Pranks are terrible and they should never, under any circumstance, be played on or by anyone. There is a forever increasing supply of evidence to show that April Fools' Day is a living nightmare. That said, this April Fools' Day prank is pretty good! Saying anything would spoil it — and spoilers are, of course, nearly as evil as pranks — so you'll just have to watch for yourself.
The week of April Fool's Day was a bit existentially dispiriting around here. The warning went out for April 1: Remember, a lot of what the internet will be getting excited about today is fake bullshit being spread in bad faith purely for the sake of getting people excited.
A desk clerk at a Tampa Bay apartment complex for seniors nonchalantly disposed of the body of a resident who'd jumped 16 stories to her death Tuesday night, mistakenly thinking all along that her corpse was a mannequin left from an April Fool's prank.
How many of these irritating pranks ended up shared to your Facebook feed? Antiviral is here to remind you that there's bullshit everywhere all the time.
The thing about reenacting a movie trope in real life, is that real life consequences will follow. Always. Because it's not a movie. Gravity, judgement, debt, concerned witnesses, police, repercussions all exist.
A pair of popular morning show hosts from a Southwest Florida radio station have been suspended indefinitely following an April Fools' Day joke that the station's General Manager believes crossed a line.
For about 20 minutes this morning, the top headline on the Drudge Report was "DRONES TO DELIVER NEWSPAPERS." It was a nice bit for Drudge, one that satisfied both his obsession with drones and his obsession with media, and had a good future-shock value for his aging, perpetually terrified audience. It was also, obviously, an April Fool's Day joke.
Today is April Fool's Day, a magical 24-hour spell during which companies spend lots of money to make stupid changes to their websites as a joke instead of as a business decision. In the spirit of public service we'd like to remind you: Don't trust anything you hear today. "Google Nose BETA," the search engine for scents? No. YouTube shutting down in preparation for finding the best video of all time? No. Twitter charging for vowels? No. Google Maps' new "treasure map" setting? Not real, and also not really even a joke. As usual, tech companies are the worst offenders in the publicity-in-exchange-for-saying-things-that-aren't-true game, but marketers have been gearing up for this for weeks, too. And TV: Good Morning America had a segment on a gorilla language this morning, and the Today Show had a Chris Brown "Breezy Flash Mob" complete with an interview. (Oh, no, wait: Today actually interviewed a violent and unrepentant abuser and hosted his insane fans outside its studio.) The prize for politics-related April Fool's is a tie between Sen. Ted Cruz who made a horrifically ugly April Fool's image macro for his Twitter, and the Yale Daily News, which straight-facedly announces that Hillary Clinton is joining the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. (Ah: that famous New Haven sense of humor.) I don't have a clear memory of anything that happened before, say, 2005, so I have to ask: Was April Fool's Day always this excruciating? Or is this all—the endless stream of bad non-jokes, the news coverage of the bad non-jokes, and the grumpy bloggers whining about the above—the internet's fault? April Fool's! I already know the answer: Human beings have always been embarrassing and unfunny, well before the internet. [Lifehacker | NYT | USAT]
For a brief moment, Google News' top story was "Romney Drops Out of Race, Endorses Santorum." This is decidedly untrue — but hey, it was published by Forbes, so it must be worth something, right? Nowhere did it say this was a prank: although it should be obvious to most, we live in a country where actual people believe Onion headlines. And it's not as though this is that much more ridiculous than the Republican primary has been thus far.
It's April Fool's Day, which means you've probably already been tricked into believing something amazing and then mocked for your gullibility. Isn't this fun? But for those who want to live vicariously through other people's pranking, here's a collection of reader submissions sent in following my appeal on Friday.
Depending on how much you enjoy making an ass of others (or having an ass made of you), April Fool's Day can be a sacred holiday. There are those who have elevated pranking to an art form: gone are the days when you could simply swap the salt and sugar, or fake a teen pregnancy.
In your finally Friday media column: college journo gone wild, a new deputy editor at Page Six, the Arianna-NYT feud evolves, Jeff Zucker's new hustle, and media fools.
It's 1911 on YouTube! That's YouTube's April Fool's gag—push a little "1911" button on the screen, and you get an old-timey version of your video, complete with a piano-roll soundtrack. This joke is not appropriate for all videos.
It seems like your average, run-of-the-mill FX crime drama, until the portraits start moving. The Aurors would be an incredible show... if it weren't an April Fools prank. Go ahead, admit you were disappointed upon realizing this was probably fake.
