April Fools Day - The Art of the Prank

April 1, 2011December 15, 2023

April Fools’ Day 2011 Prank Survey

April Fools’ Day 2011
Metro.co.uk
March 31, 2011

April Fools’ Day: Top five April Fools’ Day jokes in sport ever: For some, April Fools’ Day is all fun and high jinx, but for others it’s just those with no sense of humour playing along with the rest of the human race. At Metro we thought we’d celebrate five of the best sporting April Fools’ jokes of all time.

Top 5 YouTube pranks: To celebrate April Fools’ Day this year, we’ve had a look back at some of the best YouTube pranks to cross our jape-loving paths.

April Fools’ Day: Joke ideas to play on your work colleagues and friends: It’s April Fools’ Day and once again workers around the country will be playing a host of tricks on their colleagues and friends. If you’re short on prank ideas, read on for Metro’s guide to the best jokes to play.

April Fools’ Day movie special: Top 5 ill-advised film pranks: It”s the week of April Fools” Day and innocent pranks are very much the order of the day. We bring you our five best film pranks.

April 1, 2011December 15, 2023

April Fools 2011: Pranks Around the Web

Submitted by Nick: Over the last few days we have been working on an infographic entitled, April Fools 2011: Pranks Around The Web. We stayed up late so we could get first peek at 2011 pranks online this morning, which allowed us to quickly add them to our infographic. Needless to say were a bit tired, but very happy with the infographic we created.

We will be updating this post throughout the day with any new and exciting April Fools” Day pranks of 2011. Keep your eyes peeled and… enjoy the below April Fools infographic which includes the top pranks of today as well as the past.

[Editor’s note: We added the links. They probably won’t work after today]

Top April Fools 2011 Pranks Online

Google – Motion gaming has become extremely popular over the past few years with the Wii, Move, and Kinect. Now Google wants to make Gmail motion controlled, thus launching Gmail Motion. No keyboard or mouse needed, hand and body gestures will control everything for you. All of this is detailed on the custom site Google launched for April Fools day. The motion functionality even looks to extend to Google docs, for which Google also created a custom site experience. Another Google prank you will notice when typing in a search today is a job open for autocompleters, and you only need to type 32,000 words per minute to apply.

YouTube – In honor of April Fools, YouTube decided to go retro and give users a feel for what it would have been like for the business in 1911. They even have 1911 logos on all YouTube videos, and when you click it, the video will transform into a vintage, silent, motion picture. Everything will turn to a dirty and grainy yellow accompanied by old-school piano music, looking something like a Charlie Chaplin film. Continue reading “April Fools 2011: Pranks Around the Web”

March 30, 2011December 15, 2023

April Fools’ Day Parade — Noon Friday!

From Joey Skaggs:

Rain or shine, The 26th Annual April Fools’ Day Parade kicks off from 5th Avenue and 59th Street Friday, April 1 at noon.

Alert: We have so many Charlie Sheen look-alike volunteers that we’ve added a Charlie Sheen look-alike contest in Washington Square Park right after the parade. See you there!

Link to the press release

March 30, 2011December 15, 2023

The Artiness of Naughtiness

Update, April 3, 2011: You can now listen to this 30:00 radio show here on Joey Skaggs’ website.

This radio show, produced by Rob Alexander, hosted by Toby Amies and featuring Joey Skaggs, among others, aired on BBC Radio Friday, April 1 at 11:30 a.m. UK time. You can listen to it on the BBC Radio site until April 7, 2011.

The Artiness of Naughtiness
Friday 1 April, 2011 at 11:30am on BBC Radio 4

Toby Amies discovers how tricksters have turned the poking of fun into an art form.

What have Jonathon Swift, Orson Welles, Marcel Duchamp, Yoko Ono, Malcolm Mclaren, Jeremy Beadle, and Sacha Baron Cohen got in common? Toby Amies discovers how tricksters and pranksters have turned the poking of fun into an art form.

Pranking is such a part of society, we’ve got a specially sanctioned day of misrule in the calendar. Mark Twain described the 1st of April as “the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year”. But for some people April Fool’s day is just not enough; generally opposed to the status quo, they are determined to alter our relationship with reality by forcing us to question its veracity.

There are pranksters who have been determined to show us our folly all year round and most have philosophical, political and artistic reason to do so.

Toby investigates this reasoning behind pranking – discovering why people will risk consequences as serious as prison to make a point or get a laugh. Sometime the motivation behind a prank is not always only a good laugh at someone else’s expense. It can be a very serious business.

Toby draws a wobbly line from the court jester to the hoaxes of Swift and Welles to Yves Klein to the playful Marxism[!] of Debord and the Situationsists, through to the commercial modern pranking industry and the work of Sacha Baron Cohen, Improv Everywhere, Jeremy Beadle and America’s king of the prank, Joey Skaggs.

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4

March 29, 2011December 15, 2023

A Prank Call Instructional

Proud art of prank calling still worth mastering
by Adrian Lahola-Chomiak
The Gateway
March 28, 2011

These days, with the invention of caller ID and text messaging, it seems that prank calls have more or less fallen by the wayside. But I’m not ready to surrender this classic joke just yet; too many hours in my life have been spent trying to decide who to call and which prank to pull. So for all you wide-eyed, greenhorn, wannabe pranksters out there, here are a few tips on how to transform yourself from a refrigerator runner to a master.

First, let’s review the tools of the trade. There’s the phone, and, well, that’s pretty much it “” but you do have to worry about how you use it. You’ll want to mask your voice with a modulator app, like Funny Call from iOKi. This will make you sound like anything from Rebecca Black to a chipmunk. Now that your voice is anonymous “” and hilarious “” you’ll need to know three simple rules before you call. Continue reading “A Prank Call Instructional”