Thursday Cannon Fodder: April Fool’s Day

Friendly reminder TSFers: today is April Fool’s Day. Don’t believe anything you read online because odds are it is a misguided attempt at a joke. Yes, today is the day when brands, businesses, public figures, friends, and that person you didn’t like from high school make poor attempts and pranks and jokes that they would have been better off leaving in whatever part of their brain spawned the idea.

I really don’t like April Fool’s Day. Could you tell?

To be fair, sprinkled throughout the sea of bad is the occasional funny and good gag. But you’ve got so much unfunny to wade through to find it. I particularly enjoy the annual April Fool’s tradition from Blizzard Entertainment, the company that makes a number of my favorite video games. They always release a set of “patch notes” that everybody knows isn’t real and contains a bunch of jokes and callbacks to the previous year.

I think that’s part of being successful on April Fool’s Day — the joke has to be funny AND people need to know that it’s a joke. Too often, when people are fooled, there is an element of cruelty or confusion that takes away from the fun aspect of it.

What are some of the better April Fool’s jokes you remember / have seen over the years? Also, please share any particularly terrible ones you come across this year (or remember from past years for being REALLY bad).