When I was at university, one of my fellow - and frankly cleverer - history students had a bet with a friend that he could get the word ‘penguin’ into every essay in his finals. He not only did this, but he got a First (and then went on to become a cracking screenwriter for Coronation Street among other gigs – he’s also a smashing chap).
One of the nice things about writing is that you can quietly amuse yourself by including little bits and bobs that are just about relevant to the book but are really what are known as ‘literary Easter eggs’ for yourself. One of mine is anything connected to April Fool’s stories. I’m not a fan of practical jokes, but I do like the clever mild ones which are sensitively crafted for April 1. My first one was as a trainee journalist for the first newspaper I worked on, submitting to the newsdesk my exclusive that French research by Professor Avril Poisson that the Battle of Hastings was actually fought in 1065.
Once I started writing books, it seemed natural to include April Fool’s items. Here are some of my favourites. First of all, an entire section from my latest book, The Book Lover’s Joke Book:
1956
American magazine The Saturday Review featured an article about 5th century BC grammarian Kohmar Pehriad who advocated the use of the full stop and who provided the inspiration for the comma. His son, Apos-Trophe Pehriad, was also evangelical about punctuation marks.
1977
Radio Carlisle revealed that William Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage home in the Lake District had been sold to an American who was intending to dismantle it brick by brick and rebuild it in Arizona.
1980
The Times disclosed that it had been shown original papers written by Sherlock Holmes that he had invented Moriarty to annoy Dr Watson.
1999
A paper in science journal Nature claimed a dinosaur skeleton had been discovered by Randy Sepulchrave from the little known University of Southern North Dakota who believed that not only was it was able to fly, but it had a kind of flexible body armour and ribs which appeared to be charred by fire. It had been named Smaugia Volans (of interest to readers of The Hobbit) by Sepulchrave (co-incidentally the name of the owl-obsessed 76th Earl of Groan in Mervyn Peak’s Titus Groan).
2001
The Observer focused on plans by a dot.com entrepreneur to build a Cybrary, a bricks and mortar building which would hold printouts of all the books currently available online on the internet.
2010
The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 reported that a newly-discovered locket revealed William Shakespeare was French.
2012
The British Library came across a mid-14th century cookbook by Geoffrey Fule in its archives with a recipe for unicorns, including a picture of a unicorn on the grill (pictured above). The book apparently also included recipes for tripe and codswallop.
2013
Kevin Merden, Director of Tissue Buying at Asda announced the supermarket would soon be producing Fifty Shades of Grey lavatory paper on the back of EL James bestselling book success.
2015
The Paris Review scooped the world with an interview with Eric Carle in which he revealed that he had fought bitterly with his publishers of the inclusion of the stomach ache scene in The Hungry Caterpillar which they demanded by included as punishment for overeating. This ‘scoop’ resurfaced widely online on Carle’s death in 2021.
Next, a section from my history of art Art Day by Day: 366 Brushes with History:
April 1, 1943: Norman Rockewell’s first April Fool cover
“If you can find twenty-five of them you are shooting par. If you can find thirty-five you’re bogey plus, and if you find more than that, you ought to start discovering new stars with the naked eye.”
The Saturday Evening Post, April 3, 1943
The first of three Normal Rockwell April Fool’s issue covers for the newspaper with which he was most closely associated featured dozens of impossible, incredible, or simply daft elements spread over the entire cover showing two elderly people playing checkers. Among them were the wrong number of squares on the checkers board, and rubbers on both ends of a pencil. Rockwell produced two more covers along similar lines in 1945 (featuring a young girl and an old man looking at dolls) and 1948 (a man wearing skis leaning against a tree and ‘fishing’ out of a can of tomatoes).
Also on this day…
1928: German magazine Uhu “reveals” that x-rays show Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy is in fact a girl
1935: The Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung newspaper claims that restoration work “shows”the Mona Lisa was initially frowning but Leonardo da Vinci painted over it
1950: Dutch radio station VARA announces that Rembrandt’s The Night Watch is “dissolving” after the wrong liquid was used to clean it
1962: Artist Edo van Tetterode claims responsibility for planting a fake Easter Island statue which “washed up” on the beach near Zandvoort, North Holalnd
1998: David Bowie and William Boyd host the launch party of Boyd’s new biography of “forgotten artist” ‘Nat Tate’ at Jeff Koons’s studio in Manhattan
And finally from A Soundtrack for Life which I wrote for Scala Radio. It’s not technically an April Fool’s joke, but it’s my gaff, so it’s my rules (incidentally, another fellow historian from student days):
April Fool’s Day - String Quartet ‘The Joke’ - 1781
Josef Haydn (1732 – 1809)
Classical composers are not known for their wacky pranks, but the Austrian Franz Joseph Haydn is an exception. Kicked out of a choir as a teenager for cutting offer a fellow chorister’s pigtail, Haydn was known for his jovial approach to life as well as being one of the most famous composers of his day. "Since God has given me a cheerful heart,” he said, “He will forgive me for serving Him cheerfully."
His love of mild mischief extended to his compositions. As well as some fairly arcane musical in-jokes, Haydn also provided his audiences with plenty of less subtle messing about including:
* during his Symphony No. 45 (known as the Farewell Symphony) the musicians gradually get up one by one and leave the platform until only two violinists remain.
* the music appears to stop near the end of his Symphony No. 90, giving the audience the cue to start clapping, only for it to start up again.
* a loud bass fart noise played by the bassoon in the increasingly quiet section of the 2nd movement in his 93rd symphony.
* a quiet section in the 2nd movement of his 94th symphony (dubbed the Surprise Symphony) is suddenly broken by a loud chord before resuming as if nothing had happened
Haydn’s 1781 string quartet nicknamed ‘The Joke’ is along similarly playful lines. The final section has a series of increasingly long pauses, each one suggesting that the piece is over before carrying on. And then suddenly stopping. It’s maybe not a conventional side-splitting gag, but it is a surprisingly funny listen and apparently had his 18th century audiences in stitches.
Excellent. I do love a good April Fool but most are...disappointing. I did once manage to convince someone that Evel Knievel's brother Good Knievel was going to be down the beach that afternoon jumping 100 motorbikes in a double decker bus
Brilliant. I do believe that if you set yourself a bizarre constraint as a writer it can be enormously liberating. I used to do something like that penguin thing in the monthly features I wrote for a business magazine - not that word but others likewise weird. Mind you, nothing like as tough as the constraints Georges Perec set himself...