April Fools Day Not Funny Anymore, ‘Needs To Die’ According to Leftists
It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly is going on this April 1.
I saw a trend growing about 15 years ago as a volunteer church camp counselor. Gone were the days of spontaneous jokes on rival cabins. No more plans to place shaving cream on bottoms of door knobs, line plastic wrap on toilet seats, or duct-taping a sleeper in their bunk beds. The young Millennials were content going to bed on time and participating in approved activities in their “safe spaces.”
As a dutiful Gen-Xer, I immediately drove in some supplies from a nearby convenience store and attempted to show the next generation how it was done. The joke was on me: blank stares and plenty of questions about why we would take advantage of another person’s trusting nature. All good questions, but … yeesh. The cultural tide was turning.
More recently, social media was so full-to-the-brim of April Fools Day jokes, parodies, and false press releases that you spent the whole day not believing a single thing. Such was the glory days of Internet culture — before it was work-mandatory and governed by algorithms and advertising ROIs. But those glory days gave rise to daily punches from The Onion (now mostly sour and partisan) to the Babylon Bee (thank God that good sarcasm is still alive).
Fast forward to 2025 and the jokes, while there are some out there, are much more sparse on April Fools Day. If anything, we’ve become the joke, yet we’re afraid to laugh at ourselves. The stakes are just too high, politically and socially. Our guard is up.
Consider the absurdity of the political discourse just over the past few months of headline-generating events:
• A “military strategy leak” on a Signal chat group that contained no classified information.
• “Progressives” protesting and even burning down Tesla electric car recharging stations, fresh from the Green New Deal advocacy.
• The Left still clamoring about an “insurrection” having taken place on Jan. 6, 2021 (that surely must have justified a life sentence for all participants).
• Former anti-war activists clamoring for more aggression against Russia and support for terrorist organizations in “Palestine.”
• PR and damage control over the fact that the private sector just rescued stranded NASA astronauts while the Biden administration was busy “analyzing the situation.”
• The Associated Press, once the bastion of objective reporting and journalistic style, whining about being kicked out of White House press conferences after four years of combative stances against Donald Trump‘s policies during his first term.
• Still no Epstein Island client list.
The list goes on — and not to say that the Right hasn’t deserved some ridicule. The back-and-forth about TikTok, maybe?
We’re tired, boss.
So after half-a-millennium is it time to hang April Fools up? Is it time to water it down as progressive culture has so many other holidays with Christian connections? Or are we just going through a phase? Let’s take a quick look at the holiday:
The yearly observation likely started in 1582 when certain quarters of French society refused to refrain from their traditional celebrations of the old New Year (under the Julian calendar the year began on Annunciation Day, or March 25). You see, King Charles IX that year ordered the calendar to be adopted in all ways, following a decade or two of passive resistance of those who either did not prefer the new Gregorian calendar or simply did not care. It was also Lent season, so the “calendar truthers” were often mocked with paper fish being attached to their backs by the culturally savvy. It was probably funny back then, but to this day, April 1 is known in France as “April fish.”
While there are other possible origin stories as well, including a link to the ancient Romans, the concept of April Fools’ Day as a way to whip culturally ignorant rubes in line is still with us, though in decline.
The BBC released an audio story today titled “April Fools Day: Are we too wary of a prank?” A legacy online message board continued its recent decision to discontinue April Fools prank posts. As one LifeHacker writer penned, “no one needs a holiday that has victims,” and the occasion “needs to die:”
“In the disinformation age, every day is April 1 anyway; we’re constantly being taken for fools. We’re bombarded by people using technology to try to trick us, whether it’s criminal robots sending texts to steal the money in our bank accounts, influencers monetizing our envy through filters and careful camera angles, AI-generated deep-fakes of the pope in a puffer jacket, or the more subtle but all-encompassing hoaxes of modern politics and commerce as a whole. Hearing some jerkass saying ‘Ha ha, tricked you,’ just isn’t funny anymore—if it ever was.” [read here]
Reading between the lines of the vibe-harshing commentary, “disinformation” is serious business to the Left-leaning, especially those who weaponized fact-checking sites like Snopes (and, arguably, the AP). After the dour and self-righteous days of the Barack Obama administration, the Left developed a hair-trigger. They already endured years of mockery from “birthers,” “truthers,” and even those who doubted First Lady Michelle Obama was a biological woman. Surely, such “disinformation” was coming from somewhere, perhaps from Russian operatives seeking to affect the 2016 election or from the Trump campaign machine (or both). Soon came the Newspeak of the progressive left, and anyone who was out of sync with the official narrative was worthy of ridicule and, in some cases, jail time and career-ending penalties.
Our would-be president Hillary Clinton suggested prison time for spreading false facts. Conspiratorial right-wing broadcaster Alex Jones was famously handed a record-shattering bill for $1.5 billion and liquidation of his personal assets for spreading a hoax about the Sandy Creek school shooting. The courts may as well have just ordered him to pay a zillion bucks and have left it at that level of unattainability. Another four years of Biden could have easily saddled America with an executive-level bureau of fact-checking (oh wait, they already tried that).
The decline in April Fools pranks may also have a lot to do with a resistance to “victim shaming” in popular culture. It may also be perfectly in line with what we’re seeing across the board with diminishing humor and quality in entertainment media.
This is where we are in America this April 1. It’s hard to not take a joke personally when we’re constantly at each others’ throats.
Perhaps this is a wake up call: For us to once again be the “happy warriors” of the public discourse, and learn to laugh at ourselves once again. We won’t see any Golden Age if we fail to take the lead in this way.
Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s something on fire on my front doorstep and I must immediately stomp it out.
