Shooting Straight: Tapping our inner fool

Specific days are celebrated for different reasons. Some honour heroes, others commemorate religious events, but April 1 stands out as the only holiday that celebrates foolishness.

April Fools’ Day, or All Fools Day, is an odd celebration with a strange history. There’s some uncertainty about when and where this bizarre tradition began, but the most accepted explanation apparently traces April Fools’ Day back to 16th century France.

Till 1564, the accepted calendar was the Julian calendar wherein the New Year was in April. King Charles IX then declared that France would begin using the Gregorian calendar, which shifted New Year’s Day to January 1.

Not everyone accepted this shifting of dates at the same time. Some believed that the dates should not be shifted, and it was these people who became the butt of some April jokes and were mocked as fools. People sent gifts and invited them to bogus parties.

There are at least two difficulties with this explanation. The first is that it doesn’t fully account for the spread of April Fools’ Day to other European countries. Secondly, the Gregorian calendar was not adopted by England until 1752 but April Fools’ Day was already well established there by that point. The third is that we have no direct historical evidence for this explanation, only conjecture, and that conjecture appears to have been made more recently, possibly again to fool everyone.

Another explanation of the origins of April Fools’ Day was provided by Joseph Boskin, a professor of History at Boston University. He explained that the practice began during the reign of Constantine, when a group of court jesters and fools told the Roman emperor that they could do a better job of running the empire. An amused Constantine allowed a jester named Kugel to be king for one day. Kugel passed an edict calling for absurdity on that day, and the custom became an annual event.

It, however, later came to light that Boskin had made the whole thing up.

All said and done, no matter how smart we think we are, at some April 1st or the other in our life times, all of us have been gullible enough to fall prey to the most ridiculous lie or prank and that proves that deep inside all of us there’s definitely a fool who is waiting to be tapped.