Best April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time

It’s an oldie but a goodie — the Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time!

There are almost too many good ones in that list to pick out here — I encourage you to read through the list and maybe post your favourite in the comments. I confess to having a soft spot for the many, many, many that were pulled as pranks by media institutions. I wish newspapers these days had half the sense of humour we used to.

Actually, back when I was at the Brandon Shopper & News, I helped pull a prank on our crosstown rivals, the Wheat City Journal. With the help of a departing staffer (whom I was replacing), we crafted a story about a Korean outfit who had come to Brandon in search of used compact discs. Partnering with a local charity, they were able to “resurface” old, scratched-up CDs that no longer played. Like retreaded tires, these newly-resurfaced CDs could be sold more cheaply than brand-new CDs, yet still at a profit.

Best of all, if Westman residents could chip in and donate their unused CDs to these Koreans, the local charity would get a cut of the profits — and it would all go towards the benefit of the Western Canadian Jaundice.

Hmmm …. Western Canadian Jaundice? WCJ? Wheat City Journal?

That’s right — we asked out readers to drop off used CDs at the address of our competitors’ offices. For the skeptical, we even had a website promoting the initiative.

Apparently, they got boatloads of CDs dropped off by well-meaning people. We had, of course, put “Happy April Fool’s Day” at the end of the article, but apparently people were in too much of a hurry to be charitable to bother finishing the story.

By the end of the day, after being yelled at by several layers of my bosses, we promised never to do it again. Sigh.

In that spirit of worker rebellion, I think one of my favourites in the list above is No. 96, the Boston Globe Price Cut:

Readers of the Boston Morning Globe in 1915 could have purchased their papers for half the cost on April Fool’s Day, if they had been alert. The price listed on the front page had been lowered from “Two Cents Per Copy” to “One Cent.” But almost 60,000 copies of the paper were sold before anyone noticed the unannounced price change. When the management of the Globe found out about the change, they were just as surprised as everyone else. The new price turned out to be the responsibility of a mischievous production worker who had surreptitiously inserted the lower value at the last minute as the paper went to print.