YouTube UK and Australia "rickrolled" their visitors, rickrolling being a popular bait-and-switch-style prank in which people are baited into clicking on a link that sends them to a video of 1980s pop singer Rick Astley singing his hit
Never Gonna Give You Up. All the "featured video" links on YouTube's front page sent people to a rickroll page set up by YouTube under the user name YTRickRollsYou. Over 7 million people were rickrolled by the site. (YouTube is owned by Google.)
The animated Comedy Central series South Park had been heavily promoting that on the April 1 season premiere of the second season of the show, it would reveal the identity of the father of a character Cartman, thus resolving the cliffhanger it had left viewers with the season before. The April 1 show began as normal, with clips shown from previous episodes, but then a message flashed on the screen stating it had all been an April Fool's joke. Nothing was going to be revealed. Instead the episode focused on the completely unrelated adventures of the flatulent characters Terrance and Philip. Fans of the series were irate. Comedy Central received over 1500 angry emails. A spokesman admitted that the fans "got the joke... they just didn't like it." Fans had to wait until April 22 before the identity of Cartman's father actually was revealed.
A Yorkshire ad agency, Male Winram Tweddle and Associates, placed an ad in the
Yorkshire Post describing a new super-car, the Clegg GTi Turbo. The ad claimed that compared to this car "Owt else is nobbut middlin". A phone number was also provided for those wanting more information. When people called this number they were informed that they had "bin 'ad by some poncey ad agency."
Carolyn Fox, a disc jockey for WHJY in Providence, Rhode Island, announced that the 'Providence Labor Action Relations Board Committee' had decided to close the city for the day. She gave out a number for listeners to call for more information. The number was that of a rival station, WPRO-AM. Reportedly hundreds of people called WPRO, as well as City Hall and the police. Even more called into their offices to see if they had to go into work. WHJY management later explained that it had never imagined its joke would have such a dramatic impact on the city.
The French newspaper
L'Ardennais reported that two giant helicopters were going to remove the Meuse River bridge at Montey-Notre-Dame and replace it with a new one. A crowd of over 2000 people assembled to witness the event. Eventually a loudspeaker announced that the bridge-removal operation had been delayed until April 1, 1968.
On March 31st, 1864, the
Evening Star of Islington announced that a "grand exhibition of donkeys" would be held the next day at the Agricultural Hall. Early the next morning a large crowd gathered outside of the hall. Slowly it dawned on them that they themselves were the donkeys.
Reported in the
Albany Register, Jun 10, 1854:
Did anybody ever see one pass by an old hat on the sidewalk, without giving it a kick? We do not believe such a thing ever happened. Well, a wag seized upon this characteristic, out of which to make a little amusement, on all fools' day. He procured a boulder of some twenty pounds or more, and laying it on the sidewalk, placed it over an ancient weather beaten hat. The first person who passed that way was a jolly, rollicking young man, who went whistling "Jordan is a hard road to travel;" as he came opposite the hat, so temptingly in his way; he gave it a rousing kick, expecting of course to see it go skiving into the street. But it didn't move, and he picked up his toe in both hands, hopped about, and became emphatic in his language, in a manner that made the perpetrator of the joke dodge around the corner. A moment after a gentleman came that way with a cricket club on his shoulder; he brought it down with a swoop against the hat, expecting to see it take a hoist over the lamp-post on the adjacent corner. But it didn't, while the cricket club as it run against the stone, flew half way across the street, and the striker fell to dancing about, blowing his fingers as if they were cold, and using a good many words not found in any religious work of the day. We staid long enough to see a dozen or more assaults perpetrated on that old hat that concealed the boulder, and every time the attacking party got the worst of the bargain.
