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At 10 years old, I was initiated into one of my family’s most cherished traditions: pranking each other on April Fools’ Day. That fateful year, my dad gathered my brother, sister, and me and ran us through the plan. After imparting on us the life-changing knowledge of *67, we dialed my uncle’s number. When he picked up, we immediately chickened out, leaving our dad to take over the script we had rehearsed. In a comically deep voice, he explained that he was a librarian and reported that my uncle had a library book that was overdue by 15 years and now owed over $1,000 in late fees. With hands clamped over our mouths to keep quiet, my siblings and I were too young to see through our uncle’s melodramatic response or to understand the unbelievability of the setup itself. Instead, we declared “APRIL FOOLS!” in victory and hung up, roaring with laughter. “We got him! We got him so good!” I remember my dad shouting.
We definitely did not get him, but that was never the point. April Fools’ Day is pretty much universally either hated or ignored. It’s a holiday that actually requires being forgotten in order to be successful, but my family takes its celebration as seriously as Thanksgiving or birthdays. Because of this, it is genuinely one of my favorite days of the year. It seems to me that our fear of pranks stems from a fundamental misunderstanding that they have to be mean. In reshaping our idea of what a prank can be, I want to rebrand April Fools’ Day as a holiday, like so many others, in which gifts are exchanged and appreciated. And by that I of course mean the gift of pranks.
I’m not saying that the hate for the holiday is unwarranted. It’s a day that people use as an excuse to be cruel, to humiliate, to take things way too far. Take the story of Carrie Nickerson. In about 1917, as a 45-year-old soap saleswoman in Louisiana, she showed up at the house of John Smith, claiming that her relatives had buried a cache of gold coins on his land and that a psychic had confirmed that the treasure was there. Smith allowed Nickerson to dig on his property, fruitlessly, for months. When it became clear there was no gold, Smith and his family saw an opportunity for an April Fools’ Day prank. (Though the holiday’s exact origin is contested, references to April Fools’ Day go as far back as the 16th century, and some have linked it to the ancient Roman holiday Hilaria.)
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The Smiths decided to bury a pot full of rocks and dirt for Nickerson to find. They wired the pot lid shut and included a note saying to wait three days before opening it. Upon finding the vessel, Nickerson heeded the note’s instructions and took it to a local bank to keep in a safe-deposit box. By the time she came back three days later to claim her gold, the whole town knew that it was a mean joke. When Nickerson opened the pot, surrounded by a crowd who had come to witness her humiliation, she was enraged—but not because she realized she had been pranked. She believed that someone had stolen the gold during the days she had waited to open the pot. She remained convinced of the robbery and sued John Smith, his family, the bank cashier, and the vice president of the bank over her loss. Nickerson died before the case went to trial. Her heirs continued to pursue legal action following her death. In court proceedings a couple of years after the incident, it emerged that she had spent time as a patient in a psychiatric hospital earlier in her life, and that Smith knew of this fact when he pranked her. She posthumously won the lawsuit. The Supreme Court of Louisiana awarded her estate $500, and the case became foundational in defining intentional infliction of emotional distress.
To be so desperate that you would spend months digging for gold coins. To play with truth is no small thing, and the worst kind of prank isolates someone in their own twisted reality. But the right kind of prank has the opposite effect—it still twists the truth, still involves the prick of humiliation, but it does so for the sake of bringing more and more people into a shared new reality. That is the kind of prank that I love.
These gentler pranks don’t have to be complicated. When we were in high school, my friend Greta showed up on April 1 with a stack of red Solo cups, a clear jug of orange juice, and a fake story about buying it at the grocery store a few blocks away and accidentally bringing it on the wrong day for a class party. In the hallway, she approached new victims and invited them to drink the juice because, logically, she didn’t want to keep carrying it around. The poor, thirsty students inevitably agreed, took a cup, and found their mouths filled with (and I say this from experience) the ungodly, salty taste of Kraft mac and cheese flavor packets dissolved into lukewarm water—the true, deceptively orange contents of the jug. Each iteration of the prank, the unwitting victim spat it back into their cup, Greta yelled “April Fools!,” and the casually gathered onlookers all burst out laughing, revealing that they too had been fooled earlier. By the end of the day, Greta was like the Pied Piper of our high school, roaming the halls, trailed by a group of converts who had drunk the Kraft concoction and whose day had been wildly more entertaining for it.
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We live in a time of malleable reality, in which our understanding of the world keeps shifting so quickly and so implausibly that it often feels like the wrong kind of hoax. In recent memory, we have witnessed an attempted coup pursued over lies about voter fraud, a deadly pandemic chalked up by many to be a hoax, a broadcaster insisting for years that children massacred in their own classroom were actors in a political ploy. Nickerson’s case proves that our own court system agrees that playing with reality can be its own kind of violence. But I think that, used carefully, playing with reality can also relieve emotional distress instead of inflicting it.
I believe in the power of a good April Fools’ Day prank not as a solution, not as an answer, but as some small antidote to the horror we witness daily, a tiny gadfly on the monstrous face of truth. Growing up in a family that took the holiday seriously taught me that the point of the best April Fools’ Day pranks is not actually the gotcha. It’s the catharsis: laughing in the aftermath of small jolts to the mundane. It is healing and necessary to remember that reality is flexible in whimsical ways too, that changes to our understanding of the world can be silly and collective and easy to recover from. I think I need to live in a reality where it’s possible to pick up a call from an unknown number and hear not yet another robo scammer but three little kids stifling giggles on the other end of the line. If all goes according to plan, I will be able to play along with them just long enough to hang up in time to conceal my own delight.
