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By Emmy McKirgan

Happy April Fool’s Day! If you are a jokester extraordinaire, it’s your favorite time of the year! It’s a free pass to prepare and execute harmless jokes all day long! It’s the best day if you have comedic timing to play out your pranks and install laughter in on-lookers. 

If you are the “fool,” it’s another story. You anxiously wait for what will await you…will there be a spider in the shower or shaving cream in your shampoo? 

Will you be sitting on a whoopie cushion or have your silverware wrapped in plastic wrap? You don’t know what pranks your family will play on you. 

While not an internationally observed holiday, the beloved April Fools Day is celebrated worldwide. Some countries take it very seriously. In Poland, prima aprilis (“First April” in Latin) as a day of pranks is a centuries-long tradition. Many gags are played. To make the stories more believable, they can even involve media and public institutions. Serious tasks are left to the rest of the year as there is a possibility that everything someone says could be a lie. However, for some in Poland, prima aprilis ends at noon of 1 April, and prima aprilis jokes are considered inappropriate and not classy after that hour.

So I guess if we take a page from the Polish April Fools handbook, we should get our jabs, jokes, pranks, and the such – done early in the morning. I guess it makes sense; unless you are an early riser, you are a little groggy and not fully aware of your surroundings. If you are like many people until they get their first cup of coffee, they are zombie-like. So it’s easy to pull the wool over their eyes! So maybe it’s not how clever one is, but how asleep the “fool” is. 

Keep your gags simple! Make them harmless and silly! The most important part is to have lots of laughs.