April Fools Practical Jokes

April fool’s day is celebrated in almost every culture. Practices include sending someone on a fool’s errand, looking for things that don’t exist, playing pranks, and trying to get people to believe ridiculous things, the aim of which is to embarrass the gullible. Jokes are made to friends, enemies and neighbors, though without malice or cruelty. Some are borderline criminal, but that’s beside the point.

Practical jokes were definitively one of my favorite pastimes, back in the old days, when I had but pennies in my pockets, and all I could afford was to play with people. Creativity was never at a shortage. Harnessing it was the problem. At times it got a little heavy handed and I had to cancel so many fabulous plans of action. Marcello Marchesi was my model, the person I looked up to.

The Maestro, in one of his routine exploits, transported overnight a drunk friend to a different city where he meticulously reproduced his apartment, then abandoned him sleeping on the bed. Imagine the wake-up scene. If Marcello was flying and did not like the stewardess, he would spread Nutella on the toilet seat of the airplane’s restroom, and when confronted by the upset stewardess, he would reach down to the seat with his finger, then leak it with gusto and pronounce the words: it’s just shit! Believe me when I say that these were the light jokes. On a good day, he is dubbed for having caused an early landing. I am not going to tell you what he did in the cabin, in case you may be eating. You can always get his book Scherzi d’Autore. His secret was to create attention before he delivered the punch line. His career was so long that many believed him to be his son. A beloved comedian, no one attended his funeral because all his friends thought that it was the umpteenth joke. For years, many friends thought that he would reappear. He reminds me of that tombstone in Savannah, where someone wrote: I told you I was sick! Marcello was the undisputed master of it.

But even as a humble follower of such master, I could write a book about practical jokes. At age twenty one, I was considered an artist. The “victims” were invariably my best friends. What can I say, I loved them! This confirms that when the tie is strong, to say it in Karl Kraus’s own words “ you must bite the tie”. Boy, did I tease them? Unfortunately, practical jokes seem to be a habit of the past, a healthy practice of close societies, where no one takes offense. In Puritan societies, they have been replaced by prudence and apprehension, both rather soporific social practices, likely due to a national obsession with liability. But even the old world is suffering this loss, so it may be a universal condition. Back in the old days, someone who can plan a joke showed courage; one who could take a joke showed maturity, and a joke invariably contained a moral, something about the giver and the receiver, often empathy and compassion, never malice. In fact, it was the role of jesters to put things in perspective with humor. So what is the problem today? Are we so afraid that the message would not be read through? Or has society become so impersonal and isolated that we cannot invade for a moment anyone’s privacy? In the process, we have lost the ability to be silly, really silly, if just once a year.

I must have started early. My school teachers used to punish me without a reason, and when I asked why, they always said “because of something I did yesterday, and they did not discover, in addition to something I was planning to do for tomorrow”. I was regularly grounded! As a young apprentice, I once tied, together with another boy of my mischief’s caliber, the opposite doors of two condominium flats whose owners notoriously hated each other. We did it early on Sunday morning, leaving just about an inch or two of slack, so that none of them could open his door to find out who was behind it, but they could feel each other’s action. We then proceeded in jamming the door bells, until we heard very upset voices coming from inside. We did hide behind the fire stairs, and saw a fierce (behind doors, he, he) battle developing. It lasted a while, until the Fire Department came to free two very upset men who were pulling the door back and forth yelling at each other, saying things I cannot publish here, commanding the other to let go. We then decided to blend in with the large crowd that gathered to see the reason of such commotion, and when someone figured out that it was April 1^st, I saw several firemen falling on the floor holding their laughter. I got away with that one, even if many people who heard about my future accomplishments, still know that I must have had something to do with it. I don’t mean to brag about it, but some of my jokes were ascribed as legends.