April Fools’ Day, the day belong to the multiple fools of April, has always been a strange creature in my life. In my youth, it was a day of complex emotions for me. On one hand, my maternal grandfather–the one I was close to and cared about who passed five years ago–was a great lover of practical jokes and provided me with no small amount of delight by introducing all the little practical joke toys one could buy from a magic trick shop (that my grandfather frequented for much his adult life since his love of practical jokes and magic tricks was lifelong and much to the chagrin of my grandmother and their children) to my family. Whoopee cushions, little hand buzzers, flowers that squirt water, pop rocks, and so on. It was always a lot of fun when we’ve visit him around the end of March, usual for some Easter celebration, and he’d pull all these little pranks on his grandkids, none of which ever hurt and were always a delight because we got to keep water tools he used (which always came with instructions on how we could prank our parents at home).
On the other hand, on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, April Fools’ Day was also a cover for my brother to invent new torments that were easily dismissed by our parents as harmless fun on the day set aside for practical jokes. My stuff going missing, rocks in my shoes, things thrown or shot at me, and so on. All on top of the usual pranks that pushed only a tiny step beyond good taste, such as using electrical tape to hold down the attached sprayer on the kitchen sink so anyone going to turn it on would get sprayed with water or balancing a large cup of water on top of a door so that it would fall on the first person who came into the room. All of which were awful enough to cause me to dread the annual return of what often felt like The Purge: Child Edition since my brother would only ever get in trouble with our parents for his “practical jokes” if he drew copious amounts of blood or targeted our younger siblings.
As an adult, I’m largely tired of the “holiday.” I understand that some people enjoy practical jokes and I wish I did, but I genuinely dislike them. They’re often too close to the awful things my brother did for me to find any kind of joy in them and, in general, I don’t find betrayals of trust and intentional breaks of the general social contracts by which we all live in harmony particularly funny. I feel like it is incredibly rare for someone to pull off a practical joke without treading into potentially harmful territory. Sure, whoopee cushions are fun and all, but the reason everyone laughs is because they think someone farted and being on the receiving end of that in any kind of non-private setting is incredibly embarrassing, even if it was just a joke that everyone is in on. Same for stuff like those spring-loaded snakes in a tube. Some people are terrified of snakes and, even if they aren’t, that’s just a smaller, container-based version of jumping out at someone as they approach the corner you’re hiding behind. It’s not particularly funny, but people tend to laugh because that’s how we react to someone transgressing on social norms. Transgressive humor is its own entire branch of comedy and while I know people say they like it, I genuinely can’t imagine how they could without realizing that they’re laughing AT someone since so much of it requires that someone serve as the butt of the joke and those punches are rarely thrown upward.
As a result of my distaste for the holiday, I tend to forget about it. Not actively, mind you, but I don’t make plans or watch out for the day’s approach as March draws to a close. As a result, when I decided to formally come out to my close friends and family, I was entirely caught off guard when I was looking at the calendar to fix the date in my head and realized it was April Fools’ Day. I, of course, immediately decided to wait until the next morning to say anything since the last thing I wanted was for anyone I told to ask me if this was some kind of elaborate prank. I’d been thinking about my decision for a long time, after all, and wanted to make sure that everyone I spoke to was going to take it as seriously as I did. Which meant coming out on April Fools’ Day felt far too risky to chance anyone not taking me seriously. The side-effect of all of this is that I’m no longer caught by surprise when someone I know engages in some April Fools’ Day tomfoolery, since I will always remember the day I came out to my in-group and, as a result, the fact that I almost came out on April Fools’ Day. Which definitely hasn’t made me dislike the “holiday” more than ever now, since it combines the kind of “joking at the expense of others” that I dislike with one time I very nearly messed up. Nope. Not even a little bit.
To not be a complete stick-in-the-mud, I will say that I think we all need a little more mirth in our lives. I think it should be dispersed throughout the year rather than dispensed all at once, but I understand that sometimes you need a little bit of a push to overcome the hurdles that prevent you from putting in extra effort most days. If you must pull pranks on someone today, I suggest you take a moment to wonder how likely it is that your prank could ruin someone’s day. If the answer is anything other than “impossible,” I think you should find something else to do instead. Likely harmless pranks include Nerf dart pranks, changing the ink cartridges on someone’s pens at their desk, filling someone’s office with balloons or ball pit balls (preferably the latter of the two so you can reuse the balls rather than create a bunch of garbage), or even slightly adjusting everything in their office so its just slightly off from where it normally is. All usually harmless, though I suggest you stick to pranking people you know well-enough that you can determine ahead of time whether or not a prank could accidentally be harmfull instead of funny. As John Scalzi frequently writes: “the failure mode of clever is asshole.” Don’t be an asshole.