After the Laughter

With today being April First, I was hoping to find some good April Fools' Day hoaxes. It is also Monday, after all.

I found a story in Axios: "Exclusive: Trump allies plot anti-racism protections — for white people" that one would think qualifies. But this is Donald Trump, after all, and if one isn't either an ardent supporter of the man, or terrified that he heralds the end of the world, he's already descended into self-parody.

But I hunted through news sites and press releases, and pretty much came up empty. No-one seemed to be a mood to be funny this year. Perhaps not surprising. NPR's story on April Fools' Day pranks equated being fooled with a failure of media literacy, in the same way that one is tricked by misinformation. And LinkedIn News ran a short piece noting "April 1 is a marketing minefield," that was focused on the misses; how Google's original Gmail launch announcement was thought to be a prank, while Volkswagen's "Voltswagen" joke was mistaken for a real rebranding.

The comments following the LinkedIn story were telling, with people advising that companies simply not make any announcements at all on April 1st and that any pranks should be clearly labelled as such and "MUST be reviewed by Marketing/PR before posting."

Forbes took a swing at it with their story "April Fools’ 2.0: AI Is Crafting Ultimate Pranks You Won’t See Coming." But the "what if" piece came across as too careful (and too obvious) to be really funny. It seemed silly instead, and, like the captions in the Getty Images pictures that accompanied the piece, over-explained. IGN's video claiming that Nintendo had announced the Virtual Boy Pro was more like it. Nintendo themselves, however, didn't seem to have any jokes for the day.

It strikes me as a symptom of the general lack of unity that's always been lurking in the United States. Jokes are all fun and games until someone thinks that the joke is on them, and as the United States becomes more fractured and partisan, people become more vigilant for humor that might come at their expense. And since it's effectively impossible to make a joke that no-one can find fault with, organizations with a lot to lose don't try. It's a minor symptom of a serious problem; as people look at their neighbors with suspicion the social distance between them grows. And though there are endless debates about which systems of governance and economics would close gaps between different groups, none of them will work if Americans see one another as enemies.