Reason #3: You're the Leader of a Repressive Regime

Nothing warms the hearts of repressive rulers like the sight of their own citizens publicly mocking them. Which is why they love April Fool's Day.

Or rather, reverse that. They hate being made fun of, and they hate April Fool's Day, since satirists and political dissidents worldwide tend to regard the holiday as the equivalent of a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card, allowing them free rein to take potshots at their beloved leaders.

Take the case of China. In 1993 an innocent bit of April Foolery appeared in the China Youth Daily, a student newspaper, alleging that the state planned to lift the limit of one child per couple for holders of PhDs. Apparently this was to be a kind of eugenics-based intervention to promote the breeding of brainier Chinese citizens. When the story got picked up by foreign papers and ran worldwide as fact, the Chinese government was none too pleased. State bureaucrats took the proactive step of publicly condemning the holiday by issuing a semi-official editorial in Beijing's Guangming Daily that described April Fool's Day as "Liar's Day." Since that time, Chinese April Foolery has been rather muted.

And the Chinese are not the only nation to have adopted such a stance. In 2001 Saudi Arabia's chief cleric, the Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah Al al-Sheikh, similarly decreed that April Fool's Day was a form of organized lying and should be banned. In this case, I'm not aware of any acts of Foolery that provoked the outburst, so perhaps the Saudi cleric was simply outlining the official position just in case anyone might be tempted to try something.

Oddly enough, Saddam Hussein appears to be an exception to the rule that repressive leaders hate April Fool's Day. He repeatedly allowed his fun-loving son Uday, owner of the Babil newspaper, to treat the citizens of Iraq to a variety of belly laughs on April Fool's Day. The fun began on April 1, 1998 when Uday's paper informed its readers that Clinton had decided to lift sanctions against their country. But the news turned out to be a jest. I can only imagine the knee-slapping guffaws when readers realized how they'd been taken in. The laughs continued in 1999 when Uday mischeviously announced that the monthly food rations would be supplemented to include bananas, Pepsi, and chocolate. Again, just a joke. At this point, the Husseins appear to have run out of material, because in 2000 they recycled the sanction-lifting gag, and in 2001 trotted out the ration-supplement crowd pleaser one more time. 2002 was mercifully gag free.

Of course, not all repressive leaders live in foreign lands. Here in the United States many parents, teachers, and university administrators qualify as minor tyrants (at least in the eyes of those they have power over), and like the rulers of China and Saudi Arabia, they've learned to anticipate April Fool's Day with a mixture of dread and contempt. But the annual April insurrections mounted by those who live under their command would be far too numerous to attempt to detail here. Though the oft-repeated student prank of listing the school building for sale in the real estate section of the local paper is worth singling out for special mention. It's an oldie, but it's a sure way to warm the heart of a high-school principal. That or lock a cow in his office.


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