April Fool's Day Roundup

April Fool's Day is one of my favorite holidays... when it's done right. Humans love jokes, and it's only natural that we've set aside one day of the year that we can play jokes on each other and have it be (mostly) socially acceptable. For me, April Fool's jokes have to have a few traits to be truly funny.

First off, the joke has to be harmless. It can be mean, but not mean-spirited. Second, there must be an easy way to tell that it's a joke. It should catch the unwary, but not fool the vigilant. There must be enough of a ring of truth about it that it could be believable, but also there should be a fatal flaw. And it absolutely must have a way to tell for sure that it's a joke once someone starts to suspect. In my case, I used links to my April Fool's page.

My jokes this year were simple. I'm not a very good prankster. My original thought for the Aquaman page was a post on Aquaman's retirement party (since he is 65 this year). I had a germ of an idea, but I really needed to see what Sword of Atlantis said about him first. When Orin appeared in Sword, I decided against using that idea and decided on "All-Star Aquaman" instead. Choosing an artist was simple. I've wanted to see Oeming draw Aquaman for a long time, so I indulged my fantasy. The writer was a bit harder, but as I was reading my blogs I ran across Warren Ellis' blog again and realized that he was the one. Not only would he make for a really interesting Aquaman story, he also probably wouldn't kill me when the joke got back to him. As a matter of fact, he linked to the joke. I really wanted people to understand it was a joke, so I linked to the April Fool's page three times in the entry.

My joke for Bloggity was a little more obscure. "Banishment of the Daleks" is an old Usenet Doctor Who joke. It didn't even start out as an April Fool's joke, either. In some note, a person was listing a bunch of Dalek stories from Doctor Who, and threw in the non-existant Banishment just because there were so many "- of the Daleks" stories. Another person, who clearly didn't own a copy of the programme guide, asked about Banishment, and a whole bunch of people spontaneously jumped in and made stuff up about this fictional tale. I was involved in it, myself. We all agreed that it was a third Doctor story that had never aired. We said that UNIT and Sgt Benton in particular had big roles in the story. Beyond that, I remember little. But we had fun. Unfortunately, one person taken in by the joke was extremely offended when he learned it was a joke, and chastised some of the people involved (including two guys who were, at that time, writing Doctor Who novels but wanted to join in the fun). The joke was mostly dropped, though it came up every once in awhile. Someone even wrote some fanfic under the title, using the ideas we'd originally come up with. In any case, I wanted to bring it back with the new show happening, so it became my Bloggity joke for this year. I didn't actually expect anyone to fall for it, but I had fun writing it.

One of my favorite things to do on April 1st is to look at all the jokes other people have posted. Sadly, I was conning this year and so missed out (and I'll probably miss out again next year as well). It looks like this was a good year for jokes, too. Still, here are a few links to some of the ones I found:

Gutterninja's Review has to be one of the finest pieces of April Foolery ever written. At least for the comics blogosphere. I stand up and applaud this effort. And now I want to go watch my husband read the book to my niece.

Mike Sterling changed format for a day, and provided a screen shot for everyone who missed it.

Silver Age Comics looks at a Superman story that was clearly an April Fool's joke.

Elayne Riggs did a little round-up of jokes.

Wikipedia has a page for this year's April Fool's jokes.

The Museum of Hoaxes also rounds up this year's hoaxes.

Eric and I both landed entries in Today in Alternate History's April Fool's Day entry. Eric's was about baseball, mine was about Spaghetti trees.