I’ve covered a lot of holidays on this show, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Saint Patrick’s Day, and honestly, they’re all pretty weird and fairly mysterious. The psychology of holidays fascinates me, especially the widespread and seemingly inexplicable ones. How do we all come to celebrate, rally behind a celebration we don’t even understand? And we’re not just like wishing people a happy whatever day. We go so far beyond that. Americans spend over 10 billion dollars on Halloween each year. We throw parades and wear green shirts that say “Kiss Me I’m Irish” on Saint Patrick’s Day even if we aren’t the least bit Irish. We even pinch people who don’t wear them. And don’t even get me started on Valentine's Day. No one even knows which Saint Valentine it’s named after. But one of these holidays surpasses the rest when it comes to being mysterious and inexplicable: April Fools Day. Like really, what even is it? Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. This topic was suggested by my friend Alex who is an OG fan of the show. I know we’re several days past April Fools Day now when this episode is being released but whatever. Hopefully you guys are still interested in learning about it. I was tempted to release it last weekend but Mary really needed her Women’s History Month slot so here we are a few days late. But, better late than never as the saying goes. Here’s the real trick when it comes to an episode about the history of April Fools Day, I’ll unveil it early on… no one really knows the history of April Fools Day. It’s truly a mystery but there are several compelling theories that we’ll dig into. This is wild to me because April Fools Day is an international holiday that has been celebrated for at least several hundreds of years. Why? How? No one even knows why we do it or how it got started? Holidays are so weird. What a weird niche subcategory of human psychology. I hope someone somewhere is studying the psychology of holidays cause what in the world is that? 

 

I’m kind of assuming that everyone listening right now knows what April Fools Day is but in case you somehow don’t, it’s a holiday celebrated every year on April first and the whole point of the holiday is to trick or prank people. Right, you’ll be like “hey your house is on fire,” or whatever and then you go “April Fools!” and that’s supposed to be funny. That’s one type of prank, just like a false statement, like a lie that doesn’t count because you’re just kidding. Even newspapers have gotten in on the fun, publishing fake news stories on April Fools Day. But traditionally, April Fools pranks have also including sending people on a fool’s errand, right, when you send someone to the auto shop for example to get blinker fluid or something, something that doesn't exist. To make them feel stupid, of course. Because that’s also funny. Another big one, secretly attaching something to someone’s back, this one actually goes way back, no pun intended, but people have been doing this for a long time. We’ll get into it. More recently, it’s manifested as the classic “kick me” sign taped to someone’s back.  

 

Honestly, I’ve never been a huge April Fools day fan. Call me a buzz kill or whatever, it’s just not my kind of funny, but whatever. Let’s get into some of the theories about where this holiday came from. We know that people were aware of it, it was a thing, sort of, in Renaissance Europe and we’ll get into the evidence for that in a sec but some people theorize that it goes back even farther, to ancient Rome, of course, like most of our weirdest holiday traditions cause they were weirdo sick freaks in Rome. So the theory is that April Fools Day is linked to an ancient Roman spring festival called Hilaria, like hilarious, so funny. This was a celebration of the spring equinox and it probably took place on March 25th, we think. So the Romans called March 25th, the quote “eighth of the calends of April,” whatever that means. But that associates it with April, more specifically April 1st, the calends of April. I don’t know. So what was Hilaria like? Was it like April Fools Day? Well, here’s an entry written by Sir William Smith who was a classicist, he helped revive classical teachings in Britain and he wrote the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities in 1875. He writes quote “The manner of its celebration during the time of the republic is unknown [he’s talking about Hilaria], except that Valerius Maximus mentions games in honour of the mother of the gods. Respecting its celebration at the time of the empire, we learn from Herodian that, among other things, there was a solemn procession, in which the statue of the goddess was carried, and before this statue were carried the most costly specimens of plate and works of art belonging either to wealthy Romans or to the emperors themselves. All kinds of games and amusements were allowed on this day; masquerades were the most prominent among them, and every one might, in his disguise, imitate whomsoever he liked, and even magistrates,” end quote. So is Hilaria like April Fools Day? Not really. Except that we do have people dressing up in disguise, right masquerades, and they’re imitating real people, prominent people. So that’s kind of like a trick. But really the only thing that ties Hilaria to April Fools Day is that they are both celebrated around April 1st and not even really because Hilaria was on March 25th. So not a great theory, but it’s something. 

 

There is another Roman theory about April Fools Day. This one comes from the time of Emperor Constantine in the 300s. Apparently, a group of jesters who are like silly guys right, entertainers, clowns, fools, whatever, apparently they convinced Constantine to let one of them be king for a day and he actually agreed and he named one of his jesters, this guy name Kugel, Constantine named him king for a day. He got to rule the empire but just for that day. And the first thing that he did, as king, was announce that that day, which happened to be April 1st, would be a day of fun and frivolity and that became April Fools Day. And I mean that pretty much explains it, right? Except no. Because that whole story I just told you, that was itself an April Fools Day prank. Sorry. Had to. Yeah that story was made up by Boston University professor Joseph Boskin in 1983. He told it to Associated Press reporter Fred Bayles as if it were true and poor Bayles actually ran the story. And, I mean this is the Associated Press, this is a legit news outlet and so they had everyone believing this Kugel story. According to Boston University’s newspaper BU Today, Professor Boskin starts getting calls from the Today Show and other reputable news outlets to tell them more about King Kugel and he’s back in his classroom like boasting to his students about it basically. Robin Berghaus writes for BU Today quote “Back at BU, Boskin used the amusing scenario to show students in his Media and Social Change class how the media can suddenly pick up on a joke, rumor, an innuendo, or a story and regard it as authentic. No matter what you hear, you must question, Boskin reminded his students. Unbeknownst to him, the editor of the Daily Free Press was in his class. The next day, the Freep ran the headline “Professor Fools AP,” end quote. And the Associated Press reads this and they freak out. They don’t think it’s funny. They retract the article. Professor Boskin says quote “The AP had a huge conniption when they read this I got an immediate phone call from an editor there, who was furious, saying that I had ruined the career of a young reporter. He said I told a lie. ‘A lie?’ I asked, ‘I was telling an April Fools’ Day story.’” end quote. I guess I’m not the only one who doesn’t think it’s funny. He didn’t end up ruining poor Fred Bayles career, though, don’t worry. He’s now a journalism professor at Boston University, they’re actually colleagues now. But, Bayles does say in that article quote “Be very, very wary of what someone, particularly someone talking about April Fools’ Day, tells you. It also illustrates a professor’s responsibility not to screw around with someone’s career — and the integrity of a university,” end quote. Bayles is clearly still salty about this one. 

 

But so, yeah, April Fools, the Constantine King Kugel story is not true. That’s not where April Fools Day came from. And while people point to similarities in the ancient Roman Hilaria, Druidic rites in Britain, the medieval celebration of the Feast of Fools, and the Indian festival Holi, none of these really show clear ties to April Fools Day. One of the first possible mentions of it we have comes from the late middle ages, in a poem written by Geoffrey Chaucer who wrote the Canterbury Tales. This poem, it’s called “Nun’s Priest Tale,” was written in 1390 and it tells the story of a rooster being fooled by a fox and then the rooster also fools the fox. And it says that this takes place quote “Syn March began, thritty dayes and two,” end quote. Which would mean 32 days after March began AKA April 1st. So that would make this the first actual reference to the day, April 1st, as a day of trickery, right, fooling people. Except, many scholars think the word “bigan” is actually a scribal error and that Chaucer was actually trying to refer to May 2nd, 32 days after March ended not after it began. So this is before the printing press right, 1390. At this point, people, scribes, are writing and rewriting and rewriting, they are transcribing books by hand to make additional copies. This is why books were so rare and expensive back in the day. It’s an incredible amount of work to print a book. So they think this word bigan was a mistake by the scribe who wrote out these copies of the book, not the word Chaucer originally wrote. But even that suggests that the scribes, these medieval scribes may have associated April 1st with tricks and foolery. Right, like they just kind of expected it to be April 1st not May 2nd. So they were like “ended? No that can’t be right. He must mean began. I’ll go ahead and write began. I’ll just fix it for him, of course he meant April 1st.”  

 

In France, someone who is tricked on April Fool’s Day is called a “poisson d’avril” or an April Fish. And the first reference of this term poisson d’avril comes from a poem written in 1508 by Eloy D’Amerval (da-mah-ver-al) called The Book of Deviltry. But he doesn’t, you know, he doesn’t say anything about April 1st, or April Fools Day, specifically, just that a foolish person is an April fish. But there’s an explanation for that that has nothing to do with the holiday. Stephen Winick writes for the Library of Congress Blogs quote “The idea of the “April fish” seems to be the fact that fish were plentiful and hungry in the spring, and thus easy to catch—an “April fish” was more gullible than a fish at other times of the year. Thus, a mere reference to an “April fish” does not itself prove there was a holiday on April 1,” end quote. At least not in 1508 when D’Amerval first coined the phrase April Fish. 

 

But, we can’t rule out France entirely. A lot of scholars believe that April Fools Day is related to an event that took place in France in the 1580s. So what happened was, France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar is the calendar we know and love today and it’s almost exactly the same as the Julian calendar people used to use except for one main thing that actually kind of matters a lot. The Julian calendar added a leap day right, February 29th, every 4 years to account for the fact that a year isn’t exactly 365 days long astronomically. The Gregorian calendar tweaked that the littlest bit. According to the Gregorian calendar we now use, leap years happen every four years except when the year is divisible by 100 but not also divisible by 400. I know that’s confusing. I actually didn’t know we did this until I interviewed Peter de Jager for my Y2K episode, number 42. You can like hear me learning this for the first time in the audio from that interview. I thought we did leap years every four years no matter what, Julian style. No. Sometimes it gets skipped and that’s to keep the calendar even more astronomically accurate. Because it adds up over time. If we still went by the Julian calendar, we would be 13 days ahead of where we are right now. It would throw off the equinoxes and the solstices and all that good stuff. So anyway, had to be done, France switches over to the Gregorian calendar in 1582. But along with that shift in leap years, it also changes New Years Day from March 25th, around the time of the vernal equinox, to January 1st. That was a new thing. So before that, March 25th was New Years and they would have a week long celebration that ended on April 1st. Charles Panati writes in his book Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things quote “Many Frenchmen who resisted the change, and others who merely forgot about it, continued partying and exchanging gifts during the week ending April 1. Jokers ridiculed these conservatives’ steadfast attachment to the old New Year’s date by sending foolish gifts and invitations to nonexistent parties,” end quote. These guys were also referred to as poisson d’avril, April fish from the 1508 poem and, according to Jeff Dean writing for NPR would even have a paper fish attached to their back without them knowing. So, like I said, that prank started quite early and at some point transformed from a fish into a kick me sign or whatever. 

 

But Stephen Winick writing for the Library of Congress Blogs isn’t convinced that this calendar change, this shifting of New Years celebrations is where April Fools Day came from. He writes quote “The real history of New Year’s observances in France is more complex, with different regions celebrating at different times. As early as 1507, books were printed in France which indicated that people were beginning the year on January 1… Moreover, Panati does not provide any concrete evidence of any of his claims in the form of contemporary accounts or surviving invitations [right people were inviting people to fake new years parties as a joke but none of these invitations have been found] –not even for the claim of a week-long celebration, which is necessary to involve April 1 in the New Year change. [theres no evidence of that] In all, we’ll have to consider his story to be interesting speculation,” end quote. He also says this calendar change theory comes up a lot, too much, even to explain the origin of other mysterious holidays like old Christmas. He explains quote “Since this appears to be a traditional story that occurs in several variants localized to different holidays, times, and places, it might be good to look at the calendar-change story as a “migratory legend.”  It’s also an example of “metafolklore,” or folklore about folklore, in this case a folk story about the origins of a folk holiday… the story being “metafolklore” does not necessarily mean it is untrue, but it often means not all variants can be true simultaneously,” end quote. 

 

Metafolklore aside, the first actual for sure legit reference we have to April Fools Day being on April 1st comes from 1561 in yet another poem. This one was written by a Flemish poet named Eduard De Dene (den-ay). In the poem, a nobleman sends his servant on a series of wild fruitless errands, a wild goose chase, right. Go get the blinker fluid, the “hydro-dynamic spatula” right from Spongebob, when Mr. Krabs sends him to get this spatula that doesn’t exist and he actually gets it. Classic. Anyway, in this poem, goodness did not expect to be juxtaposing 16th century Flemish poetry with Spongebob this week but there you have it. It can be done. In the poem the servant actually realizes that these are fools errands because he realizes that it’s April 1st. So when De Dene (den-ay) wrote this in 1561, April 1st was definitely already associated with fooling people, sending people on fools errands. This trick endures through the centuries. A 1902 newspaper article from the Akron Daily Democrat reads quote “One of the most popular amusements on April 1…is the sending of persons on fruitless errands. Unsophisticated persons are sent to the bookstores for a copy of the “History of Eve’s Grandmother,” or to the chemist’s shop for “pigeon’s milk,” while small boys are sometimes sent to the harness shop for strap oil, when a liberal dose of this treatment is usually administered to the boy,” end quote. 

 

So we have possible French references, definite Flemish references, but the first mention of April Fools day in English writing comes from 1686 in a book written by John Aubrey. The book is called Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, and it reads quote “We observe it on the first of April. And so, it is kept in Germany everywhere." That’s it. That’s the whole reference. I mean it’s just like bread crumbs with this one. The Poor Robin’s Almanac from 1760 reads quote “The first of April some do say, is set apart for all Fool’s Day. But why the people call it so, Nor I nor they themselves do know.” Even in 1760 people are like what the heck is this? It’s like we’ve never known what it was. Immediately forgot why we were doing this. 

 

It makes its way to North America because by 1771 we have a diary entry written by Anna Green Winslow in Boston, more bread crumbs I’m afraid. Anna Green Winslow was just like some girl in Boston who kept a journal and wrote a series of letters to her mother in the early 1770s right before the Revolutionary War. And now this is significant because it sheds light on what life was like at that time, specifically what life was like for rich white people at that time because the Winslow family of which she was part of was very wealthy and prominent in Boston. But it is significant that this was written by a woman. As we know, we don’t often get the accounts of women. Most of history was written by men. So it is this interesting little window into the life of a Revolutionary war era woman. Anyway, she writes quote “April 1st.–Will you be offended mamma, if I ask you, if you remember the flock of wild Geese that papa call’d you to see flying over the Blacksmith’s shop this day three years? I hope not; I only mean to divert you. It is the first of April” end quote. Winick explains that seemingly cryptic entry quote “Green carefully emphasizes the date twice, and suggests the idea of the “wild goose chase,” implying her father had sent her mother on such a chase on April Fools’ Day in 1768–although the prank may also consist of asking her mother to remember an event that never happened, another kind of “wild goose chase.’” end quote. 

 

And then we start to get lasting evidence of the holiday in the form of false newspaper stories and other tidbits that were recorded on paper by the late 18th century and definitely into the 19th century. For example, a 1796 handbill requests the delivery of 17 fools caps and coats to Middletown, Connecticut on April 1st. 19th century folks love April Fools Day. They were so weird in the 1800s, were they not? Like morbid and took pictures of their dead children and had seances and stuff but also liked to joke around and prank people. Just raging unchecked trauma and mental illness and heavy metal poisoning in the 1800s, I don’t know. They liked to have fun in just like weird and creepy ways. So of course they loved April Fools Day. Here’s some of the stuff they got up to to celebrate the day according to Winick quote “By the late nineteenth century, April Fools’ Day tricks had developed into more elaborate forms, and there were three common artistic representations of April Fools’ pranks. The first one showed a brick under a hat on a sidewalk, the idea being that someone would eventually succumb to the urge to kick the hat and thus stub his toe on the brick [fun]. The second involved leaving a supposedly lost, desirable object, such as a wallet or money, in plain view, with a string tied around it. The other end of the string was held by a hidden prankster, who would pull the string and snatch away the object when a passer-by tried to take it. The third was a smoking coin, indicating a coin that had been heated up with fire or a cigar, and then left where someone might pick it up and get burned,” end quote. Because who doesn’t love stubbed toes and burnt fingers? What is funnier than that? I just think they really really needed therapy in the 1800s and it wasn’t a thing so they did this stuff instead. 

 

We even have April Fools Day related folk songs popping up in the late 1800s. One of them, which originally came from Ireland is called The First Day of April and it talks about an Irishman named Pat Campbell competing with his English neighbors in like a battle of April Fools Day tricks. And there’s actually a recording of this song from 1938 which is pretty cool, Alan Lomax recorded a guy named John Green singing it and here I’ll play you a few seconds. 0:10 - 0:32. It goes on and on and on but just kind of shows you how prevalent April Fools Day has been especially in the later 1800s. Even got its own folk song. 

 

Professor Joseph Boskin over at Boston University wasn’t the first to dupe someone with a made up newspaper article. Jeff Dean writes for NPR quote “On April 1, 1905… a German newspaper wrote that thieves had dug a tunnel underneath the U.S. Treasury and stolen $268 million in silver and gold. One of the more famous pranks occurred in 1957, when the BBC aired a segment showing Swiss harvesters picking spaghetti off trees and bushes, claiming the region had had "an exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop" that year. NPR has gotten in on the fun too. In 1992, the show Talk of the Nation ran a hoax story in which Richard Nixon — played by Rich Little — announced he was running for president again with the slogan "I didn't do anything wrong, and I won't do it again." On April 1, 2014, NPR published an article titled "Why Doesn't America Read Anymore?" The post sparked heated debate on social media — particularly among those who neglected to actually click on the link. Those who did were greeted with a challenge: ‘Congratulations, genuine readers, and happy April Fools' Day! We sometimes get the sense that some people are commenting on NPR stories that they haven't actually read. If you are reading this, please like this post and do not comment on it. Then let's see what people have to say about this [quote] 'story.'" end quote. And that is my kind of funny. Gosh I love NPR. 

 

Apparently, which like not while I was teaching, thankfully, but apparently it was once a big deal for students to prank their teachers on April Fools Day. One big one was to lock the teachers out of the school building. That was the big prank. Winick recalls an interview with a guy named Dr. Samuel Lathan who was born in rural South Carolina in 1842, quite a specific microcosm there. He did in an interview in 1938 so he was like almost a hundred years old, in which he recalls these old April Fools pranks from the mid 1800s, so so so cool that we have that. He says quote “April the 1st was dreaded by most rural school teachers. The pupils would get inside and bar the teacher out. The teacher, who didn’t act on the principle that discretion is the better part of valor, generally got the worst of it. Mr. Douglass soon learned this, and, on April Fools’ Day, he would walk to the school, perceive the situation, laughingly announce there would be no school until the morrow, and leave,” end quote. In a 1968 interview, a student from Washington DC recalls quote “I believe it was April Fools’ Day. He put tacks on a piece of tape and the teacher sat on them. She said she was going to fail everybody in class. But, I think, she found out who did it, you know. He was put out of school,” end quote. Fun stuff. 

 

And now for some slightly more fun than making your teacher sit on tacks pranks that have been pulled off successfully in recent decades, according to Readers Digest. In 1965 in Denmark, a Copenhagen newspaper reported that there was a new law that all dogs had to be painted white to improve road safety because white dogs were easier to see at night. In 1980 BBC reported that they were going to upgrade Big Ben to a digital clock to keep up with the times. In 1986, a French newspaper called Le Parisien successfully convinced people that the Eiffel Tower was going to be dismantled and rebuilt inside the new Euro Disney Park. I assume they were not pleased. The French are rarely pleased. In 1987 in Norway a fake newspaper article announced that the government was going to be distributing 10,000 liters of wine that they had confiscated from smugglers. And apparently people read this and actually showed up with empty bottles and buckets to receive their share of the wine. In 1996 Taco Bell announced that they had purchased the Liberty Bell and were going to rename it the Taco Liberty Bell. And as stupid as that is, they claimed that publicity from the prank earned them an extra million dollars over the next 24 hours after that announcement was made. So of course Burger King jumped on that in 1998 when they advertised a left handed whopper. I don’t know what that did to their sales but apparently they really did have customers showing up and trying to order the left handed whopper. And, I mean Burger King clientele, that just, that checks out. In 2008 Canada’s West Jet airline advertised their overhead storage bins as quote “among the most spacious of any airline” and announced that it would charge passengers $12 to use them as quote “sleeper cabins.” In 2009 the Taipei Times claimed that China had sent their zoo fake pandas. That they were really just brown forest bears dyed to look like pandas. And this caused an absolute outrage. In Germany in 2009, BMW ran an ad promoting its new quote “magnetic tow technology.” So the idea was that drivers could connect to the car in front of them using a magnetic beam, turn off their engine, and just get a free ride. Also in 2009, wow 2009 was a big year for April Fools Day pranks, YouTube turned some of its videos upside down and linked people to a page called “Tips for Viewing the New Layout” that suggested viewers hang their monitors upside down from the ceiling. YouTube is actually Google. Google bought YouTube in 2006 so Google is the real prankster there. In fact, Google is so notorious for their April Fools Day pranks that when they launched Gmail on April 1st, 2004, most people didn’t think it was real. It was. It is. It’s the biggest email service provider in the world ever. But it came out on April 1st. And people were so wary of Google’s constant pranks they were like “nah. Not a thing.” But honestly, that publicity probably only helped with a successful launch. Taco Bell style. 

 

So what even is April Fools Day? I mean if we follow that meager trail of breadcrumbs, an old fable, a paper fish, a random lady’s mom, I think it’s pretty clear to see that we have absolutely no freaking idea what April Fools Day is. But it seems to have something to do with spring, with coming out of the seriousness of winter and into a more lighthearted season, a fresh start. It’s almost like the comic relief. Cause, I mean, winter is bad now, depending on where you live, it’s like cold or whatever, but back then, back in the day, winter was downright scary. It had to have been a scary time of dwindling food supplies and sickness and death and if you made it through that, if you made it through winter, that was cause for celebration, for jubilation, for a little bit of foolishness. I think April Fools Day, though we can’t trace its exact origins - Hilaria, Feast of Fools, Holi - I think we see it emerge, throughout different cultures even in different times and places, because it was an inevitable necessity. The long awaited comic relief to winter’s tragedy. But I mean, who knows. Is any of this even true? It is April Fool’s Day after all. Of course it’s true, April Fool’s Day was last Tuesday you fools. 

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 

Information used in this episode was sourced from the Library of Congress Blogs, History.com, NPR, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, BU Today, and Encyclopedia Britannica. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.