No Kidding: A Look Into The Surprising Origins Of April Fools' Day

April 1 is known as April Fools' Day, and it's only fitting that the origins of the observance of this day are a bit mysterious. (Photo credit: Laura Chouette / Unsplash)

The Holiday Known For Pranks And Tricks Goes Back Hundreds Of Years

Are you gullible? Well, if you haven’t noticed yet, it’s that day of the year again… April Fools’ Day.

Every April 1, people try to trick others into believing something that isn’t true.

With the rise of the internet, participating in April Fools’ Day has only gotten easier. One must always be on guard, with fake headlines from reliable news outlets even sometimes proving to be a ruse.

While the holiday’s origins are not entirely clear, there are several moments in history that have been pinpointed by scholars as sources for this day of tricks.

Why Do We Celebrate April Fools’ Day?

One of the most significant early influences on the notion of April Fools’ Day finds its origins in early literature.

In the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which was completed in the year 1400, the poem titled “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” includes a fable of a sly fox who tricked a proud rooster to crow for him, only for the fox to then bite the rooster and take him away.

However, the fox then gets tricked himself as he succumbs to his pride and taunts his adversaries, allowing for the rooster to escape from his open mouth.

Translated from old English to the common tongue on Harvard’s website, the rooster declares near the end of the poem:

“And first I curse myself, both blood and bones,
If thou trick me more often than once.
Thou shalt no more through thy flattery
Make me sing and close my eyes;
For he that closes his eyes, when he should see,
All willfully, God let him never prosper!”

Further, in the poem, this is said to occur on the 32nd day since the first of March, which would be April 1, but some scholars question the validity of this reading of the existing Chaucer documents.

Going from England to France, there is another significant work that has been cited as having a possible influence on April Fools’ Day.

Even in France, the holiday finds its origins in literature, with a 1508 work by poet Eloy D’Amerval, titled Le livre de la deablerie, which translates to The Book of Deviltry in English.

There, D’Amerval makes a reference to “poisson d’avril,” or “April fish,” likening the foolishness of those in Hell to fish being caught. To this day in France, National Geographic notes that pranking people by trying to covertly attach a paper fish to someone’s clothes without them noticing remains in practice on April 1.

Another possible source of April Fools’ Day found in France deals with the notion of keeping a calendar.

Prior to the calendar year being set as beginning on January 1 by the Council of Trent in 1563, many territories set the beginning of the year as they pleased. When King Charles IX of France issued the Edict of Roussillon in 1564 to enforce the calendar year beginning on January 1, it is said that people who held that the year began in April were “fools.”

Was April Fools’ Day In The Bible?

For our last look at the possible origins April Fools’ Day, there have even been some who have said that the day has its roots in the Old Testament of the Bible, or the Torah as it is known to the Jews.

In the Genesis account of the great flood that God preserved Noah, as well as his wife, their sons, and their son’s wives, it has sometimes been held that the first time that Noah released the dove from the Ark in search of dry land was on April 1. That dove, of course, returned with no signs of dry land.

Several dates are cited in Genesis regarding the flood and its duration, but the Hebrew calendar is affixed to the cycles of the Moon, and the timeline for the span of time detailed in the early chapters of Genesis — prior to the covenant between God and Abraham — is widely contested.

This thought on the Biblical origin of April Fools’ Day was notably logged in the 1891 encyclopedia, compiled by William Ralston Balch, called The Complete Compendium of Universal Knowledge, Containing All You Want to Know of Language, History, Government, Business and Social Forms, and a Thousand and One Other Useful Subjects.