One Bad Reason for Loving April 1st

While there are quite a few reasons to hate April Fool's Day, there are probably far more reasons to love it. After all, on what other day of the year do you have free license to be as mischievous and obnoxious as you want? But there's one increasingly popular April Fool's Day custom that I want to express some doubts about, and that's the rise of corporate April Fools.

Our culture has a way of commercializing any celebration. It happened to Christmas, Halloween, Easter, and Valentine's Day long ago. Even President's Day has become an opportunity for car dealerships to 'slash prices' and roll out 'sales extravaganzas.' But throughout most of its history April Fool's Day remained blissfully uncommercialized, unmoved by the sweeping winds of capitalism. And that was principally because it was such an obnoxious holiday. It was the holiday for wicked urchins, inveterate pranksters, rabble-rousing dissidents, and mud-slinging tabloid scribblers. It was a day that the well-to-do wearily tolerated, but didn't participate in themselves. It was the one day of the year devoted to rebellion against social norms, for which reason corporations didn't want to touch it.

But about two decades ago cracks began to appear in the corporate cold shoulder towards April Fool's Day. A few companies began running spoof ads on April 1st. BMW, for instance, offered up the Badgewash system (an automated system to insure that the BMW logo on your car always stayed clean) as well as Driver's Weight Sensors (an anti-theft device that went off if someone with a different weight than the owner tried to start the car). But corporate foolery really took off during the 1990s. In that decade we saw two classics: the Taco Liberty Bell (in which the Taco Bell Corporation pretended to buy the Liberty Bell and rename it the Taco Liberty Bell), and the Burger King Left-Handed Whopper (a burger whose condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of left-handed customers).

In the past few years there's been a torrent of corporate April Fools. Just last year (2002) Burger King announced it was changing its name to Chicken King, Google revealed that pigeons pecking on keyboards were the secret behind its page-ranking search engine, Virgin Atlantic unveiled plans to print its corporate logo on butterflies as a novel form of advertising, and the British supermarket Tesco debuted whistling carrots (a genetically modified carrot that whistles when its fully cooked).

The appeal of April Fool's Day for corporations is obvious. Participating in it allows them to send the message that they're fun-loving and hip, which are important messages to send in our youth-dominated culture. And though the corporate April Fools can be great fun (I'm especially fond of the Taco Liberty Bell), I'm not sure that I'm ready to believe that the corporations really are fun-loving and hip. Which leaves me with a slight sense of unease because what the corporations are offering us, I think, is not truly in the spirit of April Fool's Day. It's not true rebellion or mischief. The corporations will never want to rock the boat too much. What their hoaxes are, in fact, is slightly disguised advertisements. Maybe we should call them Aprilfoolsments. And as these Aprilfoolsments become more and more common, eventually crowding out the true pranks and hoaxes, I'm worried that we'll witness the slow but sure taming of April Fool's Day.

Once fully tamed, April Fool's Day will take on an entirely different character. It'll no longer be a day so obnoxious that it drives people to hate it. It'll no longer be the bane of zoo keepers, dictators, teachers, and gentlemen in coattails. Nor will it shock the sensibilities of the easily offended. Instead it will have become an event more like the Super Bowl: something we look forward to for the ads. And I don't really want that to happen because I like the fact that there are so many good reasons to hate April Fool's Day. Which is why, even though I'm just as amused by the corporate hoaxes as everyone else, I think they ultimately represent a bad reason for loving April Fool's Day. Though maybe I'm worrying about nothing. Time, I'm sure, will tell.


Page: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8