Archive of Best April Fools Jokes....
Were you fooled by any merry japes today?
Here are some golden oldies from the past classics:-
Spaghetti Trees
This has been featured on the TV today and concerns a 1957 BBC Panorama report about Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from their spaghetti trees.
There was film footage showing it growing on trees as well as being harvested, cooked and eaten.
The BBC suggested that viewers could grow their own by planting strand of spaghetti in some toamato sauce
Metric Time -- April Fool's Day, 1975
An Australian news programme revealed that the whole country would be converting to "metric time."
The new system would have 100 seconds to the minute, 100 minutes to the hour, and 20-hour days. Additionally, seconds would become millidays, minutes would become centidays, and hours become decidays.
The then Deputy Prime Minister hailed the new time system.
Switchboards were busy with viewers who fell for the hoax.
One caller wanted to know how he could convert his newly purchased digital clock to metric time.
Instant DIY Colour TV
In 1962 the only TV channel in Sweden convinced viewers that new technology could be used to transform light wavelengths that converted black & white TV images to colour.
Their station's technical expert, Kjell Stensson, appeared on the news to announce it and to suggest a simple DIY method that simply involved stretching a
nylon stocking over their tv screen. Stensson proceeded to demonstrate the process. Thousands of viewers were taken in.
The San Serriffe Islands
1977 and The Guardian newspaper published a special supplement dedicated to San Serriffe, a small republic consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands located in the Indian Ocean.
The article described the geography and culture of this little known republic and it's two main islands called Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse.
Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian's switchboard soon jammed with readers who wanted more information about the idyllic holiday spot.
Only a few people had noticed that everything about the island was named after printer's terminology.
It's been suggested that the success of this hoax gave birth to the tradition of media enthusiasm for April Tom Foolery that has entertained us all ever since.
The Return of Nixon for President
The 1 April 1992 broadcast of National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation revealed 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.
The Left-Handed Whopper
Burger King published a full page advertisement in the April 1st edition of 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."
Gravity-Free Experiences
During an interview on BBC Radio 2, on the morning of 1 April 1976, the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth's own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room. Moore's announcement (which, of course, was a joke) was inspired by a pseudoscientific astronomical theory that had recently been promoted in a book called The Jupiter Effect.
Any more ??
Quote Reply
