Is it just me or is April Fool’s Day the worst pseudo-holiday on the calendar?
As an infovore who has the strange habit of assuming that people are telling the truth, it drives me nuts to waste a day wondering if what I’m hearing and reading is fake. I don’t get the appeal. Has anyone ever said, “Thanks for tricking me into thinking something was true when it really wasn’t. That was hilarious .” (If you have, it likely didn’t occur on April 1. Also, there is something wrong with you.)
And the worst part is that April Fool’s hoaxes generally come in three flavors—cruel, lame, and too subtle to be funny. Fortunately, only casual sadists favor the cruel “jokes” and they don’t have that many friends anyway. The lame ones are more common and more, well, lame. These are the types favored by bloggers, morning radio shows, and the guy in your office who isn’t nearly as funny as he thinks he is. These faux stories are devised to be so obvious that only the extremely gullible would believe they were true. They are as pointless as they are harmless.
The worst type, because they are most believable, are the too subtle to be funny type. These are usually found in newsy stories in which you get halfway through before realizing that someone is wasting your time. I’m not sure what the person pulling such a smug prank is thinking but I can tell you what every reader has every thought: “Oh, told me a weird lie that I believed? Congratulations, you’re a comic genius.”
This has to stop. For the rest of the day let’s take a stand in defense of true humor by glaring sullenly at anyone who follows an inanely untrue tale with “April Fools!” If we all do this then maybe in a generation or two we can kill this annoying tradition that is beloved by the same type of folks who think Family Guy is funny.
(Needless to say, nothing I post today—including the 33 Things feature—will include anything intended to deceive you. If I deceive you it will be unintentional. This blog (or at least the portion containing my posts) is hereby declared an April Fools-Free Zone. No foolin.)
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