It is one thing to call Lincoln Park Zoo or Brookfield Zoo and ask for “Mr. Lion, please,” or say, “May I please speak to Mr. Bear?” and hundreds will on Wednesday, which is April Fools’ Day.
Those sorts of modest stabs at humor lack, shall we say, a certain creative punch.
Not so a story that appeared on the front page of the Standard, a newspaper in Nairobi, Kenya, on April 1, 1989. Reporter Haroun Wandala detailed a multimillion dollar plan to dump tons of rock on top of the country’s Mt. Kenya so that it could steal the Tallest Mountain in Africa title from the 19,340-foot-tall Mt. Kilimanjaro.
That’s a good one and more than half the paper’s readers swallowed the story.
But my favorite April Fools’ Day prank is George Plimpton’s 14-page article in the April 1, 1985, edition of Sports Illustrated.
In the story, Plimpton, “reporting” from spring training, told the remarkable tale of New York Mets prospect Hayden “Sidd” Finch, a Harvard dropout with the ability to throw a fastball at an unhittable 168 miles an hour.
The article, complete with pictures (a lanky youth who pitched with one foot bare and the other in a work boot) and the obvious cooperation of the Mets’ organization, was a sensation and eventually grew into a book.
But a couple of weeks after the “Sidd” Finch article appeared, a letter to the editor was published in S.I.
It succinctly captured the essence of a good April Fools’ Day prank.
It read: “You lousy, good-for-nothing blankety-blanks. You got me hook, line and sinker and I loved it.”
