Hating on April Fools' Day

A while back I came out hating on St. Patrick’s Day.

Today, I come out hating April Fools’ Day.

And it is Fools’ Day, not Fool’s Day. If you’re going to prank and hoax people on April 1, at least get the apostrophe in the rightplace.

Why hate on the day?

It’s dumb. It begets things like this. And this. And this.

I’m not humorless. At least I don’t think I am. I’m just a wet blanket on a day where the jokes are so uniformly stupid and ubiquitous in their stupidity. Fark.com doing everything in Comic Sans. Wow, that’s a knee-slapper. And the big merit badge thing? Whooooooooo, you really had me going there. And forget visiting sites like Cheezburger. Everything’s a joke there. Even more so on April the First.

Here’s why it’s not funny: Everyone is doing it; there is no escape. I blame the Internet.

Before the Internet (yes, I am a dinosaur) if nobody in your family or circle of friends were into April Fools’ Day, you only heard about things secondhand. Maybe a joke got so great or so out of hand it showed up on the local news.

No more.

Now everywhere you go on the Internet you see a joke, with the smug jokester figuratively peering over your shoulder with that damn dumb look on his or her face, waiting for you to realize you’re being snookered.

It’s like reading Eoin Colfer’s “And Another Thing,” his contribution to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: All the little tells and in-jokes are there, but the story itself is so uninspired and boring you’d think Douglas Adams actually wrote it.

See, we live in a world where things like this exist:

Casper is one of a wave of companies seeking to make us covet what previously have been mundane, inconspicuous household items, and lend a folksy transparency to notoriously opaque industries. After all, few people know what you sleep on, even if you have a bumping social life. “It’s a challenge for us. Mattresses aren’t about external signaling, it’s different than eyeglasses or sheets,” says Philip Krim, Casper’s co-founder and CEO. “We deliver a mattress on a cargo bike in New York. That just doesn’t make sense. But you’re spending your hard-earned money, it should be delightful.”*

And things like this. It’s April Fools’ Day every day, or at least you could convince yourself it is.

Then there’s this. You’d wish it were an April Fools’ Day joke, but, apparently, it is not.

Or maybe it is. Or it isn’t.

We’re living in a Post-Fools’ World, folks.

Or at least a world ruled by the Pentaverate.

*Aldous Huxley and Neil Postman must be spinning in their graves. We are truly amusing ourselves to death. The whole way these Millennial twits want every shopping experience to be the cutest things in the world to share on the Internet makes me sicker than if April Fools’ Day and St. Patrick’s Day were combined.

Enjoy your jokes, folks. Nevermind the whips inside your head.