April Fools

My calendars and devices say I’m posting this on Monday, March 30. Maybe it’s really two days later, with the calendars and devices snickering “April Fool!” behind my back.

Gentle, unthreatening practical jokes can delight both prankster and target at any time of year. On April 1, we positively expect them. Jodi Wellman in Psychology Today describes the benign capers that lead to shared laughter as “pro-social mischief.”

Not all pranks are benign, especially in an unequal relationship. A trick played by the boss on a subordinate, or by a big child on a small or timid one, is bullying. In my camp counselor days, when the campers in my cabin short-sheeted my bed (folded the sheet so I couldn’t extend my legs), I laughed and praised their ingenuity. If campers and counselor were strangers, though, short-sheeting might seem insolent.

In a less happy learning experience one summer, several of us middle-class white college students sent inner-city high schoolers into a suburban woodland at night for a snipe hunt (prey we knew wasn’t there). We didn’t realize the dark forest would be as unfamiliar and scary to them as parts of the inner city were to us.

“In short, the ground rule for practical jokes is radical safety,” Wellman writes. No ridicule, no damage, no fear, no exclusion, no pushing personal buttons. Pranksters should reveal the joke quickly, clean up any mess, and honor their “victims” with some sort of celebration afterward. Then we can all laugh together.

Image: “A-maze-ing Laughter,” bronze sculpture by Yue Minjum in Morton Park, Vancouver, British Columbia.​