I’m actually writing this in advance of April 1, so right now I only know what Stonemaier Games is doing for April Fools. But I’m often delighted by silly jokes–large and small, interpersonal and corporate–on April 1, so I wanted to post this in the hopes of collecting some moments that made you smile on this auspicious day.
Before I ran a business, my favorite type of April Fools “prank” was the type that had some element of misdirection or confusion–leaning into the “fool” portion of it. Of course, it needed to be something that didn’t cause harm or more than a few seconds of inconvenience.
Now that I run a company, I don’t want to ever confuse or mislead customers. So now I lean more into sheer silliness for corporate April Fools jokes (if we do anything at all).
For example, this year I made a video of my top 10 favorite pets (mostly cats) in game boxes. It isn’t an attempt at misdirection–it’s a real, silly video I made featuring lots of pet photos. You can view it here:
This was a Facebook post that was the perfect April Fool’s Joke:
“This is too good not to share
!! Omg I just got hit with the best April Fools!
…See More”
And that was it — you couldn’t click on the “…See More” despite trying to, and it just worked perfectly. You felt silly but not angry. It was a tiny little instance of the “fool” approach.
We had a good one here in Ireland making the rounds on Facebook, a popular childrens theme park called Tayto park (sponsored for the last 10 years by a crisp/chip brand) had announced in February that they were ending their sponsorship, opportunity knocked on 1st April and it was announced that Guinness would be the new sponsor and the park would be called “Guinness Park” with rides being renamed appropiately. I heard it from a few people before it dawned on them.
That’s great! Thanks for sharing.
Der Postillon (think of a German The Onion) posted on Mar 31 that they boycott April 1 as a signal against fake news and won’t do any posts on April 1.