A day where pranksters prevail, jokers run wild, and there’s no humor low enough for the sake of high jinx.  But as comedy has a strong link to tragedy, this day has an austere beginning that started several hundred years ago. Although the origins of April Fools’ Day are shrouded in mystery, the most popular theory is that France changed its calendar in the 1500s so that the New Year would begin in January to match the Roman calendar instead of the start of spring in late March or early April. However word of the change traveled slowly, and many people in rural areas continued to celebrate the New Year in the spring. These country dwellers became known as “April fools.” Another theory comes from Alex Boese, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes in San Diego, California, who believes that April Fools’ Day simply grew out of age-old European spring festivals of renewal, in which pranks and camouflaging one’s identity are common. A third theory comes from Joseph Boskin, professor emeritus of American humor at Boston University, has offered his own interpretation of the holiday’s roots—as a prank. In 1983, Boskin told an Associated Press reporter that the idea came from Roman jesters during the time of Constantine I in the third and fourth centuries A.D. As the story goes, jesters successfully petitioned the ruler to allow one of their elected members to be king for a day. So, on April first, Constantine handed over the reins of the Roman Empire for one day to King Kugel, his jester. Kugel decreed that the day forever would be a day of absurdity. Kugel, incidentally, is an Eastern European dish that one of Boskin’s friends had been craving.  The news agency was less than thrilled about the gambit, Boskin said. “I thought I should have been complimented for a quacky, quirky story that was fitted to the occasion.”

Some people have no sense of humor, and those people should stay at home today.  This might stop the sad trend that Boese  has observed: statistically the number of pranks in the home and at the office has decreased in recent years in the United States, and has been replaced by large institutionalized media hoaxes.

So to inspire any would be foolishness out there here is a list of 10 favorite April Fool’s Tricks culled from the list of the Top 100 April Fools Day Hoaxes of all time from Alex Boese’s Museum of Hoaxes.  They are in my order of preference, you can rearrange them any way you like:

#1: Flying Penguins

2008: The BBC announced that camera crews filming near the Antarctic for its natural history series Miracles of Evolution had captured footage of Adélie penguins taking to the air. It even offered a video clip of these flying penguins, which became one of the most viewed videos on the internet. Presenter Terry Jones explained that, instead of huddling together to endure the Antarctic winter, these penguins took to the air and flew thousands of miles to the rainforests of South America where they “spend the winter basking in the tropical sun.” A follow-up video explained how the BBC created the special effects of the flying penguins.

#2: Alabama Changes the Value of Pi

1998: The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the ‘Biblical value’ of 3.0. Soon the article made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly spread around the world, forwarded by email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by physicist Mark Boslough.

#3: The Taco Liberty Bell

1996: The Taco Bell Corporation announced it had bought the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of outraged citizens called the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the bell was housed to express their anger. Their nerves were only calmed when Taco Bell revealed, a few hours later, that it was all a practical joke. The best line of the day came when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale. Thinking on his feet, he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold. It would now be known, he said, as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.

#4: San Serriffe

1977: The British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement devoted to San Serriffe, a small republic said to consist of several semi-colon-shaped islands located in the Indian Ocean. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian’s phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Only a few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer’s terminology. The success of this hoax is widely credited with launching the enthusiasm for April Foolery that gripped the British tabloids in subsequent decades.

#5: Nixon for President

1992: National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation program announced that Richard Nixon, in a surprise move, was running for President again. His new campaign slogan was, “I didn’t do anything wrong, and I won’t do it again.” Accompanying this announcement were audio clips of Nixon delivering his candidacy speech. Listeners responded viscerally to the announcement, flooding the show with calls expressing shock and outrage. Only during the second half of the show did the host John Hockenberry reveal that the announcement was a practical joke. Nixon’s voice was impersonated by comedian Rich Little.

#6: The Left-Handed Whopper

1998: Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left-Handed Whopper” specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, “many others requested their own ‘right handed’ version.”

#7: Sidd Finch

1985: Sports Illustrated published a story about a new rookie pitcher who planned to play for the Mets. His name was Sidd Finch, and he could reportedly throw a baseball at 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy. This was 65 mph faster than the previous record. Surprisingly, Sidd Finch had never even played the game before. Instead, he had mastered the “art of the pitch” in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the “great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa.” Mets fans celebrated their teams’ amazing luck at having found such a gifted player, and Sports Illustrated was flooded with requests for more information. In reality this legendary player only existed in the imagination of the author of the article, George Plimpton.

#8: The Great Comic Strip Switcheroonie

1997: Comic strip fans opened their papers on April 1, 1997 and discovered their favorite strips looked different. Not only that, but in many cases characters from other strips popped up out of place. The reason for the chaos was the Great Comics Switcheroonie. Forty-six comic-strip artists conspired to pen each other’s strips for the day. For instance, Scott Adams of Dilbert took over Family Circus by Bil Keane, where he added a touch of corporate cynicism to the family-themed strip by having the mother tell her kid to “work cuter, not harder.” Jim Davis of Garfield took over Blondie, which allowed him to show his famous overweight cat eating one of Dagwood’s sandwiches. The stunt was masterminded by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott, creators of the Baby Blues comic strip. When asked why he participated, Scott Adams noted, “You don’t get that many chances to tunnel under the fence.”

#9: 15th Annual New York City April Fool’s Day Parade

2000: A news release sent to the media stated that the 15th annual New York City April Fool’s Day Parade was scheduled to begin at noon on 59th Street and would proceed down to Fifth Avenue. According to the release, floats in the parade would include a “Beat ‘em, Bust ‘em, Book ‘em” float created by the New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle police departments. This float would portray “themes of brutality, corruption and incompetence.” A “Where’s Mars?” float, reportedly built at a cost of $10 billion, would portray missed Mars missions. Finally, the “Atlanta Braves Baseball Tribute to Racism” float would feature John Rocker who would be “spewing racial epithets at the crowd.” CNN and the Fox affiliate WNYW sent television news crews to cover the parade. They arrived at 59th Street at noon only to discover that there was no sign of a parade, at which point the reporters realized they had been hoaxed. The prank was the handiwork of Joey Skaggs, an experienced hoaxer. Skaggs had been issuing press releases advertising the nonexistent parade every April Fool’s Day since 1986.

#10: The Sheep Albedo Hypothesis

2007: RealClimate.org posted about the work of Dr. Ewe Noh-Watt of the New Zealand Institute of Veterinary Climatology, who had discovered that global warming was caused not by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but rather by the decline of New Zealand’s sheep population. The reasoning was that sheep are white, and therefore large numbers of sheep increase the planet’s albedo (the amount of sunlight reflected back into space). As the sheep population declined, the ground was absorbing more solar radiation, thus warming the planet: “It can be seen that the recent warming can be explained entirely by the decline in the New Zealand sheep population, without any need to bring in any mysterious so-called ‘radiative forcing’ from carbon dioxide, which doesn’t affect the sunlight (hardly) anyway — unlike Sheep Albedo.”

Noh-Watt also warmed of a potentially destabilizing feedback mechanism: “As climate gets warmer, there is less demand for wool sweaters and wooly underwear. Hence the sheep population tends to drop, leading to even more warming. In an extreme form, this can lead to a ‘runaway sheep-albedo feedback,’ which is believed to have led to the present torrid climate of Venus.”

Roger Smith went to Yale where he earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in literature, philosophy, and the arts. He then went onto a three year stint in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Germany. On coming home he entered in the CBS Executive Training Program in News and Public Affairs. Upon completion of the training program, Mr. Smith went to New York City where he joined the Public Affairs Department of CBS. At CBS he was a “Roger” of all trades filling the roles of: writer, producer, associate producer, researcher, project manager, and production coordinator. He worked on the Thomas Alva Edison Award winning Let’s Take A Trip, a weekly live remote for children. He left CBS, when they disbanded their Public Affairs Department, and moved onto PBS starting at WTTW in Chicago. Here his work as executive producer on Facet, a weekly one-hour prime-time arts series, earned two Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Emmy Awards. He stayed in Chicago a year. He moved back to New York, landing a job at WNET. He produced Newsfront, a daily one-hour prime-time live news show. After a year or so he moved to WGBH Boston where he would spend the next 9 years. Several programs that Smith worked on at WGBH have won recognition. The Captioned French Chef, was the first television program captioned for the hearing impaired, and it led to federal funding for the National Caption Center at WGBH. What’s My Thing? earned the prestigious Ohio State Award. A Part of Yourself, the 1972 motivational film about organ transplant, was recognized with a Certificate from the American Medical Association. He worked on Nova during its first years. During his tenure Nova earned the George Foster Peabody Award. Other programs with which Smith was associated won the Cine Golden Eagle Award, and the First Prize in the Rehabilitation Film Festival. Smith left WGBH in 1977.

The programs he has been affiliated with number over 500.  Since leaving WGBH he has served as consultant on a variety of projects. He is the president of his own production consulting firm, the Production House, Inc. He wrote Public Media and Community Dialogue, a handbook for the Association of Junior Leagues, and he has taught courses in film analysis at the University of Massachusetts and children’s television at Grahm Junior College. He has also been guest lecturer on television at Boston University, Emerson College, and Harvard University.

Roger P. Smith is the author of The Other Face of Public Television, which shines a light on the veteran producer’s point of view that public TV is an art form whose potential has been repeatedly squelched by lawmakers and business executives and that political correctness is a major obstacle to innovative programming.

For more than 20 years Mr. Smith has called the California Desert his home. He has settled down considerably compared to his earlier days, when he called: New York, Paris, Rome, London, Cairo, Chicago, and Boston home. He still enjoys traveling the world, even when he is home he explores the globe virtually via his appetite for gourmet cooking and interest in researching Old and Early Middle Kingdom Egyptology. He still has a soft spot for canines, especially old English sheep dogs. Another of Mr. Smith’s pastimes, horticulture, (gardening), allows him to get his hands dirty.

Mr. Roger P. Smith can be found on the Madison Who’s Who Directory, where he is looking forward to networking with you.