This video by Jeremiah Warren explains the history of April Fools Day. The pace of delivery is a bit fast, but the viewer has lots of visual on-screen clues on key information.
Self-study activity:
Watch the video two or three times and, as an oral activity, say what the following refer to.
1582
March 25 to April 1
1752
an image of a fish
throw flour
put jokes until noon
You can check your answers with the transcript below.
April Fools Day or All Fools Day is the one day of the year when you’re allowed to mercilessly prank your friend, family and coworkers. How exactly did this day come about? We don’t actually know for sure what started the celebration of April Fools Day.
References can be found as early as the 1500’s. But these accounts are infrequent and not very detailed. The most popular theory is that it began around 1582 in France during the reformation of the calendar. Before France adopted the Gregorian calendar, they celebrated New Year’s for eight days, beginning on March 25 and ending on April 1.
When they switch calendar systems, the eighth day moved from April 1 to January 1, because they didn’t have Internet, phones, social media and a mail system, a lot of people didn’t hear about this change until years later. Those that did not hear about the change continued to celebrate New Year’s in April. Others refused to celebrate it out of rebellion.
Those who had been informed of the change and adjusted their calendars, begin to make fun of these fools who were uninformed or rebellious. This harassment evolved into a tradition of playing pranks on the first day of April and this spread to other countries.
However, April Fools Day was already established in England, which didn’t switch calendar systems until 1752. Also, people were already engaging in pranks and light-heartedness around this time of the year, long before the French switched their calendar systems, such as in the case of the ancient Roman festival of Hilaria.
Modern celebrations of April Fools Day have slightly different traditions depending on the country you are in. But they all has the similar theme of pranking or humiliating individuals.
In France, they try to tape an image of a fish to your back without you noticing. And in Portugal, they throw flour at you. In England, you are only supposed to put jokes until noon and if you pull a joke after noon, you are called an April fool. In the United States and Britain, even popular media outlets and companies have been known to get involved in the fun.
In 1996, Taco Bell announced that it had purchased the Liberty Bell from the City of Philadelphia and was going to rename it The Taco Liberty Bell. In 1992, NPR claimed that Richard Nixon would be running again for President. British publication, The Guardian, famously pranked the public in 1977, when they said that a semi-colon shaped island in the Indian Ocean had been discovered. This hoax is credited for launching the trend of April Fools Day pranks by British tabloids.
So hopefully you now know a little more about the history of April Fools Day or at least what we think the history of it is. Now that we are at the end of this video, you might be wondering of how those information is accurate seeing that it is a video about April Fools Day. Yeah, it’s accurate, but seriously it’s accurate. I wouldn’t do that to you.
