Chances are, you may have been taken in by an April Fool's prank this morning. It's something virtually everyone is familiar with in modern Canadian culture, but may never have given much thought to how or where it began.
Chances are, you may have been taken in by an April Fool's prank this morning.
It's something virtually everyone is familiar with in modern Canadian culture, but may never have given much thought to how or where it began.
Peter Bailey, director of the St. Albert Public Library said, based on his research into this topic the question of how it began might be nearly as old as the tradition itself.
“I saw a reference to 1708, there's a written reference to somebody saying, ‘What is the origin of April Fool's?'” he said. “I think it's an old, old question.”
While there is a variety of speculation about the origins, Bailey said the one that seems to make the most sense to him is with the French tradition of the Poisson d'Avril, or April Fish, in which one would try to surreptitiously attach a paper fish to somebody. References to this holiday go back as far as the early 1500s.
In English culture, Bailey said he likes to think April Fool's Day traditions developed in tandem with the kind of satirical British humour that mocks members of high society similar to the style of famous comedy troupe Monty Python.
“There's a long tradition of taking those kinds of folks down a peg, and I think Canada has inherited some of that tradition,” he said. “We're famous for our sense of humour more recently, but we're also considered one of the more boring cultures in the world so there's that tension for us in Canada.”
For David Goa, who studies and lectures on religion in public life at the University of Alberta's Augustana Campus, the history of April Fool's Day can be traced back to different religious customs in the middle ages.
In Christian culture, there's All Fool's Day, in Hindu culture there is the feast of Holi, and in Judaism there is the feast of Purim. All of these traditions involve playing tricks on people, he said, and all serve the purpose of sporting with cultural ideas about power.
The Feast of Fools in the medieval church involved dressing a boy up as a bishop and leading him into the church on a donkey in the procession as a way to keep the power of church authorities in a realistic light. While the bishop is a symbol of God, it was important to remember the bishop is not actually divine but is human.
“When there are things that are really precious to us, things that are loaded with meaning for us, sometimes we also need to sport with those things a little bit,” he said. “We need to sort of restore them to the human register from the divine order.”
Despite its origins in a religious context, the tradition of poking fun at the cultural standards in our society has translated into the secular world as well. Goa used the example of the Grey Cup in Canada, one of the more significant events for many Canadians in any given year.
“You find people doing all sorts of things around the Grey Cup game and taking it very seriously,” he said. “But you also find people who are making fun of it, and sporting with it a little bit.”
Even in simply playing pranks on those around us, we're in a sense sporting with the idea of power within our own personal relationships. For example, children sometimes express their own individuality and in a sense, freedom from their parents, with which both Goa and Bailey said they have personal experience.
Goa recalled some small tricks like waking up earlier than his father to put salt in the sugar bowl, but said the most memorable one came when he was five years old. His mother was pregnant, and on the last day of March she and his father went to the hospital. At about 3 a.m. on April 1, his father returned home and told the other children they had a sister.
“We were all fairly astute, and said that's an April Fool's joke,” he said. “My younger sister has never gotten over that.”
Bailey said when he was young, his mother would almost every year pull a fast one on her kids and they would invariably fall for it. One year, however, they were skiing with their uncle in Canmore and Bailey decided to play a prank on her by telling her his uncle broke his leg. She took the news poorly, and didn't see the humour when it was revealed as an April Fool's Day prank.
“All those years of her pranking her family, but it turns out turnabout was not fair play,” he said.
Bailey said while there are not a lot of books on the topic on the St. Albert library's shelves, there are many in the provincial library system that they could bring in for readers who want more information on the origins April Fool's Day.
