Credit: The Guardian, April 1, 2024
Back in 1977, I opened a copy of the Guardian newspaper to find a seven-page travel supplement devoted to San Seriffe on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the islands’ independence. But wait a moment. The capital is Bodoni? The islands’ dictator was General Pica? The two islands comprising the republic are Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse? Its indigenous people are Flongs though the majority of the population, descended from European colonists, are colons or mixed-race semi-colons? And then there was the date: April 1.
You might have had to have been a typographicista, or old enough to have worked in hot metal, to get it off the bat — and many readers were fooled for several days — but San Seriffe remains the high-water mark of April Fool’s hoaxes. It was better, even, than the celebrated filmed report in 1957 by the BBC’s flagship news magazine Panorama of the Swiss spagetti tree harvest. It is also, in passing, a reminder of halcyon days when a newspaper both had, and could afford to devote the resources to producing an elaborate seven-page joke.
So it was disheartening to read a Reuters news agency report today about how April Fool’s has descended into yet another marketing gimmick. BMW, with an eye to the U.K.’s forthcoming royal baby, announced the launch of a limited-edition pram; Procter & Gamble launched the newest flavor of its Scope mouthwash, bacon, “for breath that sizzles”. Google, which keeps to the spirit of April Fool better than most companies, announced its new Google Nose product (adding scent to the internet; currently still in beta), had parchment maps on Google Maps, and many a web site would have been grateful for the extra 41 visitors Google Analytics was reporting they were getting from the International Space Station.
We can’t help thinking when imaginative whimsical pranks go corporate, the innocent fun just seems to drain out of them. As the Guardian’s David McKie wrote in a 2006 essay about how San Seriffe came to be, it was pitched at the perfect point for an April Fool’s, “where not only the gullible are going to be fooled but where even sceptics think it might just be true.” And that is the Holy Grail of the spinmeisters and marketing communications folk, too.
