Suggest HN: No April Fools this year
As you get near April Fools, and need to deploy your prank pages, perhaps reconsider doing it. As a general rule April Fools has become less popular on the web the more widespread it has become, and some people might take levity badly given the current world situation - I myself am among the party of people who think everything is open to mockery, but only if the jokes are good. Most April Fools pranks are tedious.
Obviously you may not have the ultimate say in what pranks are to be played at your company on the world, but perhaps you can push back on them and point out they might not be as well received as in years past.
93 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] thread> Two elephants were skydiving
> and suddenly one gets a
> Cinnabon bun in the eye.
I have to admit this doesn't seem very funny at all, but someone told me this and I couldn't stop laughing. Then again, I was twelve at the time. :o)
Hope you have a great birthday, despite the times!
It may well just have been a friend saying random nonsense, I have no idea.
* What is E.T. short for? Because he has little legs * How do you titilate and ocelot? Oscillate it's tit a lot. * What is Batman's favourite food? Toast - still don't get why that is funny but even now I laugh.
Thanks for reaching out!
Thanks for the laugh!
Agree. Most are somewhere between tedious and boring. “Oh look, we changed our company name to [something amusing only to a pencil pusher]. Aren’t we funny. Buy our products.”
> some people might take levity badly given the current world situation
Disagree and fuck them. The last thing we need is doom and gloom [0]. Few situations ought to be handled with solemnity. Including funerals. We gain nothing and only make it worse. What we do need is levity. Some light-heartedness.
[0] Music genres of that name are encouraged though
edited for impact
on edit: submitted before your edit.
In my experience from previous years lots of people on HN seem to feel the same way because there are always all these pranks, and people complaining that they're not very funny.
So I would like people not to put out these stupid jokes.
One thing that might help people to decide not to make the pranks is the observation that some people would find them offensive, given that the purpose of these pranks are essentially marketing exercises.
As for why I would care what people say, I care to a minimal extent and tolerate what I see as humorless behavior in the same way that while they might say that was inappropriate when I make a joke I would like them to tolerate my viewpoint. Thus if I think something might be offensive to some people in a context I consider if it is really funny before saying it.
And then I come on HN and laboriously explain my reasoning for every little bit of politeness I practice because that's just the kind of guy I am.
Hoist the jolly roger, and give me your best jokes ever this year.
PS: DEFCON is cancelled
I know it's a foreign concept but I'm sure we can import someone to teach us.
Maybe we are seeing "it's never going to not be soon, don't even think of it"
Organized, planned, workshopped humor on an industrial scale!! What Ho!
Indeed, the humorlessness of this place tends to encourage tedious pedantry and vindictive sniping.
Spreading misinformation is not funny. Making others miserable is not funny. Schadenfraude is not funny.
We need levity and laughter more than ever. Doing it well is where the dividing line is. I'd suggest do it well, or don't do it at all.
Iow: don't do jokes where the punchline is "look how fucking stupid you are for believing what I said", which is most April fool's jokes.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3334201
https://web.archive.org/web/20100718195724/http://www.perl.c...
The official Perl.com site announced Perl and Python were going to merge so you could run both languages in the same interpreter. In itself that was quite amusing, but the best part is that the Raku project actually adopted the name for their VM because it could actually do that, and became https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_virtual_machine, so what started out as a proper joke turned out to be real.
1. People need humour in challenging moments 2. Black comedy and gallows humour can lift the spirit at even the worst of times 3. As much of the northern hemisphere enters spring we could collectively do with a fillip to jolt us into a more optimistic mindset
The only value in this proposal I see is that if you are working on a tedious April Fools prank then yes you should drop it, which is true whatever year we are in.
This entire debate is mostly going to be heavy on the subjective and is largely pointless accordingly. It's opinion tossing, people hoping their opinion somehow magically weighs more.
I like pizza. No, pizza sucks, it's too hot. Pizza isn't hot enough. Only cold pizza is good. No all pizza is inherently evil. Pizza is hand delivered by the saints. Only pizza with pineapple is good. Pizza with pineapple is the worst thing ever.
Seinfeld sucks, he isn't funny at all. Seinfeld is a god.
All the people disagreeing with OP in this thread are misreading them as wanting to somehow ban jokes and humour.
Sometimes there are good ones, but 90% are not.
Joke all you like if that helps you stay sane through the pandemic, but leave those who don’t wish to out of it and don’t play pranks on people.
So yeah, I'm jaded, but that said I don't want to be a grouch about it (except for here, for argument's sake). If people enjoy it, then I'm cool with quietly simmering.
I've always hated April fool's as nothing seems to be funny but only for those who pull it off. I tend to "turn off" the internet on the day just to avoid feeling I've wasted time.
Fuck this attitude. Just yesterday I joked in a comment on Youtube about the quality of James May's video for reminding people to stay at home. I wrote
"James May shamelessly reused the footage he recorded during the Spanish Flu pandemic".
6600 people liked the comment, it was by far the most liked comment on that video, until suddenly Youtube decided it was inappropriate and the comment was no longer displayed. Who are they to decide what people are allowed to find funny?
Come on! Just don't make distasteful or obviously bad jokes, otherwise it's fine, welcome even.
April Fools as practiced on the internet and directed at strangers is bullshit on a good day and a headache on a bad one.
I've got enough bullshit to deal with.
Totally agree. Also the problem with most April Fools events online is that unless you spend 30 minutes scrutinising the page, it's not apparent that it's a joke or fake. A bad joke is one that no-one gets. It doesn't make you clever to have outwitted your readers, just arrogant.
Let's face it, in these trying times, there's enough fools online and in the media trying to screw our lives up, lets not be part of that.
> I agree with what people have already said, but I think there's one more point to add: people usually over-estimate how funny their own comments are. We have a tendency to think, "This idea of mine is hilarious! And different! Surely this witticism is the exception." And we are usually wrong. When you have N people all doing that, there's a lot of noise.
> I try to gently point this out to people who complain when their attempt at humor has been downvoted by the community. It's not that we don't like humor. We just don't like banal attempts at humor, which becomes noise. Or, put in a less charitable fashion, "You're not as funny as you think you are."
On the other hand, I want to see even more jokes. Yes, the situation is crap, so even more the need to raise everybody's spirits. If you don't want to see jokes, log off for a day, some insane Doctors said it won't actually kill you.
I would suggest that jokes that lessen the current virus or deaths surrounding it would be in poor taste, but each to their own. I personally won't be making morbid jokes, but I'm not going to fetch the pitch forks out of the garage to go seek revenge from anybody who does.
But there are other ones that I have found genuinely amusing and funny. The list of Google’s April fools pranks/features has some real gems - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_April_Fools
Some of them even lead to products or other real features down the line (like the 2014 Pokemon google maps explorer, which went on to become Pokemon Go).
Yeah, some jokes miss the mark for me, but I get that my sense of humor isn’t universal, and frankly I think a bit of levity is important for us right now as individual and as a culture.
In the good pranks category, I'm especially fond of new product announcements when it's clear it's a joke like Amazon shipping authors directly or the Google's "Clean screen" app. They are often refreshing and witty and it's just what I want from a good joke. And it's free positive marketing if done right. (Just don't announce your company bankruptcy, like Elon Musk.)
I'm still holding to my idea of swapping a font with https://hellveticafont.com/ for a day. I'll just make sure it's not obstructive and can easily be disabled.
This is the entire issue, as with evil people, no people ever find themselves to be bad jokers, or evil.
I like the Michael Carbonaro/Just For Laugh Gags variety. That kind of positive humor and creativity is helpful during crisis. You can see the effect it has on people in the youtube comments.