When April Fools Go Wrong
I had been planning to write a whimsical post about April Fools Day at some point, inspired by seeing April Fools editions of the college newspapers at some of the campus where I teach. When I attended an overnight visit for prospective students at Fordham, The ram had just put out their AF edition, with a front page that proclaimed that condoms and beer would soon go on sale at the Student Deli. At least one of the editors I spoke to that weekend made sure to point out that it was just a joke. Once I got on the staff, I got to participate in some of the April foolery. We did a theme issue in which a giant asteroid was going to hit the campus and destroy the world, which allowed me to put an obvious R.E.M. reference on the front page, and sneak in numerous non-obvious references to Babylon 5 and Mystery Science Theatre 3000 on the inside. I kind of wonder how many people actually found those editions funny, and how much of it was just a giant in-joke for our own benefit. At any rate, I got a smile out of seeing those AF papers this year, although I didn’t get a chance to look through all of them.
Which meant I was a little bit surprised when one school made the big city newspapers because some of the jokes about school and archdiocesan leaders were deemed to have stepped over the line. I can’t help but feel bad for those editors – I imagine all the hard work they’ve put into their journalistic careers, and this can’t be the kind of thing you want to be remembered for. Somehow I feel like the story shouldn’t have blown up the way it did, but I guess there’s no easy way to keep something like that purely in the school community.
Anyway, I was going to skip any mention of April Fools at all, since I was kind of bummed out about the subject. Then last Sunday, the comic strip Baldo – about a Latino teenager and his family & friends – featured a strip where the family’s Tia Carmen was dragged away by immigration agents. There’s been no followup at all so far in the weekday strips – they’ve continued the storyline that began before Sunday. But on the creators’ website, there’s a big April Fool graphic. And I’m sitting here wondering what kind of April Fools joke that strip was. It seemed like the creators had a point they wanted to make, but without any kind of context, it’s hard to be sure what the point was. And whatever point one might be inclined to draw from the strip is probably mitigated by the fact that it was, essentially, just a joke. I know humor and satire can make serious points, but you have to be able to tell that it’s satire. Instead, it just seemed like the idea was that April Fools meant that we should take the strip seriously, but not too seriously.
I’m not sure I have an organized point here, other than the notion that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what April Fools Day is good for and if most of us have lost the skill or the restraint to make effective use of it. But for the most part I think I just need to get some of this down on electrons in an effort to get it out of my head.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.