h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Over the past years - decades even - April fools jokes in the media have got weaker, less crazy, less funny and less original.

This is probably because

- All the good ones have already been done
- Less and less crazy ideas are impossible
- People are less gullible
- journalists are fed up with trying to think things up

So - have you seen any good April fool jokes lately?

Yesterday, at a choral dress rehearsal, I said to the guy next to me that no one one had played any April Fool jokes on me yet. "Maybe it's because today is the 2nd."

...there's an idea!

Perhaps one could get up a movement to ban the 1st of April, same principle as 13th floors in tall buildings and maybe even out the length of February in the process...

>>- People are less gullible

I'm not falling for that assertion.

Nor am I.

Anyway, why ban April 1st? A month has t start somewhere, doesn't it?

I do find April Fools more dreary than ever these days, but that's probably only to be expected with our increasingly dull society. Is it a co-incidence that the colour grey is so popular? Grey and silver cars predominate on the roads, grey increasingly crops up in interior design, and most bizarre of all, it's now fashionable for youngsters to dye their hair grey.

Brighten up!

That certainly is a new slant on things, quotes. There were some attempts at April Fools jokes, of course, this year, but I still think that the journalists are so limited by the society becoming crazier, rather than duller.

This year's April fool joke could be next year's government-approved mega-project, however daft it is.

I wonder if part of the problem is that marketing and PR types have worked out that it's a good way to get publicity and to present brands and companies in a positive light - associating them with a sense of fun, particularly if the joke is sending themselves up a little bit. Although I understand that google's prank backfired a bit this year.

So now nearly every company seems to think that it has to have an April Fools story, and so they're everywhere, so the overall impact is diminished.

That may well be it, too, although I hadn't noticed any of these. Are they all internet-based? Do you have any examples?