Don’t Google “April Fool’s Day sucks” today. Swathes of haters come for the calendar’s number one prankster every year without fail, arguing that the day is unfunny, doesn’t serve any purpose and only makes people feel smug or stupid. But we weren’t always so grumpy. It would take a miserable person indeed to look back at some of the most glorious April Fools and not crack a smile. Where did it go so wrong?
There is no one definitive explanation of where April Fool’s Day began. But, as Martin Wainwright explains in his 2007 book The Guardian Book of April Fool’s Day, there is a history of various creeds and cultures being particularly zany at the spring equinox. “We seem to feel a universal sense of vim,” writes Wainwright. “Let’s have a bit of fun. Mischief time.” Catholics like to believe that April Fool’s Day officially began in 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII changed the European calendar such that the start of the year became 1st January, and no longer 25th March. Because the new year used to be celebrated for a week, meaning it ended on 1st April, people who still used the old calendar were called fools. (Critics might point out that this explanation is as funny as April Fool’s Day ever got.)
It was in the 18th and 19th centuries that a firm tradition was established in Britain. But even 170 years ago, April Fool’s Day had its detractors. Presciently, Herman Melville, tired of American pranksters such as PT Barnum fooling gullible members of the public, included in his 1857 novel The Confidence Man a story of the devil trying to con his fellow passengers on a Mississippi riverboat. The book was set and released on April Fool’s Day. It was well reviewed in Europe, writes Wainwright, “but the New York press recognised that their abandonment of truth was part of the target, and bit back”.
By the 1920s, the day was already being commercialised by ad agencies, who wanted to get in on the action. So began a century of often joyous, frequently tiresome corporate humour. For many, April Fool’s Day now involves being bombarded by obviously fake product launches by every corporation on planet Earth. Google has a 20-year history of carrying them out, only stopping in 2020 at the height of the pandemic when nothing seemed funny anymore.
We weren’t always on high alert. When we were less assaulted by news on a daily basis—and, crucially, when we had no access to social media—April Fool adverts did manage to make us laugh. Duncan Forrester used to be product PR manager for BMW UK and remembers them fondly. One from 1988—before Forrester’s time—was for an imaginary windscreen wiper meant only to wipe the BMW logo on the bonnet of the car; another was a screen in the car through which you could turn on your microwave at home. “My view is that April Fool’s jokes are a sort of barometer of the confidence of a brand,” Forrester tells me. He understands the perspective that a joke might cease to be funny because it originates from a committee scheduling it months in advance. “But I think that companies are well placed to be able to do it, and if it just creates a little bit of light-heartedness in a rather serious world, then that has to be a positive thing.”
I don’t disagree with Forrester, and I can see the logic in companies wanting to stand out. But, as any good comedian will tell you, jokes work particularly well when they feel surprising. And as anyone on the internet will tell you, the reason that the lead-up to April Fool’s Day now feels like counting down the days to your execution is that we know what will happen: we will spend most of the day squinting at news stories about companies releasing perfumes that smell like Donald Trump’s hair or umbrellas that can read your mind, wondering if anything is real any more.
But then again, this is a little like saying that when we turn up at a comedy show, we know that a comedian is going to try to make us laugh. The question is: why have we become ill-disposed to the April Fools in the first place? Perhaps the best analogy is that 1st April isn’t like turning up to a comedy show hoping to laugh; it’s like a comedy festival run by people who have never had any involvement in the world of comedy at any point in their lives.
But it isn’t just saturation; the problem is that in 2025 misinformation has become a more everyday occurrence, with the most powerful man in the world coining the term “fake news” while regularly spewing it himself. In 2007, Wainwright was able to write, “Most of us pass our days in a state of good-natured trust which is healthy for ourselves and society—but also a gift to those playing April Fool’s jokes.” That’s not true anymore, is it? When I’m scrolling through the internet in any form, “a state of good-natured trust” couldn’t be a worse description of my state of mind.
We feel angrier now; less willing to believe, less willing to be hoodwinked. “We all see that the word ‘truth’ has a different definition to it now from many of our politicians,” Forrester agrees. He admits that the days of “impactful” April Fools are probably over—not, of course, that it will stop companies all over the world trying.
You can apply to April Fool’s Day a rule of thumb that is reliable elsewhere: if Elon Musk is joining in, it’s not funny. This would mean that April Fools officially died last year, when Musk pretended to be joining Disney as their new Chief DEI Officer. “Can’t wait to work with Bob Iger & Kathleen Kennedy to make their content MORE woke!” he said. Unfunny, unbelievable and communicated on a site now synonymous with misinformation, Musk’s tweet managed to succinctly encapsulate why so many of us are tired of being taken for fools.
