturday horny local surfers hoping to see the girl next door were treated instead to the new design of our newsletter format. Sorry boys. ;-)

[tenshi816]

25. Last year my local paper

published a front page story (complete with photograph) about a tree on the moor I live next to being spray-painted pink, right down to each and every leaf. I fell for it and went marching right out the door, camera in hand, to take a picture of said tree. I went to the exact spot the article said it was located, and found nothing, not a single pink tree anwhere. It was only when I got back home and looked at the newspaper again that I realized what date it was. I'm still slightly embarrassed at how gullible I am at times.

[DrDan]

26. Loof Lirpa drafted by the Bostin Celtics

from some Eastern Europe country.

But his joining Boston was dependent upon the "Celtics" now being pronounced in the traditional fashion ("Keltics")

[SidDithers]

27. Sidd Finch in Sports Illustrated...

an article written by George Plimpton about a guy who, through his Buddhist monk training, was able to throw a fastball 160 miles per hour. The New York Mets were in on the joke and allowed some of their people to be used in photos.

Plimpton eventually expanded the story in to a pretty funny book.

Sidd, short for Siddhartha :)

Sid