Pranks

In 1810 a man sent a thousand tradesmen to the same London address for a bet. In 1835 a New York paper reported bat-winged people living on the moon and sold out for a week. In 1957 the BBC filmed Swiss peasants harvesting spaghetti from trees and viewers rang in asking where to buy the plants. The prank is one of the few things humans have done continuously and identically for three hundred years: build a plausible world, invite someone in, and see how far they will walk. This archive follows it from newspaper hoaxes and campus capers through the television age to the point where pranking became a job, and then, in the 2010s, ran into the question of who was paying for the joke.

A chronological documentary of 356 moments spanning 497 BC–2026 on Loreline.

Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-08-22

Eras

Days Set Aside for It, The calendar traditions that license mischief: April Fools' Day, the Spanish-speaking world's Día de los Santos Inocentes on 28 December, the French poisson d'avril and its paper fish, Odessa's Humorina, mischief night. Recurring customs rather than single events, dated here to their earliest solid attestation.
Printed and Believed, The hoax as journalism: the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, the Berners Street affair, San Serriffe, the newspaper that ran a straight face on 1 April and the readers who never saw the joke. Includes the hoaxes newspapers themselves fell for.
Fooling the Experts, Deceptions aimed at people who should have known better, Piltdown Man buried in a gravel pit for forty years, Mary Toft and her rabbits, the Mechanical Turk, the Sokal affair. The ones that worked exposed something real about how expertise is granted.
On Air, Radio and television as the delivery mechanism: the spaghetti harvest, Ghostwatch, the Swedish stocking-over-the-screen, Big Ben going digital. A medium trusted enough to be worth abusing.
Filmed Pranks, Hidden-camera and performed pranks made to be watched: Candid Camera from 1948, Jackass, Punk'd, the YouTube prank channel and its descendants. Where the prank stops being an event that happened and becomes a thing that was filmed.
Hacks and Capers, The institutional prank as craft, MIT putting a police car on the Great Dome, Caltech rewriting the Rose Bowl card stunt, an Austin Seven on the Senate House roof in Cambridge. Engineering problems solved for a joke.
People Who Made a Career of It, The professional pranksters and prank-artists: Hugh Troy, Alan Abel, Joey Skaggs, the Yes Men, Improv Everywhere. Where the prank becomes a medium, satire, activism, or performance with the audience unaware they are in it.
Brands Join In, Once pranking sold things: the Taco Liberty Bell, Burger King's left-handed Whopper, Google's annual gags, the modern brand April Fools arms race and the fatigue that followed.
Mass Participation, Pranks that needed a crowd: Rickrolling, Boaty McBoatface, coordinated votes and poll-crashing, r/place, the internet organising itself around a joke.
What It Cost, The reckoning. Staged "pranks" exposed as fake, channels demonetised, dangerous stunts copied by children, swatting calls that ended in a death, and the criminal convictions that followed. Included soberly and factually, because an archive of pranks that omitted the harm would be a lie about the subject.
Pranks That Never Happened, The other failure mode: a prank the press invented, or reported straight and never corrected. The 1938 "mass panic" that historians say was largely a newspaper fiction; jenkem; the bikini bridge; the "Slap a Teacher" TikTok challenge that fact-checkers could find no trace of, and which the Washington Post later reported was pushed by a consultancy working for Meta; boat-jumping deaths that the police force named in the story said never happened. The scares are better documented than most of the pranks, and they are all somebody's deliberate work.

497 BC - Saturnalia - Roman festival of role reversal. Recurring annual Roman festival from 17 December in which normal social order was inverted: masters served their slaves, gambling was permitted, and a mock king presided. The attestation used is Livy's record of the dedication of the Temple of Saturn, traditionally dated 497 BCE, whose dedication anniversary of 17 December fixed the festival date. The festival is older than any surviving description and no founding date is recoverable.
497 BC - Saturnalicius princeps - 'King of the Saturnalia'. A recurring role within the annual Saturnalia: a mock king chosen by lot at each gathering whose capricious commands ('Sing naked!', 'Throw him into cold water!') had to be obeyed. He is the direct classical analogue of the medieval Lord of Misrule. The date given is the Temple of Saturn dedication anchoring the festival; the office has no separately datable attestation.
217 BC - Saturnalia reformed after Lake Trasimene. A recurring festival whose observance was formally reformed in 217 BCE following the Roman defeat at Lake Trasimene, when the rites were revised and the public banquet expanded. This is the earliest securely datable historical event in the festival's observance, as distinct from the traditional 497 BCE temple date. Catullus later called it 'the best of days' (optimo dierum).
44 BC - Lupercalia - Roman purification rite. Recurring annual Roman festival on 15 February in which young priests (Luperci) ran near-naked striking bystanders with thongs (februa) cut from sacrificed animals. The earliest firmly datable attestation is the Lupercalia of 44 BCE, at which Mark Antony offered Caesar a diadem; the festival is of much older, possibly Sabine origin. Pope Gelasius I condemned it between 494 and 496 CE.
7 BC - Massacre of the Innocents (Matanza de los Inocentes). The Gospel of Matthew (2:16-18) recounts Herod the Great ordering the killing of male children under two in Bethlehem, traditionally dated c. 7-2 BC. Scholarly consensus rejects its historicity: it appears only in Matthew and is uncorroborated by Josephus. Matthew links it to Jeremiah 31:15, the verse that gave the feast its mourning character, the origin of the Hispanic prank day.
0485 - Feast of the Holy Innocents established. The Latin Church instituted the feast at a date now unknown, not before the end of the 4th century. The earliest recorded mention is the church calendar of Carthage at the end of the 4th century, and it is first found in the Leonine Sacramentary of about 485, given here as the earliest solid attestation. A recurring annual observance. Latins keep it on 28 December, Greeks on 29 December, Syrians on 27 December.
0606 - Lathmar Holi (लठमार होली) at Barsana and Nandgaon. At the twin towns of Barsana and Nandgaon in Uttar Pradesh, men from Nandgaon visit Barsana during Holi and are driven off by women wielding lathis (sticks) while colour is thrown, re-enacting a legend in which Radha and her companions repelled Krishna. A recurring annual custom; year carried from the earliest firm Holi attestation. NOTE: Wikipedia gives only a mythological origin, and the widely repeated '1569 / Narayan Bhatt' origin claim appears only in low-quality sources and is excluded.
0606 - Bhang (भांग) - the intoxicant of Holi. Bhang, an edible preparation of cannabis leaves ground with milk and spices, is consumed during Holi and Mahashivratri, served in thandai, lassi and pakoras. It remains legal in much of India because the NDPS Act of 1985 excludes cannabis leaves and seeds from its definition of banned cannabis, and it is sold from government-licensed shops in several states. A recurring annual custom; year carried from the earliest firm Holi attestation, as bhang's own antiquity is not precisely datable.
0743 - Carnival - pre-Lenten reversal ritual. Recurring pre-Lenten festive season described as a reversal ritual in which social roles are inverted and norms about desired behaviour are suspended, analysed by Bakhtin as 'uncrowning' through the grotesque body. The earliest specific date available is 743, when the Synod of Leptines condemned Carnival excesses, an attestation of existing practice, not an origin. Historian John Bossy holds there is no evidence much before 1200; the origin is genuinely unsettled.
0750 - The Donation of Constantine is forged. A forged imperial decree purporting to record Constantine the Great handing authority over Rome and the western empire to the papacy. Scholars generally place its composition in the eighth century, though one study argues for the ninth at Corbie Abbey; the eighth-century estimate is taken here as the earliest. Its authenticity was contested from 1001 onwards, and Lorenzo Valla demolished it in 1439-1440 by showing on philological grounds that its Latin could not be fourth-century.
0900 - El Obispillo - the boy bishop (Episcopus puerorum). Recurring custom, with revels traceable to the 10th century, in which a boy chorister was elected to parody a bishop, commonly on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (28 December). In England the boy was elected on St Nicholas's Day and his authority ran to 28 December. Henry VIII abolished it in 1542; Mary I reinstated it in 1553; Elizabeth I ended it. The initial motive was apparently the exaltation of the innocent and the lowly.
1010 - Sizdah Bedar (سیزده‌بدر) and Dorugh-e Sizdah - the Lie of the Thirteenth. Sizdah Bedar ('thirteen outdoors') is the recurring annual Iranian festival on the thirteenth day of Nowruz, around 1-2 April, when families picnic outdoors. It carries a prank tradition called دروغ سیزده (Dorugh-e Sizdah, 'Lie of the Thirteenth'), the Iranian analogue of April Fools' Day. The year given is the approximate completion of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, which references 'the thirteenth day of Farvardin'. IMPORTANT: the widely repeated claim that pranks date to 536 BCE is NOT supported by any scholarly source, and Wikipedia itself notes the festival's historical roots are 'a bit vague'.
1160 - Feast of Fools (festum fatuorum / fête des fous). Recurring medieval clerical festival around the Feast of the Circumcision in which subdeacons took over the roles of their superiors in a ritual inversion of church hierarchy. The earliest documented church reference is by John Beleth in Paris, written between 1160 and 1164, describing subdeacons presiding; the earlier year of that range is used. Choirboys led the ceremonies on 28 December, the hinge connecting this custom to the Spanish prank day.
1376 - Basler Fasnacht - Carnival of Basel. Recurring annual carnival, the largest in Switzerland, beginning with Morgestraich at 4:00am on the Monday after Ash Wednesday and running exactly 72 hours. Satire is central: cliques display satirical Sujets on illuminated lanterns and Schnitzelbank singers perform mocking verses on current events. The oldest document referring to carnival in Basel dates from 1376, when a tournament ended in a riot remembered as the 'böse Fasnacht'. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2017.
1420 - Śmigus-dyngus (Wet Monday) - first written prohibition. Recurring Polish Easter Monday custom of dousing people with water, in which boys traditionally soak girls. The earliest written attestation is a prohibition at the Poznań diocesan synod of 1420, 'Dingus prohibetur', warning against practices where men and women 'attack for eggs and other gifts... or dragging into the water', proof the custom was already well established enough to alarm the clergy.
1431 - Feast of Fools forbidden by the Council of Basel. The Feast of Fools was officially forbidden by the Council of Basel in 1431. Suppression was far from immediate: instances were still recorded in Brussels in 1719 and Amiens as late as 1721. The long survival of the custom despite repeated ecclesiastical bans is why its licensed-mischief character migrated into secular folk practice rather than dying out.
1440 - Valla exposes the Donation of Constantine. Lorenzo Valla demonstrated on linguistic grounds that the Donation of Constantine, the document by which the papacy claimed temporal authority over the Western empire, could not have been written in the 4th century, because its Latin was of a much later period. It is an early instance of philology used to break a forgery, several centuries before forensic science.
1445-03-12 - Paris Faculty of Theology condemns the Feast of Fools. A circular letter of 12 March 1445 from the theology faculty of the University of Paris to the prelates of France, declaring 'how much we abhor and how much we execrate a certain kind of ritual of merriment, which is called by its organizers the Feast of Fools'. It documents a recurring annual custom, not a one-off event. NOTE: many sources date this 1444 because the medieval French calendar began the year at the Annunciation (25 March); 12 March 1445 is the modern equivalent.
1466 - Première attestation de « poisson d'avril » (Pierre Michault). The earliest known occurrence of the phrase 'poisson d'avril' in French, in Pierre Michault's Doctrinal du temps présent. Critically it does NOT mean an April 1st prank here: CNRTL glosses it as 'entremetteur, intermédiaire', a go-between carrying love letters. Its existence a century before the 1564 Edict of Roussillon is one of the main reasons historians reject the calendar-change origin story.
1480 - Nasreddin Hodja (Nasreddin Hoca) - earliest manuscript attestation. Nasreddin Hodja is the trickster-sage of Turkish and wider Islamic folklore, whose anecdotes turn on inversion, absurd logic and mockery of authority. The oldest recorded Nasreddin story appears in Ebu'l-Khayr-i Rûmî's Saltuk-nâme of 1480, which states he was born in Sivrihisar. From the 16th century the figure served increasingly as a point of crystallisation for a floating tradition of jokes and anecdotes of varied origin.
1500 - Purim costumes and the Italian carnival influence. Bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider theorised that the custom of masquerading in costumes and wearing masks on Purim originated among Italian Jews at the end of the 15th century, influenced by the Roman carnival, since Purim usually coincides with Mardi Gras. A recurring annual custom. NOTE: the theory is contested, Rabbi Yair Hoffman argues Steinschneider was mistaken, and cross-dressing at Purim is already referenced by Kalonymus ben Kalonymus in the early 14th century.
1507 - « Poisson d'avril » chez Eloy d'Amerval, Le Livre de la Deablerie (AMBIGUOUS). Eloy d'Amerval's Le Livre de la Deablerie contains the line 'Maquereau infâme de maint homme et de mainte femme, poisson d'avril'. IMPORTANT: CNRTL dates the work 1507-08 (the earliest year of that range is used) and gives the same sense as Michault's 1466 attestation, a pimp or go-between, paired with 'maquereau' (mackerel/pimp), NOT an April 1st joke. It is very frequently miscited online as the first reference to April Fools' Day; the link between the 'mackerel' sense and the 'April prank' sense remains unexplained by lexicographers.
1511 - Souling and soul caking. Recurring Allhallowtide custom in which children and the poor go door to door singing and praying 'for the souls of the givers' in exchange for spiced soul cakes marked with a cross. In Cheshire it developed into souling plays featuring a death-and-resurrection sequence and a participant wearing a horse skull. The earliest reported souling activity dates to 1511; Shakespeare alludes to 'pulling like a beggar at Hallowmas' in 1593.
1529 - Plough Monday. Recurring English custom marking the start of the agricultural year on the first Monday after Epiphany, in which costumed celebrants, sometimes cross-dressed, dragged a plough house to house demanding money, threatening to plough up the front path of anyone who refused. The earliest source naming the day comes from Cambridgeshire in 1529; a related plough race is recorded at Carlton in Lindrick in the late 13th century.
1541 - Lord of Misrule. Recurring English Christmastide custom in which a peasant or subdeacon presided over the revels, inverting the household hierarchy for the season. The earliest firm year available is the custom's abolition by Henry VIII in 1541; Archbishop Grindal of York issued a further injunction in 1570 against 'anye lordes of misrule'. Outlawed again under the Puritans in the 17th century.
1546 - Carnaval de Negros y Blancos, Pasto - the 28 December water day. The Blacks and Whites' Carnival in Pasto, southern Colombia, is dated to 1546 and was named a UNESCO Masterpiece of Intangible Heritage on 30 September 2009. Its pre-carnival opens on 28 December, when Pastusos play with water, soaking passers-by. What began as a day of tricks and hoaxes became this water game, imitating the water carnival of neighbouring Quito. The practice has since been prohibited because of water shortages. A recurring annual custom.
1561 - April Fools' Day - Eduard de Dene, 'Refereyn vp verzendekens dach'. The Flemish poet Eduard de Dene of Bruges wrote a comic poem about a nobleman who repeatedly sends his servant on absurd errands on 1 April, the servant each stanza fearing he is being made to run a fool's errand. It is widely regarded as the earliest unambiguous documented reference to pranking on 1 April anywhere, and formed part of his Testament Rhetoricael, completed 1561.
1561 - First undisputed reference to April Fools' Day. A Flemish poem by Eduard de Dene describes a nobleman sending his servant on absurd errands on 1 April, and is the earliest unambiguous documentary reference to the custom. A claimed 1392 reference in Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale is disputed: scholars believe a scribal error is involved and the passage may originally have pointed to 2 May. John Aubrey's 'Fooles holy day' in 1686 is the first British reference.
1561 - Verzenderkesdag - Flemish fool's-errand custom. In Flanders 1 April is traditionally known as 'verzenderke(ns)dag' ('sending-day'), after the custom of dispatching someone on a pointless errand. Documented 18th- and 19th-century practice involved sending servants out with a nicely wrapped stone or a box of dead rats, or to fetch non-existent goods. A recurring annual custom; the earliest documented attestation in the Low Countries is De Dene's 1561 poem naming the day.
1561 - Poisson d'avril - the paper-fish custom. The French name for April Fools' Day is 'poisson d'avril' (April fish), and the signature prank is pinning a paper fish to an unsuspecting person's back, then shouting 'Poisson d'avril!' when it is discovered. A recurring annual custom, still practised by French schoolchildren. The earliest unambiguous European attestation of 1 April pranking is de Dene's 1561 poem; the fish motif's own origin is obscure and not securely datable.
1572-04-01 - 'Op 1 april verloor Alva zijn bril' - Den Briel wordplay. On 1 April 1572 the Watergeuzen (Sea Beggars) captured Den Briel, a turning point in the Dutch Revolt against the Duke of Alva, producing the enduring pun 'Op 1 april verloor Alva zijn bril' ('On 1 April Alva lost his spectacles'), punning on Briel/bril. Dutch sources stress this is a folk etymology, NOT the origin of April Fools' Day, which is attested earlier and across Europe.
1600 - Aprilsnar - Danish tradition. The Danish national encyclopedia states that 'at narre april' has been known in Denmark since the 1600s, arriving from Germany. Originally the aprilsnar was the person tricked into 'running April', sent on pointless errands, given useless gifts, or told fabricated stories. A recurring annual custom; the year given is the start of the attested century, not a precise date.
1618 - 'In den April schicken' - earliest German attestation. The German idiom 'jemanden in den April schicken' ('to send someone into April') is first recorded in Bavaria in 1618, and in the rest of Germany from 1631. The noun 'Aprilscherz' only came into regular use in the second half of the 19th century. A recurring annual custom. The frequently repeated story that the custom began with a failed currency reform at the 1530 Augsburg Reichstag is explicitly classed as an unsecured explanation.
1641 - Gai Jatra (सा पारु / Sa Paru) - Nepal's festival of satire. Gai Jatra, known in Nepal Bhasa as Sa Paru, is a recurring annual Newar festival in the Kathmandu Valley honouring relatives who died in the past year, with children costumed as cows in procession. Since the 1600s it has carried licensed caricature and political satire, with performers openly mocking those in authority. The year is the EARLIEST year of Pratap Malla's reign (1641-1671), to whom the founding is traditionally attributed. NOTE: the attribution is oral tradition; historian Gautama Vajra Vajracharya states 'Pratap Malla did not start Gai Jatra', and some rituals predate him.
1650 - Aprilskämt / 'narra april' - Swedish tradition. According to the Nordiska museet the Swedish custom of aprilskämt goes back to the middle of the 1600s. An early feature was sending the victim on fictitious errands, e.g. asking a pharmacy for 'synvinklar' or a carpenter's apprentice for 'spikolja'. The classic rhyme is 'April, april, din dumma sill, jag kan lura dig vart jag vill'. A recurring annual custom; the year is the approximate mid-17th-century attestation.
1683-04-01 - Prima Aprilis - Polish tradition and the 1683 treaty backdating. Poland's April Fools' tradition is called Prima Aprilis, most likely arriving via Germany and France. Its seriousness is documented by a striking episode: the Polish anti-Turkish alliance with Leopold I, signed on 1 April 1683, was backdated to 31 March out of concern that a treaty signed on that date might be dismissed as a joke. A recurring annual custom; earlier Polish attestation claims (13th century) are not firmly documented.
1686 - April Fools' Day - John Aubrey, 'Fooles holy day'. The first British reference to the recurring custom: in 1686 the antiquary John Aubrey referred to the celebration as 'Fooles holy day'. This confirms the annual observance was established in England by the late 17th century.
1691 - « Poisson d'avril » au sens moderne (Jean de Labrune). The earliest known occurrence of 'poisson d'avril' meaning 'tromperie, mystification traditionnelle du 1er avril', the modern April Fools sense, appears in Jean de Labrune's La Vie de Charles V, duc de Lorraine (1691), per the CNRTL/TLFi etymological entry. This marks the semantic shift from the 15th-century 'go-between' sense to the prank sense, roughly two centuries later, and is the key dated milestone for the French custom as such.
1698-04-01 - 'Washing the lions' at the Tower of London. An early documented instance of the recurring 1 April custom: on 1 April 1698 several people were tricked into going to the Tower of London to 'see the Lions washed'. The hoax was repeated in later years, becoming a standing April Fools' joke rather than a single event.
1698-04-01 - Londoners sent to see the lions washed at the Tower. Dawks's News-Letter of 2 April 1698 reported that 'yesterday being the first of April, several persons were sent to the Tower Ditch to see the Lions washed.' The Tower genuinely housed a royal menagerie, which made the errand plausible to visitors. The prank persisted for more than 150 years: Gustave Louis M. Strauss recalled handing out tickets to the 'grand ceremony of washing the lions' around 1848, and surviving forged tickets from the 1850s direct holders to a non-existent 'White Gate'.
1700 - Aprillipäivä - Finnish tradition and the herring rhyme. April Fools' Day has been known in Finland since at least the 1700s. The custom is marked by the rhyme shouted once the trick is revealed: 'Aprillia, syö silliä, juo kuravettä päälle!' ('April fool, eat herring, drink ditchwater after it!'), cognate with the Swedish herring formula. April hoaxes became common in Finnish newspapers in the 1960s. A recurring annual custom; the year is the start of the attested century.
1704 - George Psalmanazar invents Formosa. A fair-haired European of unknown origin arrived in London in 1703 posing as a native of Formosa (Taiwan), and in 1704 published 'An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa'. The book was entirely fabricated, complete with an invented alphabet, calendar and accounts of ritual cannibalism, and it went through multiple editions. As genuine reports of Formosa reached Europe his claims collapsed, and he confessed around 1706, first to friends and later publicly.
1718 - « Donner un poisson d'avril » entre au Dictionnaire de l'Académie française. The Académie française dictionary records the idiom 'donner un poisson d'avril à quelqu'un', defined as obliging someone to undertake a pointless errand in order to mock them. This is the point at which the custom is formally lexicalised in the standard French reference dictionary, confirming it was established practice by the early 18th century. The definition matches the fool's-errand structure of De Dene's 1561 poem.
1726-06 - Mary Toft claims to give birth to rabbits. Mary Toft, a servant from Godalming, Surrey, convinced surgeons and eventually figures at the royal court that she was giving birth to rabbits. The claims began after an episode in August 1726 and drew national attention from late October. On 4 December evidence emerged that rabbits had been bought and smuggled into her chamber; she confessed on 7 December, and she and the surgeon John Howard appeared before the bench on 7 January 1727.
1731 - Wren Day (Lá an Dreoilín). Recurring Irish and Manx custom on 26 December in which 'Wrenboys' in straw masks and motley go door to door with a decorated wren bush, singing and collecting donations said to bring prosperity. The earliest dated attestation is George Waldron's 1731 record that the wren was buried 'with a whimsical kind of solemnity, singing dirges over her in the Manx language'. A stuffed wren now replaces the real bird.
1737 - Mummers play. Recurring seasonal folk drama performed by amateur troupes at Christmas, Easter and Plough Monday, in which two characters fight and the loser is revived by a doctor with a magic potion, the troupe then collecting money. The earliest attestation is a fragmentary St George speech from Exeter, possibly dating to 1737 though not published until 1770; the earliest complete text is an undated chapbook printed by John White of Newcastle between 1746 and 1769.
1749-01-16 - The Bottle Conjuror empties the Haymarket. An advertisement in the London papers promised that at the New Theatre in the Haymarket a performer would play every instrument known to man upon a borrowed walking cane and then squeeze his entire body into a common wine bottle in full view of the audience. A full house paid to attend on 16 January 1749; no conjuror appeared, and the audience rioted and gutted the theatre's interior. The hoax is traditionally traced to a wager about human gullibility involving the Duke of Portland and the Earl of Chesterfield, though the perpetrator was never positively identified.
1760 - Macpherson publishes the Ossian fragments. James Macpherson published 'Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland' in 1760, followed by Fingal in 1761 and Temora in 1763, presenting them as translations of a third-century Gaelic bard, Ossian. They became a European sensation and shaped Romanticism. Samuel Johnson denounced Macpherson as a fraud, and Charles O'Conor attacked the work in 1766 and 1775. Modern consensus is that Macpherson largely composed the poems himself while drawing on genuine Gaelic material he had collected.
1769 - Chatterton sends the Rowley forgeries to Horace Walpole. Thomas Chatterton wrote pseudo-medieval poetry which he attributed to 'Thomas Rowley', an invented 15th-century Bristol monk. In 1769 he sent specimens to Horace Walpole, who initially praised them before Thomas Gray and William Mason identified them as forgeries. Chatterton died on 24 August 1770 at seventeen. A 1777 edition still presented the poems as genuine medieval work; the following year's edition conceded they were probably Chatterton's own.
1770 - The Mechanical Turk is unveiled in Vienna. Wolfgang von Kempelen built a chess-playing automaton and first displayed it at Schönbrunn Palace in 1770, after promising Empress Maria Theresa he would surpass a visiting French illusionist. The cabinet in fact concealed a human chess player. An operator's escape was witnessed during a Baltimore exhibition in 1827, but the mechanism was not fully published until Silas Mitchell's articles in The Chess Monthly in 1857, after the Turk was destroyed by fire in 1854.
1790 - Mischief Night. Recurring night of licensed pranking and minor vandalism, observed on 4 November in Yorkshire and northern England and on 30 October in much of the United States. The phrase first appears in 1790, when a headmaster encouraged a school play ending in 'an Ode to Fun which praises children's tricks on Mischief Night in most approving terms'. Related May Day Eve mischief was criticised by Philip Stubbs as early as 1583.
1794-06 - William Henry Ireland forges Shakespeare. In December 1794 the teenage William Henry Ireland presented his father with a deed bearing a forged Shakespeare signature, then produced a stream of letters, documents and finally an entire 'lost' play, Vortigern and Rowena. Edmond Malone's 'An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers' demolished the papers on 31 March 1796, one day before the play opened at Drury Lane on 2 April 1796. The play closed after a single performance, and Ireland confessed publicly later that year.
1800 - Påskkärring - Swedish/Finnish Easter witch custom. The oldest written records of the påskkärring (Easter witch) date from the early 19th century, though Nordiska museet notes the tradition is probably older. Originally adults dressed as witches to mimic and frighten others; it later became a children's custom. Children dress in headscarves with painted faces and go door to door, in Sweden on Maundy Thursday and in Finland on Palm Sunday. Derives from the belief that witches flew to Blåkulla before Easter. A recurring annual custom.
1810-11-27 - The Berners Street hoax. Theodore Hook, reportedly on a wager, sent thousands of letters summoning tradespeople and dignitaries to 54 Berners Street in Westminster on a single day. From 5am chimney sweeps, coal wagons, bakers, fishmongers, undertakers with a coffin and carts of furniture and pianos converged on the house of a Mrs Tottenham. The chairmen of the Bank of England and the East India Company and the Duke of Gloucester were among those drawn in, and police had to cordon the street.
1814-02-21 - The Great Stock Exchange Fraud. On 21 February 1814 a man calling himself Colonel du Bourg arrived at Dover with news that Napoleon had been killed and Bourbon rule restored, and the story was carried into London by riders in French uniform. Government securities surged and more than £1.1 million in bonds were sold before the report collapsed. Eight people were convicted of conspiracy, including the impostor Random de Berenger and the naval hero and radical MP Lord Cochrane, who was stripped of his rank and expelled from Parliament. Cochrane always maintained his innocence, was pardoned in 1832, and historians remain divided on his guilt.
1817-04-03 - Princess Caraboo arrives in Almondsbury. On 3 April 1817 a young woman speaking an unknown language appeared in Almondsbury, Gloucestershire, and via a Portuguese sailor's 'translation' was identified as Princess Caraboo of Javasu, captured by pirates and escaped by swimming ashore. She was taken in by local gentry for ten weeks. A boarding-house keeper recognised her from a newspaper picture: she was Mary Willcocks, a cobbler's daughter from Witheridge, Devon, who had invented her language from imaginary and Romani words. She sailed for Philadelphia on 28 June 1817 and later sold leeches to hospitals in Bristol.
1823-02-10 - First Cologne Rosenmontag parade (Rosenmontagszug). On 10 February 1823 the first organised masked parade passed through Cologne's Neumarkt, staged by a newly formed committee (today's Festkomitee Kölner Karneval). Participants mocked authority, including costumes parodying Prussian soldiers' uniforms, which so alarmed officials that several later processions were cancelled from 1830 to prevent sedition. Now a recurring annual custom.
1824 - Weiberfastnacht - Beuel washerwomen's committee founded. In 1824 the washerwomen of Beuel (Bonn) founded the first women's committee, today the Alte Beueler Damenkomitee von 1824. While their husbands took laundry to Cologne and celebrated there, the women staged their own gathering, the birth of Weiberfastnacht. The custom is one of role reversal: women storm the town hall and take power, and cut off men's neckties. A recurring annual custom, marked in 2024 by its 200th anniversary.
1828-04-01 - Dia da Mentira - Brazil's 'A Mentira' newspaper hoax. Brazil's 1 April observance is called Dia da Mentira ('Day of the Lie') or Dia dos Bobos. Its documented national origin is the Minas Gerais newspaper 'A Mentira' ('The Lie'), launched on 1 April 1828 with the false news of the death of Dom Pedro I, contradicted the next day. The paper published until 14 September 1849, signing off with a final prank summoning creditors to settle accounts at a nonexistent location.
1835-08-10 - Barnum exhibits Joice Heth as Washington's nurse. From 10 August 1835 at Niblo's Garden in New York, P. T. Barnum exhibited Joice Heth, an enslaved and by then blind and largely paralysed Black woman, advertising her as 161 years old, born in 1674, and George Washington's childhood nurse. She died on 19 February 1836, and Barnum sold tickets to a public autopsy on 25 February attended by around 1,500 people, at which the surgeon David L. Rogers put her age at about 80. Barnum then claimed Rogers had dissected the wrong body and that Heth was alive in Europe, before admitting that too was a stunt.
1835-08-25 - The Great Moon Hoax. Beginning on 25 August 1835, the New York Sun ran six articles describing life discovered on the Moon by the astronomer Sir John Herschel, including bison, unicorns, tailless beavers and bat-winged humanoids. The series was written by the reporter Richard Adams Locke, who did not publicly admit authorship until 1840. The Sun conceded the articles were fabricated on 16 September 1835 but never printed a formal retraction.
1842 - Barnum exhibits the Feejee Mermaid. The object was the torso and head of a juvenile monkey sewn to the back half of a fish, with scales and animal hair worked over the join. Moses Kimball brought it to New York in the summer of 1842 to show P. T. Barnum, who built a publicity campaign around a fictitious naturalist, 'Dr J. Griffin', supported by anonymous letters posted from Montgomery and Charleston. Griffin displayed it publicly for only about five days before it moved to Barnum's American Museum.
1844-04-13 - Poe's Balloon-Hoax in the New York Sun. On 13 April 1844 the New York Sun published Edgar Allan Poe's unsigned account of the balloonist Monck Mason crossing the Atlantic by gas balloon in seventy-five hours, complete with diagrams and technical specifications. The detail was convincing enough that crowds reportedly gathered at the Sun's offices for further news. The paper backed away from the story on 15 April, saying it had received no confirmation, while conceding such a voyage was not impossible.
1846-04-01 - День смеха (Den Smekha) - Dostoevsky and Nekrasov's 'Pervoe aprelya'. Russia's 1 April is known as День смеха (Den Smekha, 'Day of Laughter') or День дурака. Its literary landmark is the comic almanac 'Первое апреля' ('First of April'), published on 1 April 1846 by Nikolai Nekrasov, containing the satirical story 'How Dangerous It Is to Indulge in Ambitious Dreams' co-written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nekrasov and Dmitry Grigorovich. NOTE: the widely repeated claim that Peter the Great instituted the day is not reliably sourced and is omitted.
1851 - L'affaire Vrain-Denis Lucas - le faussaire aux 27 000 lettres. Lucas met the mathematician Michel Chasles in 1851 and over eighteen years sold him more than 27,000 forged letters attributed to Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene, all written in French, all flattering to France. Chasles presented forged Pascal-Newton correspondence to the Académie des Sciences in 1867 as proof Pascal had anticipated universal gravitation. In February 1870 the Tribunal correctionnel de Paris sentenced Lucas to two years.
1852 - Heyoka - the Lakota contrary. A recurring sacred-clown role among the Lakota and Dakota, assumed only by those who have had visions of the Wakíŋyaŋ (thunder beings), who 'speaks, moves and reacts in an opposite fashion to the people around them', shivering in heat, going naked in cold, complaining of fullness during famine. The heyoka acts as mirror and teacher, questioning norms and offering critique of those in authority. The earliest source cited is Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's Historical and Statistical Information (1852).
1857-02-24 - Mistick Krewe of Comus - first New Orleans Mardi Gras parade. The Mistick Krewe of Comus was founded in 1856 and staged its first torchlit night parade on 24 February 1857, themed 'The Demon Actors in Milton's Paradise Lost'. This established the recurring annual krewe parade that defines New Orleans Mardi Gras, and Comus paraded near-continuously from 1856 to 1991. NOTE: Wikipedia articles conflict, variously giving 1833/1853/1856; founding-1856, first-parade-1857 is the reading corroborated across sources.
1861 - William Mumler sells the first spirit photographs. Mumler, a Boston engraver, produced what he described as an accidental self-portrait showing his dead cousin, and turned spirit photography into a business serving families bereaved by the American Civil War. He was tried for fraud in New York in April 1869; P. T. Barnum testified against him and had the photographer Abraham Bogardus fake an image of Barnum with Lincoln's ghost to show how easily it was done. Mumler was acquitted because the prosecution could not prove the method beyond doubt. His best-known image, showing Mary Todd Lincoln with a spectral Abraham Lincoln, is variously dated; Mumler himself later said February 1872.
1861 - Vrain-Lucas convicted over 27,000 forged letters. From 1861 the French forger Denis Vrain-Lucas sold the mathematician and collector Michel Chasles counterfeit letters attributed to figures including Newton, Pascal, Cleopatra and Mary Magdalene, all written in nineteenth-century French on watermarked paper. Over sixteen years he produced roughly 27,000 documents, and Chasles defended their authenticity before the Académie des Sciences. In February 1870 the Correctional Tribunal of Paris sentenced him to two years in prison plus a 500-franc fine and costs.
1862 - Els Enfarinats - first documented reference (els emmantats). The earliest documentary reference associated with the Ibi festival dates to 1862, when a group called 'els emmantats' (the cloaked ones) was recorded in the town's book of ordinances, understood as the forerunner of Els Enfarinats. Some sources place its organisation at the end of the 18th century, and others claim records to 1636, but 1862 is the earliest firm documentary attestation. A recurring annual custom whose origin is genuinely unclear.
1866 - The Calaveras Skull. A human skull said to have been found in a Californian mine shaft was presented as evidence that humans had lived in North America in the Pliocene. It had been planted by miners as a joke on a local geologist, and the joke outlived their intention, the skull was cited in scientific literature for decades.
1869 - Correction: 'a sucker born every minute' was not Barnum. The line most often attached to P. T. Barnum is popularly said to have been his verdict on the crowds paying to see the Cardiff Giant. In the standard account it was said instead by David Hannum, a member of the syndicate that had bought the giant, about the people queueing for Barnum's plaster copy of it. No contemporary source records Barnum saying it. The episode is a useful marker of how hoax history itself accretes invented detail.
1869-10-16 - The Cardiff Giant is dug up. On 16 October 1869 workers digging a well behind William 'Stub' Newell's barn in Cardiff, New York, uncovered a ten-foot stone man. It had been carved and buried by Newell's relative George Hull, a tobacconist who conceived it after losing an argument about the giants of Genesis 6:4 at a revival meeting. Hull confessed to the press on 10 December 1869, and on 2 February 1870 a court declared both the giant and P. T. Barnum's rival plaster copy to be fakes.
1874-11-09 - The Central Park Zoo escape hoax. The New York Herald's front page of 9 November 1874 described a mass breakout from the Central Park menagerie, with a rhinoceros goring its keeper and a lion, polar bear, panther, hyenas and a Bengal tiger loose in the city, claiming 49 dead and 200 injured. The piece was written by J. I. C. Clarke under managing editor T. B. Connery, who had witnessed a leopard's near-escape and wanted to dramatise the zoo's poor safety precautions. A disclaimer at the very end stated that not one word of it was true, but many readers panicked before reaching it.
1875 - The MIT hack becomes an institution. MIT's tradition of the 'hack', an elaborate, anonymous and deliberately harmless prank, usually involving significant engineering, is documented from the 19th century onwards and is treated by the institute as part of its culture rather than as vandalism. The unwritten rules require that a hack be safe, non-destructive, reversible and, ideally, admired by its victims. The institute maintains an official gallery of them.
1882 - Whittlesey Straw Bear. Recurring Cambridgeshire custom on the Tuesday after Plough Monday, in which a man is encased in straw and led dancing from house to house for food and drink. An 1882 newspaper records a man dressed in straw led through the town 'to entertain by his frantic and clumsy gestures the good folk'. Stopped in 1909 when police enforced the 1824 Vagrancy Act against 'cadging', and revived by the Whittlesea Society in 1980 after seventy years.
1885 - La mystification de Léo Taxil. Gabriel Jogand-Pagès, writing as Léo Taxil, faked a conversion to Catholicism around 1884 and spent over a decade 'exposing' a satanic Masonic cult called Palladism, complete with an invented high priestess, Diana Vaughan. At a press conference on 19 April 1897, billed as Vaughan's first public appearance, he confessed the entire fabrication. The invented material still circulates in anti-Masonic writing today.
1890 - Pueblo sacred clowns (Koshare, Koyemshi, Newekwe). A recurring ritual role in Pueblo religion, in which jester-tricksters perform at ceremonies, offering humorous interpretation of popular culture, reinforcing taboos and defusing community tension; they were 'somewhat feared by the Hopi as the source of public criticism and censure'. The earliest ethnographic source cited is Adolf Bandelier's The Delight Makers (1890), followed by Parsons and Beals (1934) and Parsons's Pueblo Indian Religion (1939).
1898 - Guising - Halloween disguise custom. Recurring Halloween custom ancestral to trick-or-treating, in which costumed children go door to door performing a song, joke or poem in exchange for treats; the word derives from 'disguising'. The first recorded North American use of the term is from 1898 in British Columbia, with a fuller description reported at Kingston, Ontario in 1911.
1899-06-25 - The Great Wall of China demolition hoax. On 25 June 1899 four Denver papers - the Times, Post, Republican and Rocky Mountain News - all ran a front-page story that China planned to demolish the Great Wall and replace it with a road, with American firms bidding for the contract. The Denver papers dropped it within days but the story spread east and into Europe, gaining embellishments as it went.
1900 - Poisson d'avril postcards - the Belle Époque phenomenon. At the turn of the 20th century the poisson d'avril postcard became a Belle Époque phenomenon: cards illustrated with fish, flowers and young women, carrying flirtatious rhymes such as 'Ce poisson vous dira combien je vous aime'. At their height they were more widely sent in France than Christmas cards. The Château de Dieppe Museum holds a collection of 1,716 such cards. The tradition died out after the First World War.
1903 - Blondlot announces N-rays. The French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot reported a new form of radiation he called N-rays, and dozens of papers by other researchers confirmed them. Robert Wood visited the laboratory and secretly removed a prism essential to the apparatus; Blondlot's assistant continued to report seeing the rays. It is a case of self-deception rather than fraud, and became the standard example of observer bias. Not a hoax. Blondlot appears to have genuinely believed in N-rays; no deliberate deception was established. Included as the boundary case that shows how thin the line between hoax and error can be.
1905-12-28 - ABC: the collapse of the Madrid Viaduct. On 28 December 1905, two years after the newspaper was founded, ABC reported that the viaduct over Calle Segovia in Madrid had collapsed, complete with a supporting photomontage. It was the first inocentada in ABC's history and one of the earliest documented cases of a major newspaper using image manipulation to sell a hoax. The paper published a note the following day explaining the joke.
1907-12-28 - ABC: the stolen lion of the Congress of Deputies. On 28 December 1907 ABC ran a half-page photomontage showing the façade of the Spanish Congress of Deputies missing one of its bronze lions, claiming it had been stolen overnight by 'devoted followers of Caco', Cacus, the thief of Roman myth, and Spanish slang for burglars. It is the third year running of ABC's inocentada and shows photographic manipulation was already an established tool of the Spanish press hoax.
1910-02-07 - The Dreadnought hoax. Horace de Vere Cole led a party including Virginia Stephen (later Woolf), her brother Adrian, Duncan Grant, Guy Ridley and Anthony Buxton aboard HMS Dreadnought disguised as Abyssinian royalty, in costumes and blackface supplied by the theatrical costumier Willy Clarkson. A forged telegram announced the arrival of 'Prince Makalen of Abbysinia and suite', and the Royal Navy received them with an honour guard and a tour of its newest battleship. No law had been broken; the men were given a symbolic thrashing by junior officers, and the press ridicule embarrassed the Navy.
1912 - Adloyada (עדלאידע) - the Tel Aviv Purim parade. The first Purim costume parade in Tel Aviv was held in 1912, three years after the city's founding, conceived by the artist Abraham Aldema, who taught drawing at the Herzliya Gymnasium. The procession initially ran only about 350 metres along Herzl Street. In 1932 the parade was given the name 'Adloyada', from the Aramaic 'ad delo yada' ('until one no longer knows'), the Talmudic phrase licensing Purim revelry. A recurring annual custom.
1912 - エイプリルフール (Eipuriru Fūru) reaches Japan. Japanese Wikipedia states that Western April Fools' Day was transmitted to Japan during the Taishō period, spreading under the literal translation 四月馬鹿 (shigatsu baka, 'April fool'); the Sino-Japanese term 万愚節 (mangusetsu) is also used. A recurring annual custom. No specific year is documented, so 1912 is given as the first year of the Taishō era, the earliest possible date, not a confirmed one.
1912-12-18 - Piltdown Man announced to the Geological Society. Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward presented skull and jaw fragments from Piltdown, East Sussex, to the Geological Society of London on 18 December 1912 as a missing link between apes and humans. The specimen was in fact a medieval human skull combined with a roughly 500-year-old orangutan jaw and fossil chimpanzee teeth, stained with iron solution and chromic acid and filed to fit. Fluorine dating by Kenneth Oakley, Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and Joseph Weiner exposed it in November 1953; an eight-year review published in 2016 concluded Dawson was the forger.
1912-12-28 - ABC: Count Romanones dining with his political enemies. On 28 December 1912 ABC published a doctored front-page photograph purporting to show the Count of Romanones, then Prime Minister of Spain, dining amicably with the republicans Alejandro Lerroux, Pablo Iglesias and Rodrigo Soriano, all political opponents. The hoax marks a shift in the inocentada from invented disasters to fabricated political imagery.
1917 - The Cottingley Fairies photographs. In mid-1917 Elsie Wright, 16, and her cousin Frances Griffiths, 9, borrowed a camera in Cottingley, West Yorkshire and returned half an hour later with a photograph of Frances beside four dancing fairies; a second, of Elsie with a gnome, followed two months later. The figures were cardboard cut-outs Elsie copied from Claude Shepperson's illustrations in Princess Mary's Gift Book, propped up with hatpins and thrown in the beck afterwards. Arthur Conan Doyle publicised them in The Strand in December 1920. The cousins admitted the fakery in 1983, though Frances maintained to the end that the fifth photograph was genuine.
1917-11-01 - Trick-or-treating - earliest printed attestation. Recurring annual Halloween house-visiting custom in which costumed children demand treats under implied threat of a prank. The earliest known printed use is in The Sault Daily Star, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, 1 November 1917: 'Tricks or treats you could hear the gangs call out'. CORRECTION: the frequently cited 1927 Blackie, Alberta reference is NOT the earliest, it is the earliest instance of the modern exact phrasing 'trick or treat', which the 1917 citation antedates in variant form.
1917-11-01 - Correction: the earliest recorded 'trick or treat' is 1917, in Ontario. The phrase is often said to first appear in Blackie, Alberta in 1927. The earlier attested instance is in The Sault Daily Star of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, on 1 November 1917, reporting that 'Tricks or treats you could hear the gangs call out.' Costumed door-to-door guising is documented earlier still, at Kingston, Ontario in 1911, but without that phrase. The distinction worth keeping is between the practice and the formula used to demand the treat.
1922-08-27 - Krokodil (Крокодил) - Soviet satirical magazine. Krokodil was the leading satirical magazine of the Soviet Union, its first issue published on 27 August 1922 as a supplement to Rabochaya Gazeta ('Workers' Newspaper'). A snarling red crocodile burst from its cover, the avatar of its brand of political satire. Though political satire was dangerous for much of the Soviet period, Krokodil was given considerable licence to lampoon officials. Circulation peaked around 5.8 million in 1980; it published until 2008.
1926 - Kammerer's midwife toad. Paul Kammerer claimed his experiments on midwife toads demonstrated the inheritance of acquired characteristics. G. K. Noble found that the specimen's supposed nuptial pads had been injected with India ink. Kammerer denied doing it, blamed an assistant, and killed himself weeks later; whether he was the forger has never been settled.
1930 - MIT students weld a streetcar to its rails. In the 1930s Ken Wadleigh, later a dean at MIT, and four others distracted a streetcar motorman and set off small thermite charges to fuse the vehicle's wheels to the rails. It is the earliest specifically documented example in MIT's hack tradition; the institute's records do not attest dated hacks before this. The far better-known Smoot measurement of Harvard Bridge did not follow until October 1958.
1930 - Devil's Night (Detroit). Recurring annual observance on 30 October in Detroit, emerging in the 1930s-1940s as minor pranking before escalating in the early 1970s to widespread arson. Destruction peaked with over 800 fires in 1984; the volunteer Angels' Night patrol programme, established 1995, substantially reduced incidents. The year given is the opening of the attested decade, as no exact first year is documented.
1930 - كذبة أبريل (Kadhbat Abril) - 'the April lie' in the Arab world. April Fools' Day is observed across the Levant and Egypt as كذبة أبريل (Kadhbat Abril, 'the April lie'), or in Lebanon كذبة أول نيسان ('the first of April lie'), the phrase used to reveal a prank. A recurring annual custom adopted through European contact rather than indigenous in origin. The year is anchored to the earliest documented Arabic-press April hoax in the region traced in this archive (the 1930 Ha'alif Bei libel), not to an origin date, which is not documented.
1934-04-21 - The Loch Ness 'Surgeon's Photograph'. The Daily Mail published the photograph on 21 April 1934, crediting the London gynaecologist Robert Kenneth Wilson, and its silhouette of a long neck became the standard image of the Loch Ness Monster. It was staged by Marmaduke Wetherell, a big-game hunter the Mail had publicly ridiculed after his 'Nessie footprints' proved to have been made with a hippo-foot umbrella stand. Wetherell, his son Ian, Maurice Chambers and the model-maker Christian Spurling built the creature from a toy submarine topped with wood putty. Spurling confessed in 1994, aged 93, shortly before his death.
1937 - The Night Climbers of Cambridge. Cambridge students developed a clandestine tradition of scaling college buildings and chapels at night, frequently leaving objects on unreachable pinnacles. 'The Night Climbers of Cambridge' was published in 1937 under the pseudonym Whipplesnaith and documented the practice with photographs. The tradition is the direct ancestor of the Senate House roof stunts.
1938-10-30 - Correction: the War of the Worlds 'mass panic' did not happen. The popular image of millions fleeing their homes is not supported by the evidence. A C. E. Hooper survey of 5,000 households found roughly 2 percent were listening to the drama at all. Media historian W. Joseph Campbell concluded in 2003 that the panic and mass hysteria 'did not occur on anything approaching a nationwide dimension', and Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow found the supposed panic 'so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast'. Newspapers, then losing advertising to radio, amplified scattered reports of confusion to discredit the rival medium.
1938-10-30 - The War of the Worlds broadcast. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel on CBS at 8pm Eastern on 30 October 1938, staged as a sequence of news bulletins reporting a Martian landing at Grovers Mill, New Jersey.
1939 - Correction: the Great Wall hoax did not cause the Boxer Rebellion. In 1939 the Denver songwriter Harry Lee Wilber claimed in the North American Review that the 1899 fake story had been reprinted in China and provoked the Boxer Rebellion. This is a hoax about a hoax. Boxer activity had already intensified in March 1899, before the article was written, and no Chinese source connects the two. The embellishment is still widely repeated as fact.
1941 - Vichy France arrests 13 over a 'Communist April Fool plot'. In 1941 the Vichy government arrested thirteen people over what it described as a Communist April Fool plot to rename streets. The episode is a striking documented instance of an authoritarian state treating an April Fools' prank as subversion, and of the custom persisting under occupation.
1944-06 - The Ern Malley hoax. The conservative poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart invented a dead mechanic-poet, Ernest Lalor Malley, and wrote seventeen poems in a single afternoon in 1943 by splicing lines from whatever books were at hand, intending to expose modernist credulity. Max Harris published them in the Autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins, and the hoax was revealed in the press within weeks. Harris was then prosecuted for obscenity in South Australia and fined £5; Angry Penguins folded in 1946. The poems are now widely anthologised on their own merits.
1946-11-21 - Vernon Sullivan - J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (Boris Vian). Boris Vian wrote the novel in about fifteen days in August 1946 and published it through Éditions du Scorpion as his own translation of a hardboiled American novel by 'Vernon Sullivan', a Black author supposedly unpublishable in the United States. A morality group sued in February 1947; Vian publicly admitted authorship in November 1948 and the book was banned in 1949. Over 110,000 copies sold. NOTE: English Wikipedia gives 1947; fr.wikipedia gives the exact publication date of 21 November 1946, used here as the earliest verified date.
1947-06-28 - Allen Funt's Candid Microphone reaches radio. Allen Funt's Candid Microphone debuted on ABC radio, recording ordinary people's unguarded reactions to contrived situations without their knowledge. The format was a direct ancestor of every hidden-camera show that followed, establishing both the technique and the ethical convention of securing consent before broadcast. It ran until September 1948, by which point Funt was already moving the idea to television.
1948-08-10 - Candid Camera arrives on television. Allen Funt brought the format to ABC television, still under the Candid Microphone title, before moving to NBC in autumn 1949 where it was renamed Candid Camera. Funt built trick props for the purpose, including desks with spring-loaded drawers and cars with hidden fuel tanks, and interleaved the stunts with straight interviews of ordinary people. It became one of the longest-running formats in American television and the template for hidden-camera comedy worldwide.
1949-02-12 - Radio Quito's War of the Worlds - the deadliest media hoax in Latin America. On the night of 12 February 1949 Radio Quito broadcast a localised adaptation of The War of the Worlds staged as live news bulletins, conceived by artistic director Leonardo Páez. Martians were reported landing at Cotocollao and a famous radio personality was vaporised on air; police and firefighters were dispatched. When the deception was revealed, a mob burned the downtown building housing both the station and the newspaper El Comercio. At least five people died, including the station's pianist and violinist. Radio Quito was closed for two years; Páez was acquitted but went into exile.
1949-02-12 - Radio Quito's War of the Worlds riot. Radio Quito broadcast a Spanish-language adaptation of The War of the Worlds staged as breaking news bulletins interrupting a music programme, announcing that Ecuador was under Martian attack. Listeners believed it; when the station admitted the deception, the panic turned to fury and a crowd burned down the building, which also housed the newspaper El Comercio. At least six people were killed. It is the clearest case of a broadcast hoax producing lethal consequences. Death-toll figures vary between six and twenty across sources; at least six is the conservative figure. This, not the 1938 Welles broadcast, is the War of the Worlds adaptation that actually killed people.
1950 - Kukeri (кукери) - Bulgarian mumming. Recurring Bulgarian winter ritual mumming in which masked figures in animal skins and clanging bells go house to house to scare away evil and invoke abundance; in western Bulgaria they are called survakari or babugeri. Origins are often linked to Thracian Dionysian rites but are, in scholars' words, 'too far back to really know'. The year given is the earliest systematic ethnographic study period (from the late 1950s, notably by Petar Petrov), not an origin date.
1953-04-01 - Iceland's first media aprílgabb - the flying bus to Akranes. The first April Fools' hoax in Icelandic media appeared on the back page of Morgunblaðið on 1 April 1953, claiming a new type of aeroplane, shaped like a bus but with wings and a tail, would carry passengers between Reykjavík and Akranes, illustrated with a faked photograph. Many readers contacted the paper asking when scheduled flights would begin. The hoax was revealed the following day.
1953-06 - Piltdown Man exposed as a forgery. Kenneth Oakley, Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and Joseph Weiner demonstrated that the Piltdown skull, hailed since 1912 as the missing link, was a modern human cranium combined with an orangutan jaw whose teeth had been filed down and stained. Fluorine absorption dating showed the mandible contained far less fluorine than the skull. Time magazine carried the evidence in November 1953 and Piltdown vanished from the evolutionary charts almost overnight, after 41 years. The forger's identity was disputed for decades, with suspects including Arthur Conan Doyle and Teilhard de Chardin. An eight-year review reported in 2016 pinned it on Charles Dawson alone, matching a tooth he 'found' in 1915 to the same jaw.
1957-04-01 - BBC Panorama's spaghetti harvest. BBC's flagship current-affairs programme Panorama aired a three-minute film showing a Swiss family in Ticino picking strands of spaghetti from trees, narrated in earnest by Richard Dimbleby. Cameraman Charles de Jaeger originated the idea and editor Michael Peacock funded it on a budget of about GBP 100; the 'harvest' was filmed at a pasta factory in St Albans and at a hotel in Switzerland. Around eight million people watched at a time when spaghetti was an exotic tinned novelty in Britain. Hundreds rang the BBC asking how to grow their own, and were told to place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best. Popularly remembered as fooling the whole nation; the number of genuine inquiries was substantial but far smaller than the legend implies.
1957-04-01 - Swiss spaghetti harvest - BBC Panorama. On 1 April 1957 the BBC's Panorama broadcast a three-minute report, narrated by the trusted Richard Dimbleby, showing a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from trees. It was filmed in Ticino, at a hotel in Castagnola and a pasta factory in St Albans. The idea came from cameraman Charles de Jaeger, who recalled teachers teasing his Austrian schoolmates that they believed spaghetti grew on trees. Around eight million watched and hundreds phoned the BBC, some asking how to grow their own spaghetti tree.
1958-04-01 - Polygoon's South Limburg cave-system hoax. In 1958 the Dutch newsreel producer Polygoon ran an April Fools' item about a newly discovered underground cave system in South Limburg. Journalists travelled from across the country to see the discovery. It is one of the earliest documented Dutch broadcast-media April hoaxes.
1958-06-08 - An Austin Seven on the Senate House roof. Cambridge woke to find a battered Austin Seven van perched on the apex of the Senate House roof. About a dozen engineering students from Gonville & Caius had towed the derelict from Harston, stripped its engine and rear axle to lighten it, and winched it up overnight with a derrick and steel rope borrowed from the gliding club, using a plank bridge across the Senate House Leap. After five days the police, fire brigade and Civil Defence gave up and cut the van into six pieces with oxy-acetylene torches to lower it. The perpetrators stayed anonymous until a fiftieth-anniversary reunion in 2008.
1959-05-27 - Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. Alan Abel launched SINA on NBC's Today show, a straight-faced campaign to clothe naked animals under the slogan 'a nude horse is a rude horse'. Actor Buck Henry fronted it as the organisation's president G. Clifford Prout and carried the act onto CBS Evening News in August 1962. The hoax ran for years, at one point staging a White House protest demanding trousers for Jackie Kennedy's horses, and is a founding text of the modern media prank.
1960-04-01 - Dutch TV: the Leaning Tower of Pisa has collapsed. On 1 April 1960 the Dutch television news announced that the Leaning Tower of Pisa had fallen over. The report drew a large volume of shocked and grieving reactions from viewers, and is remembered as one of the best-known Dutch April Fools' hoaxes of the broadcast era.
1960-04-01 - Sorø Lake drained - Folketidende aprilsnar. On 1 April 1960 the Danish regional newspaper Folketidende reported that Sorø Lake had been drained after pranksters removed the plug from the lake bottom. Curious sightseers travelled to Sorø from across the region. The hoax was the work of journalist Holmgaard and photographer Ellen Skovmand, and is among the best known in Danish press history.
1961-01-02 - Caltech hijacks the Rose Bowl card stunt. During the Rose Bowl between Washington and Minnesota, the Washington cheering section's card stunt was rewritten by fourteen Caltech students. Led by 19-year-old Lyn Hardy, who posed as a high-school reporter to learn the plan, they entered the cheerleaders' quarters, reprinted and hand-altered all 2,232 instruction sheets, and swapped them back on New Year's Eve. On the day, a husky turned into a beaver, one word appeared reversed, and the fourteenth image spelled CALTECH in block letters before an estimated 30 million NBC viewers.
1961 - 'Vorsicht, Kamera' - hidden-camera pranks reach German TV. The hidden-camera prank format arrived on German television in 1961 with WDR's 'Vorsicht, Kamera', presented by Chris Howland, adapted from the American Candid Camera created by Allen Funt. It established the template later developed into Germany's dominant prank show, 'Verstehen Sie Spaß?'.
1962-04-01 - The Easter Island statue washed ashore at Zandvoort. On 1 April 1962 the sculptor Edo van Tetterode, working with the Dutch broadcaster KRO, had a mock Easter Island moai, nicknamed 'de Loeres', appear washed up on the beach at Zandvoort. Crowds came to see the supposed archaeological find. Van Tetterode subsequently established a prize for the best Dutch April Fools' hoax.
1962-04-01 - Instant colour TV via a nylon stocking - SVT hoax. On 1 April 1962, when Sveriges Television was Sweden's only channel and broadcast solely in black and white, technical expert Kjell Stensson appeared on 'Hänt i veckan' and explained that viewers could obtain colour by stretching a nylon stocking over the screen, invoking the prismatic nature of light. Stensson was a genuine technician and the broadcaster's technical chief, which lent authority. Many households cut up their stockings. Regular colour broadcasts did not begin in Sweden until 1 April 1970.
1962-04-01 - Sweden's instant colour television. SVT, then Sweden's only channel and broadcasting in black and white, presented its technical expert Kjell Stensson explaining that a nylon stocking stretched over the screen would refract the picture into colour. He opened with genuine-sounding material on the prismatic nature of light and double-slit interference, then told viewers to tape a stocking to the glass and move their heads to catch the full spectrum. Thousands complied. Sweden did not actually begin regular colour transmission until 1970.
1964-04-01 - Le déplacement de la Tour Eiffel (RTF, Journal de Paris). On RTF's Journal de Paris, journalist Henri Di Donna interviewed an 'engineer' at the foot of the Eiffel Tower about plans to relocate the monument to make way for a grand municipal stadium, using visual effects to illustrate the move. Di Donna then played a tour guide misinforming credulous tourists. The INA catalogue record explicitly states the piece was made for 1 April. NOTE: this hoax is widely miscited online as 1979 or 1986, and variously attributed to the Seine destabilising the tower or to Disney buying it for Marne-la-Vallée; the INA primary record gives 1964 and a stadium.
1964 - La tour Eiffel déplacée - Le Parisien libéré. The print counterpart to the televised hoax: Le Parisien libéré reported the Eiffel Tower would be relocated because of structural deterioration and prohibitive upkeep costs, a story RTF then carried in its Journal de Paris. It caused genuine public alarm and was picked up internationally. RTBF notes an antecedent, in the 1950s France Soir announced the tower would be dismantled and lent to Greece.
1965 - The Vinland Map is published as pre-Columbian. Yale University Press published the Vinland Map as a 15th-century document showing Norse knowledge of North America before Columbus. Analyses over the following decades found modern titanium compounds in the ink, and in 2021 Yale announced the map was a 20th-century forgery. It was believed for over fifty years, partly because it told scholars something they wanted to be true.
1966-12-23 - Jára Cimrman - a national hoax genius invented on Czech radio. Jára Cimrman, a fictional Czech polymath presented as a forgotten universal genius, first appeared on the radio programme 'Nealkoholická vinárna U Pavouka' on 23 December 1966, created by Zdeněk Svěrák and Jiří Šebánek. The mystification worked: some listeners believed it, and some demanded the deceivers be punished. Setting him in the Austro-Hungarian era let the creators slip indirect satire of the communist regime past the censors. In 2005 he won a public vote for 'The Greatest Czech' and was disqualified for being fictional.
1968 - The Mussolini diaries forgery. In 1968 The Sunday Times agreed to pay £250,000 for what were presented as Benito Mussolini's private diaries, handing over £60,000 before the documents were shown to be forgeries. They had been manufactured by an Italian mother and daughter, Amalia and Rosa Panvini. The episode is the direct antecedent of the 1983 Hitler Diaries, in which the same newspaper group was deceived again by Konrad Kujau's forgeries.
1969-04-01 - Detecting 'zwartkijkers' - the aluminium foil hoax. On 1 April 1969 the Dutch television news announced a nationwide operation to track down 'zwartkijkers', people who had not paid their TV licence, using inspectors with scanners. Asked whether anything could defeat them, an inspector remarked he could not imagine anyone wrapping their television in aluminium foil. Shops sold out of foil within hours the next day. NOTE: several aggregators date this 1971; the Dutch history programme Andere Tijden dates its own archive footage to 1 April 1969.
1971-06-07 - The Tasaday announced as a Stone Age tribe. Manuel Elizalde, head of the Philippine government agency PANAMIN, announced the discovery of the Tasaday, a cave-dwelling group in Mindanao presented as having lived in total isolation since the Stone Age. National Geographic and the world's press covered them extensively, while Elizalde restricted access with armed guards. After Marcos fell in 1986, the Swiss journalist Oswald Iten found the caves deserted and reported that neighbouring tribespeople had been paid to perform primitiveness. Usually filed as a straightforward hoax, but linguistic work by Lawrence Reid found the group genuine and genuinely unfamiliar with agriculture. The exaggeration was the timescale: their isolation probably lasted a few generations, perhaps 150 years, not millennia.
1973 - Orson Welles's F for Fake. Welles's essay film premiered at the San Sebastian festival, weaving together the art forger Elmyr de Hory, the Howard Hughes biography hoaxer Clifford Irving, and Welles's own history of deception including the War of the Worlds broadcast. He opens by promising that everything in the next hour will be true, then admits after the hour has elapsed that the final passage, a story about Oja Kodar and Picasso, was invented. It is the definitive film about the mechanics of the hoax, and was not released in the United States until 1976.
1974 - Le poisson d'avril à la RTBF - canular annuel récurrent. Belgian public broadcaster RTBF has run televised April 1st hoaxes for four decades; this is a recurring annual practice, not a single event. The earliest documented in RTBF's own retrospective is 1974: the National Bank of Belgium would issue two separate currencies, a Walloon franc and a Flemish franc, the same communitarian anxiety Bye Bye Belgium exploited 32 years later. Later editions include the invented sport of 'kayak à pattes' (1984) and genetically modified carnivorous trout at Mirwart (2008).
1975 - Romain Gary / Émile Ajar - le double Goncourt. Gary won the Prix Goncourt in 1956 for Les Racines du ciel, then again in 1975 for La Vie devant soi under the name Émile Ajar, a prize awarded to an author only once. His cousin's son Paul Pavlowitch impersonated Ajar publicly for years. Gary shot himself on 2 December 1980, naming himself as Ajar in his suicide note; the posthumous Vie et mort d'Émile Ajar confirmed the deception.
1976-04-01 - Patrick Moore's Jovian-Plutonian gravity effect. On BBC Radio 2, the astronomer Patrick Moore announced that at 9:47 that morning Jupiter would pass behind Pluto, briefly weakening Earth's gravity, and that anyone who jumped at the exact moment would feel themselves float. Hundreds rang in immediately afterwards to report the sensation; one caller said she and eleven friends had been wafted from their chairs and orbited gently around the room. The joke's buried punchline was that Pluto is far too small for any such alignment to matter.
1976 - Joey Skaggs opens a Cathouse for Dogs. Skaggs advertised a canine brothel in The Village Voice, offering 'a savage selection of hot bitches' for USD 50, and supplied footage to WABC-TV. The station ran it, and the material was folded into a documentary, It's A Dog's Life, which went on to win an Emmy. Animal-welfare groups protested, the ASPCA and the New York Attorney General investigated, and Skaggs was subpoenaed. The station never broadcast a correction after he revealed the whole thing was staged. An Emmy-winning documentary incorporated the fabricated footage and the broadcaster issued no retraction, which is the point Skaggs was making about how news verifies itself.
1976 - The Celebrity Sperm Bank auction. Working under the alias Giuseppe Scaggoli, Skaggs announced an auction of sperm supposedly donated by rock stars including Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan and John Lennon. He staged the event with actors and then claimed the samples had been stolen, generating a second wave of coverage from the same outlets that had reported the first.
1977-04-01 - The Guardian invents San Serriffe. The Guardian published a seven-page travel supplement on the tenth anniversary of independence of San Serriffe, a fictional Indian Ocean republic, laid out exactly like the paper's real country reviews. Every name was a printing pun: the islands Upper and Lower Caisse, the capital Bodoni, the leader General Pica, and an archipelago shaped like a semicolon. Hundreds of readers wrote in describing holidays there, and travel agents and airlines complained about customers who refused to accept the place did not exist. It is routinely ranked among the most successful hoaxes of the twentieth century.
1979-10-31 - A plastic cow on the Great Dome. A lifesize plastic cow appeared on top of MIT's Great Dome on Halloween, one of the earliest of the dome hacks that would become the institute's signature form. The cow was later preserved and displayed in the Stata Center. Dome hacks depend on students reaching a roof that is deliberately hard to access, and the tradition has its own ethic requiring that nothing be damaged.
1980-01-02 - Alan Abel fakes his own death. Abel staged his own death near the Sundance ski lodge in Utah, complete with a grieving accomplice, and The New York Times ran his obituary on 2 January 1980. It became the first obituary the paper ever retracted. Abel appeared at a press conference the next day to announce that reports of his demise had been grossly exaggerated.
1980-01-31 - 'Verstehen Sie Spaß?' - first broadcast. Germany's best-known hidden-camera prank show first aired on 31 January 1980 as a 30-minute ARD programme, co-produced by SDR and NDR. It was created and presented by the Swiss broadcaster Kurt Felix, who developed it from hidden-camera segments in his Swiss show Teleboy. Felix hosted for its first ten years and expanded it into a major Saturday-evening show in 1983.
1980-04-01 - Johannesburg Star's rat-fur coats hoax. On 1 April 1980 the Johannesburg Star reported that police had raided a sewer where 'ratters' were breeding a special strain of imported Irish rats and selling the pelts as mink, seal skin and other furs. As a result of the story, furriers were besieged with calls from worried customers. It is the best-documented South African April Fools' press hoax of the apartheid era.
1980-04-01 - TV-Avisen's one-legged sparrow banknotes. On 1 April 1980 Danish television news TV-Avisen reported that new banknotes featured sparrows, and that forgeries could be identified because the counterfeit birds had only one leg instead of two. From 1980 DR's television news made the annual aprilsnar a fixture of the Danish broadcast calendar.
1980-04-01 - Big Ben goes digital. The BBC's overseas service reported that Big Ben was to be modernised with a digital readout, its chimes replaced by beeps, and offered the four clock hands to the first listeners who wrote in. A Japanese seaman in the mid-Atlantic radioed the station to claim one. The response was mostly anger rather than amusement; Tony Lightley of the overseas service conceded that surprisingly few people thought it was funny.
1981-04-01 - Le château de Versailles transformé en HLM (Antenne 2, Journal de 20H). Antenne 2's evening news ran a report on plans to convert the north wing of the château de Versailles into social housing (HLM). It staged protests outside the château, an interview with 'architect M. Heymann', and statements from a château defence committee spokesman and a prospective tenant, intercut with panoramas of the grounds. The INA record explicitly carries the tag '[poisson d'avril]'.
1981 - Els Enfarinats - the flour-fight mock coup, revived. Els Enfarinats ceased at the end of the 1950s and was recovered in 1981, reconfigured around the flour, egg and firecracker battle staged today. Every 28 December participants in mock military dress stage a coup d'état, seizing the mayor's office at 8am under the slogan 'Nova Justícia' and imposing absurd laws, while a rival faction fights to restore order. Fines are donated to charity. 'Enfarinats' is Valencian for 'the floured ones'. A recurring annual custom.
1981-09-26 - Game for a Laugh begins on ITV. ITV launched Game for a Laugh with Jeremy Beadle, Matthew Kelly, Henry Kelly and Sarah Kennedy, mixing studio games such as the Dunk Tank and the Pie Chair with elaborate set-ups sprung on members of the public. It ran to November 1985 across 56 episodes and made Beadle a household name, leading directly to Beadle's About. It reintroduced the hidden-camera prank to British prime time after a long absence.
1982 - MIT's balloon erupts at the Harvard-Yale game. During the Harvard-Yale football game, a large weather balloon painted with MIT inflated out of the ground at the 50-yard line and burst, an intervention in a rivalry MIT was not part of. The Boston Herald summarised the result as 'MIT 1, Harvard-Yale 0'. It is the classic example of the MIT hack as a piece of public theatre staged on someone else's stage.
1983-04-22 - The Hitler Diaries. The German magazine Stern announced it had acquired sixty volumes of Adolf Hitler's private diaries, paying 9.3 million Deutsche Marks through the reporter Gerd Heidemann. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper authenticated them in The Times on 23 April, then reversed himself at a press conference two days later. Forensic analysis on 6 May found modern ink, paper and polyester bindings postdating 1953. The forger Konrad Kujau and Heidemann were both jailed in 1985.
1983-04-25 - The Hitler Diaries (Hitler-Tagebücher). On 22 April 1983 the German magazine Stern announced it had acquired Hitler's personal diaries covering 1932-1945, presenting the scoop at a press conference on 25 April. The 60 volumes had been forged between 1981 and 1983 by Konrad Kujau, a Stuttgart dealer in Nazi memorabilia, and brokered by Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann, who embezzled roughly half the payments. On 6 May 1983 the Bundesarchiv declared them crude forgeries, the paper and ink being postwar. Both men were convicted in July 1985.
1985-04-01 - Programme à la carte sur Minitel - la « télévision connectée » (FR3 Caen). FR3's regional news Normandie soir reported a new on-demand television service delivered to viewers via Minitel, billed as the 'mariage de l'audiovisuel et de la télématique'. Journalist Rémi Roche's piece illustrated the 'connected television' process and included an interview with Robert Roland; INA states the newsroom concocted it as an April Fools joke.
1986-05-02 - 風雲!たけし城 (Takeshi's Castle). TBS obstacle-course game show first broadcast on 2 May 1986, starring Takeshi Kitano as a count whose castle contestants must storm through a gauntlet of physical challenges. It ran to 19 October 1990 across 133 episodes plus four specials. Redubbed for foreign markets it became a global cult hit and seeded an entire genre of physical-endurance game shows abroad.
1986 - Israel Radio reports the death of Nabih Berri. In 1986 an Israeli army intelligence officer planted a false report on Israel Radio that Nabih Berri, leader of the Shi'ite Amal movement in Lebanon, had been assassinated. The hoax triggered immediate regional tension and was picked up by Lebanese state radio before both stations retracted. Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin announced the unnamed officer would face court martial. It is a documented case of an April Fools' prank inside a military intelligence service reaching international news.
1986 - The Fat Squad diet commandos. As 'Joe Bones', Skaggs marketed a squad of enforcers who would be hired to physically stop clients from breaking their diets. Good Morning America ran a segment featuring his commandos standing guard over a refrigerator. The hoax played on the American diet industry's appetite for ever more extreme propositions and on television's willingness to book a vivid visual without checking it.
1986-11-22 - Beadle's About begins on ITV. Jeremy Beadle's hidden-camera show launched on ITV, building elaborate practical jokes around members of the public: cars swapped and apparently destroyed, unauthorised building work appearing beside people's homes, and in one Dorset stunt a woman named Janet Elford convinced that aliens had landed in her garden. At its peak it drew around 15 million viewers. It ran until 1996 and made Beadle one of the most recognised and most disliked faces on British television.
1987-04-01 - Bergens Tidende's confiscated smuggled wine hoax. On 1 April 1987 the Norwegian newspaper Bergens Tidende reported that Vinmonopolet would distribute 10,000 litres of confiscated smuggled wine. By opening time about 200 people had queued outside the outlet carrying bottles and buckets. It deliberately revived the format of Aftenposten's celebrated 1950 hoax.
1987 - Never Gonna Give You Up (the payload itself). Rick Astley's debut single, produced by Stock Aitken Waterman, topped charts in 25 countries in 1987. The official music video is the artifact every rickroll actually delivers. Its visual specificity is central to the joke: the meme works because the payoff is recognisable within two seconds of the intro.
1987 - Caltech alters the Hollywood sign to read CALTECH. Caltech students disguised the Hollywood sign so that it read 'CALTECH', using fabric to change the letters. The stunt belongs to a long tradition of alterations to the sign, which has also been made to read 'HOLLYWEED' and other slogans.
1987 - El Obispillo revived at Burgos Cathedral. The obispillo tradition was re-established in Burgos in 1987 and has been celebrated annually since. A boy from the cathedral choir symbolically assumes the role of bishop for a day, staging a ritual inversion intended to dramatise the exaltation of the lowly. Also observed in Palencia, León and Murcia. A recurring annual custom; 1987 is the revival year, not the origin.
1988-04-01 - Izvestia signs Maradona to Spartak Moscow. On 1 April 1988 the Soviet newspaper Izvestia reported that Moscow Spartak was negotiating with Diego Maradona, then the world's most famous footballer, for a $6 million transfer within a year. It is a notable late-Soviet press April Fools' hoax, published as glasnost loosened editorial constraints.
1989-03-23 - Cold fusion announced in Utah. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced at a University of Utah press conference that they had produced nuclear fusion in a tabletop electrochemical cell at room temperature. The university pushed the announcement forward to establish priority, bypassing the normal route of publication and peer review. Replications failed worldwide, and by 1 May the American Physical Society heard eight of nine leading speakers declare the claim dead. Often grouped with deliberate scientific hoaxes, but the evidence points to experimental error and calorimetry mistakes rather than fraud. Fleischmann and Pons believed their results and never retracted.
1989 - 罰ゲーム (batsu game) penalty format established. The batsu game, a punishment the loser of a bet must undergo, began on Gaki no Tsukai in 1989, arising from the hosts' on-air wager about the outcome of the 40th NHK Kōhaku Uta Gassen. Early penalties were surreal rather than physical: the loser might be made to appear on a morning show, fetch mineral water from France, or fly to New York to meet Ryuichi Sakamoto. Before 2003 the penalties were mostly confined to the Downtown pair.
1989-10-03 - ダウンタウンのガキの使いやあらへんで!! first broadcast. Nippon TV's long-running variety show hosted by the owarai duo Downtown (Hitoshi Matsumoto and Masatoshi Hamada) first aired late on 3 October 1989. It later added Hōsei Tsukitei and the duo Cocorico as co-hosts and reached its 1,000th episode on 18 April 2010. It became the single most influential vehicle for the 罰ゲーム (batsu game) penalty format in Japanese television.
1990 - Hair Today, Ltd. sells cadaver scalp transplants. Skaggs promoted a company offering scalp transplants harvested from donor cadavers, sending press materials to journalists who reported it. The New York Department of Consumer Affairs subpoenaed the non-existent business. It is one of several Skaggs projects designed to demonstrate how a plausible letterhead and a phone number are sufficient to enter the news cycle.
1991 - Doug and Dave confess to the crop circles. Doug Bower and Dave Chorley told the press they had begun making crop circles in 1978 using nothing but a plank of wood, a length of rope and a baseball cap fitted with a wire sighting loop. They claimed responsibility for every circle made before 1987 and for more than 200 between 1978 and 1991. In a demonstration staged for journalists, the cereologist Pat Delgado inspected a formation they had just made and pronounced it genuine before the trick was revealed. The confession did not end the phenomenon. Circles multiplied worldwide afterwards as others copied the method, and Bower and Chorley never claimed the roughly 1,000 other formations of the period.
1992-04-01 - Moskovskaya Pravda's 'March 32nd' second metro. On 1 April 1992 Moskovskaya Pravda announced plans for a second Moscow subway system 'in the interests of competition', published in a fake edition dated March 32nd. The joke landed in the first months after the Soviet collapse, satirising the sudden arrival of market competition as an explanation for everything.
1992-06 - Portofess, the confessional on a tricycle. As Father Anthony Joseph, Skaggs pedalled a portable confessional booth mounted on a tricycle to the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden, offering 'religion on the move for people on the go'. News crews covering the convention filmed and interviewed him as a genuine curiosity. It remains one of his most photographed interventions.
1992-10-31 - Ghostwatch panics BBC1. BBC1 broadcast Ghostwatch on Halloween night, a scripted drama recorded weeks earlier but presented as a live investigation into a haunted house in Northolt. Real broadcasters played themselves: Michael Parkinson anchored in-studio with Sarah Greene, Mike Smith and Craig Charles on location. The BBC switchboard logged roughly a million calls, and the Broadcasting Standards Commission later ruled the programme excessively distressing for cultivating a sense of menace. The BBC did not repeat it on British television for a decade. An 18-year-old viewer, Martin Denham, died by suicide five days later and his family's complaint reached the BSC via judicial review. A persistent rumour that Sarah Greene trailed the show on the children's programme Going Live! is false; researchers found no such promotion in the episodes.
1993 - The Barbie Liberation Organization swaps voice boxes. The Barbie Liberation Organization, sponsored by RTMark, bought talking Teen Talk Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls, surgically swapped their voice boxes, and returned them to store shelves in an action they called 'shopgiving'. Between 300 and 500 dolls were altered. On Christmas Day 1993 children found Barbies growling 'Dead men tell no lies' and G.I. Joes chirping 'I love to shop with you'. The group published instructions encouraging others to replicate the surgery.
1994-04-01 - RATP renames three Paris metro stations. On 1 April 1994 the Paris transport authority RATP renamed three metro stations for 24 hours, with themed giveaways at each. It is an unusual case of a state transport operator staging an official poisson d'avril, and established a recurring RATP habit of April 1st station-name jokes still practised today.
1994-05-09 - A police car on MIT's Great Dome. Students placed what appeared to be an MIT Campus Police cruiser on top of the Great Dome of Building 10. It was a gutted, junked Chevrolet Cavalier painted in force livery, carrying the licence plate IHTFP and a dummy officer at the wheel, with a box of doughnuts on the roof. It remains the best-known hack in MIT's tradition and is the one most often reproduced in the press.
1995-04-01 - 'Riesensauerei von Patting' - Süddeutsche Zeitung's turbo-pig hoax. On 1 April 1995 the Süddeutsche Zeitung published a report headed 'Riesensauerei von Patting' claiming that genetically modified 'Turboschweine' had been bred with extra cutlets. Several television broadcasters dispatched camera crews to Deggendorf to investigate the supposed scandal before the hoax was revealed. It is cited in German press retrospectives as a classic April hoax satirising biotechnology anxieties.
1995-09-21 - The Hindu milk miracle - Ganesha statues 'drinking' milk. On 21 September 1995 statues of Ganesha across India and the Hindu diaspora appeared to drink milk offered on spoons, in one of the largest claimed mass-miracle events in modern history; milk sold out within hours. It began before dawn on 20 September at a temple in southern New Delhi and spread to Malaysia, Europe, America, Kenya and Fiji. Scientists attributed it to capillary action and surface tension drawing milk out of the spoon and down the porous statue.
1996-04-01 - Taco Bell buys the Liberty Bell. Taco Bell took full-page advertisements in six major American newspapers announcing it had purchased the Liberty Bell to help reduce the national debt, and would rename it the Taco Liberty Bell. Thousands of people telephoned the company and the National Park Service before the joke was admitted at noon. White House press secretary Mike McCurry played along, saying the Lincoln Memorial had been sold to Ford and would become the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial. The stunt cost about USD 300,000 and generated an estimated USD 25 million in coverage, with sales up more than a million dollars over two days.
1996-04-01 - ITAR-TASS revives the Warsaw Pact. In 1996 the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS reported as an April Fools' story that the Russian parliament was debating whether to revive the Warsaw Pact. The report was immediately repeated by state news agencies in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria and broadcast on national radio in each country at least twice, causing widespread alarm before ITAR-TASS admitted the joke and apologised.
1996-06 - The Sokal affair. Physicist Alan Sokal submitted 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' to the cultural-studies journal Social Text, which published it in its Spring/Summer 1996 'Science Wars' issue. The paper argued that physical reality is at bottom a social and linguistic construct, and larded fashionable theory with claims Sokal knew to be nonsense. Three weeks later he revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca, igniting a decade of argument about rigour in the humanities. Often told as a failure of peer review, but Social Text did not practise academic peer review at the time and defended that policy. The target was a specific strand of cultural studies, not the humanities as a whole.
1996-12-28 - TVE: an entire fake newscast - Yeltsin born in Ronda. On 28 December 1996 Televisión Española broadcast a complete newscast composed entirely of false stories. The veteran foreign correspondent Rosa María Calaf reported that Boris Yeltsin was 'neither Russian nor named Boris' but born in Ronda, Andalusia; another item announced that Bill Clinton would be sent into space aboard a shuttle named 'Macarena'. It is the most elaborate documented Spanish television inocentada, in that the hoax was the whole bulletin rather than a single planted item.
1997-01-29 - Brass Eye begins on Channel 4. Chris Morris's Brass Eye parodied current-affairs television so exactly that it induced public figures to endorse invented causes on camera. In the drugs episode, Bernard Manning and Noel Edmonds warned viewers about a fictitious drug called 'cake', and the MP David Amess was persuaded to record a warning about it, later raising the substance in Parliament. The series established the celebrity-endorsement trap as a satirical form.
1998-04-01 - Burger King's left-handed Whopper. Burger King took a full-page advertisement in USA Today announcing a Left-Handed Whopper for the 32 million left-handed Americans, identical to the original but with all condiments rotated 180 degrees so the weight redistributed and toppings would not spill to the right. Thousands of customers came in the next day asking for one, and many others requested a right-handed version. It is the most cited example of a corporate April Fool that worked because the product logic sounded internally consistent.
1998 - Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf wins People's beauty poll. People magazine ran an online write-in poll ahead of its '50 Most Beautiful People' issue. Howard Stern told his radio listeners to write in Hank Nasiff Jr., a Stern Show regular. Hank finished first with roughly 230,000 votes, far ahead of Leonardo DiCaprio's ~14,500. It is the earliest well-documented mass hijacking of a corporate online poll.
1999 - Archaeoraptor is exposed as a composite fossil. National Geographic presented Archaeoraptor as a feathered dinosaur linking birds to theropods. It was a forgery assembled in China from the tail of one animal and the body of another, and the magazine retracted it. The underlying science was not wrong, feathered dinosaurs are real, which is what made a fake so easy to place.
1999 - The Great Dome becomes R2-D2. To mark the release of Star Wars: Episode I, MIT students covered the Great Dome in painted panels so that the building read as the head of the droid R2-D2 from a distance. The hack was timed to the film's opening and removed afterwards, in keeping with the convention that a hack must be reversible.
1999 - The Yes Men register gatt.org. Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno built a parody World Trade Organization site at gatt.org, closely imitating the real WTO's design. Because it read as official, organisers began sending genuine invitations to speak at conferences and on television, which the pair accepted in character. The accidental invitations turned a website parody into years of impersonation performances and defined the group's method. The impersonations were not planned. The site was built as satire and the speaking invitations arrived unsolicited because organisers mistook it for the real WTO.
1999 - MTV Bakra - Indian hidden-camera prank television. MTV Bakra, hosted by Cyrus Broacha, began in 1999 on MTV India and ran until 2009, becoming the defining Indian hidden-camera prank show. Modelled on Candid Camera, it played elaborate practical jokes on members of the public and on celebrities; 'bakra' is Hindi for 'goat', colloquially the mark or dupe of a prank. The format made Broacha a household name and spawned numerous Indian imitators.
2000-01-14 - Trigger Happy TV and the giant mobile phone. Dom Joly's Trigger Happy TV began on Channel 4, filmed surreptitiously by cameraman Sam Cadman. Its signature bit had Joly standing in a library, a funeral or some other hushed place, hoisting an absurdly oversized mobile phone and bellowing 'Hello?! Yeah, I'm in a library!'. Unusually for the genre, most of the comedy came from Joly humiliating himself rather than the public, and the show ran without a laugh track, scoring its sketches with melancholy instrumental music.
2000-10-01 - Jackass premieres on MTV. Created by Jeff Tremaine, Spike Jonze and Johnny Knoxville, Jackass combined pranks on the public with self-inflicted stunts filmed on consumer cameras. It ran three seasons and 25 episodes before ending in August 2001 amid pressure over imitative injuries among teenage viewers. Its aesthetic, cheap cameras and no narrative, shaped a generation of stunt and prank video that migrated to the internet.
2001-04-01 - Sunday Observer: the return of Idi Amin. On 1 April 2001 the Tanzanian newspaper Sunday Observer published a false report that the exiled former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin had been sighted in Tabora. Amin was in fact living in Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2003. The hoax is a notable East African instance of an April Fools' story trading on genuine regional political anxiety.
2001-04-01 - BT's Copenhagen metro on Rådhuspladsen. On 1 April 2001 the Danish tabloid BT published a fabricated photograph of a metro train standing on Rådhuspladsen in central Copenhagen, produced by angling a photograph of a Stockholm underground train into the Copenhagen square. It played on the genuine and much-delayed construction of the Copenhagen Metro, whose first section opened in October 2002.
2001 - Monkey-man of Delhi (कला बंदर, 'Kala Bandar'). In May 2001 reports spread through New Delhi of a monkey-like creature attacking people at night, described as four feet tall and covered in black hair with a metal helmet, metal claws and glowing red eyes. Over 350 sightings were reported, around 60 involving injuries, and two people died falling from rooftops while fleeing. Police released artists' sketches but found no physical evidence; the episode is described as mass hysteria, and by mid-2002 teenagers were caught fabricating sightings in monkey costumes.
2001 - Gẹlẹdẹ - Yoruba satirical masquerade. A recurring Yoruba masked performance of Benin, Nigeria and Togo honouring the primordial mother and elderly women, whose performances 'convey an oral heritage that blends epic and lyric verses, which employ a good deal of irony and mockery, supported by satirical masks'. The Efe component is the vehicle of licensed social criticism, voicing things otherwise socially unacceptable. Proclaimed a UNESCO Masterpiece in 2001 and inscribed on the Representative List in 2008; the year is the UNESCO proclamation, as no earlier dated attestation was verifiable.
2001-07-26 - Brass Eye's Paedogeddon special. Channel 4 broadcast a Brass Eye special satirising media panic about paedophilia, delayed from 5 July because of recent child disappearances. It drew roughly 3,000 complaints, reportedly the most objected-to programme in British television history at that point, and was condemned by the Home Secretary David Blunkett and the minister for child protection Beverley Hughes. Several of the criticising commentators admitted to not having watched it.
2002-01-05 - The first No Pants Subway Ride. On 5 January 2002 Charlie Todd launched the No Pants Subway Ride with just seven participants removing their trousers on a single New York subway car, with a new pantless rider boarding at each consecutive stop. The event grew to more than 3,000 participants in New York alone and was replicated in over 60 cities across 25 countries. It became the longest-running recurring public prank of the internet era, predating YouTube by three years.
2002 - The Bogdanov affair. The brothers Igor and Grichka Bogdanov published theoretical-physics papers in peer-reviewed journals which many physicists judged to be meaningless. Unlike Sokal, the brothers appear to have been sincere, which turned the affair into an argument about whether referees in a highly specialised field can reliably distinguish deep work from nonsense. Often listed alongside the Sokal affair as a deliberate sting. The Bogdanovs were not hoaxing; they defended the work as genuine, which is what makes the episode awkward for peer review rather than a joke at its expense.
2002-10-25 - Jackass: The Movie takes pranks to cinemas. MTV Films and Paramount released Jackass: The Movie on 25 October 2002, directed by Jeff Tremaine. It grossed $79.5 million worldwide against a small budget. The film proved that low-budget prank and stunt footage could carry a theatrical release, a commercial validation that later underwrote YouTube prankster film deals.
2003-03-17 - Punk'd premieres on MTV. Ashton Kutcher's Punk'd debuted on MTV, turning the hidden-camera format on celebrities rather than the public. Early stunts convinced Justin Timberlake that agents were seizing his home over unpaid taxes and staged the theft of Frankie Muniz's Porsche. The original run continued to 2007 and made the show's title a verb.
2003-05-31 - Český sen (Czech Dream) - the fake hypermarket. Film students Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda mounted a full advertising campaign for a fictitious hypermarket called Český sen, promising absurdly low prices. On 31 May 2003 more than 3,000 shoppers walked across an empty plain in Prague's Letňany district toward what proved to be a canvas façade on scaffolding. The resulting 2004 documentary turned the stunt into a critique of advertising and post-communist consumerism.
2003 - Rozygrysh (Розыгрыш) - Russian celebrity prank show. Rozygrysh, launched on Channel One Russia in 2003 and fronted by presenter Valdis Pelšs, staged elaborate hidden-camera practical jokes on famous Russian personalities. It became the country's best-known celebrity prank format; Pelšs has said the show cost him his relationship with the singer Alla Pugacheva.
2003-07-27 - 絶対に笑ってはいけない - first 'no-laughing' batsu game. The first 'absolutely no laughing' batsu game, 絶対に笑ってはいけない温泉旅館一泊二日の旅, was broadcast on Gaki no Tsukai across 27 July to 17 August 2003. The format sends the cast into a themed scenario where any laughter is punished by a caning, and it grew out of a penalty segment aired on 18 May 2003. This was a summer segment within the regular programme, not yet the New Year's Eve special the series later became.
2004-04-01 - Gmail launches on April Fools' Day. Google announced Gmail on 1 April 2004, offering a gigabyte of free storage at a time when Hotmail gave users two megabytes. Because Google had spent four years publishing elaborate April Fools' hoaxes, and because the announcement was written in a jokey register, much of the press assumed it was another gag. The product was entirely real, producing an inversion in which the truth was disbelieved because of the date. Frequently listed as a Google April Fools' hoax. It was a genuine product launch that merely landed on 1 April; the same day Google separately ran a fake job posting for its Copernicus lunar research centre.
2004-11-20 - Yale makes Harvard spell WE SUCK. At the Harvard-Yale football game, Michael Kai and David Aulicino of Yale's class of 2005, helped by twenty classmates, dressed as a Harvard pep squad and handed crimson-and-white placards to the alumni section, telling them the cards would spell GO HARVARD. Raised together they read WE SUCK, visible to the players on the field. Harvard initially denied it had happened, so the Yale students registered harvardsucks.org and posted video of the whole operation. Most Harvard students never saw it. They were seated in a separate section and left the stadium unaware; the cards were held up by alumni.
2005-02-14 - YouTube is founded. YouTube was founded on 14 February 2005 by three former PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. The platform removed every barrier that had kept amateur video off the internet: no hosting costs, no encoding expertise, no distribution deal. Within five years it would host an entire economy of prank channels earning millions from advertising.
2005-04-23 - "Me at the zoo" - the first YouTube upload. On 23 April 2005 co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded a 19-second clip of himself at San Diego Zoo talking about elephants. It was the first video ever posted to YouTube. Its amateurish, unscripted, handheld quality set the aesthetic register that prank channels would work in for the next twenty years.
2005-12-09 - The Florence Cassez telemontaje - Mexico's staged live police raid. On 9 December 2005 Florence Cassez and Israel Vallarta were detained at the Las Chinitas ranch by federal police. The following morning Televisa and TV Azteca crews broadcast what audiences believed was a live raid freeing kidnapping victims. On 5 February 2006 police chief Genaro García Luna admitted the capture scenes had been reconstructed so news programmes could carry the operation 'live'. In January 2013 Mexico's Supreme Court ordered Cassez's immediate release, voiding her 60-year sentence because the televised montaje had tainted the criminal process.
2005-12-20 - Radio COPE impersonates Zapatero to prank Evo Morales. On 20 December 2005 the Spanish radio station COPE put through a prank call to Bolivia's newly elected president Evo Morales in which a comic impersonated Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero congratulating him. Morales believed it entirely and announced the supposed call at a press conference, forcing the Spanish government to deny it. Bolivia's foreign minister called it 'an offense that could disturb bilateral relations'; Spain's ambassador in La Paz delivered a formal apology, and the real Zapatero called Morales the following day.
2006 - The duckroll: 4chan's bait-and-switch prototype. 4chan founder Christopher 'moot' Poole installed a word filter replacing 'egg' with 'duck', turning 'eggroll' into 'duckroll'. Users posted deceptive links promising something interesting that instead delivered an image of a mallard duck fitted with truck-tire wheels. The earliest archived duckroll thread dates to December 2006. Every structural element of the rickroll is already present: the false promise, the anticlimactic payoff, the shared in-joke.
2006-12-13 - 'Bye Bye Belgium' - RTBF's Flemish secession hoax. On the evening of 13 December 2006 the French-language Belgian public broadcaster RTBF interrupted programming with a fake special news bulletin claiming the Flemish parliament had unilaterally declared independence, dissolving the Belgian state. It used interviews with real politicians, footage of flag-waving crowds and reports that the king had fled, with an intermittent caption reading 'Ceci n'est peut-être pas une fiction'. RTBF only announced it was fiction after about half an hour, by which time the story had reached the United States. Not an April hoax, but the most consequential broadcast hoax in Belgian history.
2007-04-01 - Google TiSP: broadband through your toilet. Google announced the Toilet Internet Service Provider, a free 8 Mbit/s broadband service delivered through municipal sewage lines. Users were instructed to drop a fibre-optic cable down their toilet and flush, after which 'Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers' would retrieve it in the sewer. The hoax came with full mock installation instructions and a support FAQ.
2007-05-15 - cotter548 uploads "RickRoll'D". YouTube user cotter548 uploaded the copy of 'Never Gonna Give You Up' titled "RickRoll'D" that became the canonical destination link for the prank. It accumulated close to 71 million views and served as the meme's default payload for years. YouTube blocked it in several countries including the United States on 17 July 2014.
2007 - PrankvsPrank begins with the cinnamon challenge. PrankvsPrank was established in 2007 when Jesse Wellens filmed Jennifer 'Jeana' Smith attempting the cinnamon challenge. The couple built the channel on escalating retaliatory pranks played on each other, inventing the couples-prank genre. USA Today rated them 'YouTube's best pranksters' in April 2013.
2007-06 - First rickroll: the fake GTA IV trailer. In May 2007 anticipation for the first Grand Theft Auto IV trailer overwhelmed Rockstar's servers, and a 4chan user posted what appeared to be a working mirror on the /v/ board. The link instead opened Rick Astley's 1987 music video. The prank spread within days and took its name by analogy with the existing duckroll. Note: the widely repeated 'Halo 3 origin' claim is unsubstantiated.
2007 - The Bicholim conflict, a war Wikipedia invented. A detailed Wikipedia article described the Bicholim conflict, a 17th-century war between the Portuguese and the Maratha Empire, complete with a peace treaty. It held Good Article status for five years before an editor established that no such war took place. It stands as the most-cited example of how long a well-formatted fabrication can survive in a reference work.
2007-11-07 - Jenkem drug panic. A user on the Totse message board posted a fabricated account, with staged photos, of getting high by inhaling gas from fermented human waste. The Collier County Sheriff's Office in Florida circulated an internal bulletin about the supposed drug, and by November 2007 the panic had reached national outlets including Fox News and ABC. The author had already confessed the hoax, saying he used flour, water, beer and Nutella. The DEA confirmed no verified cases in the United States.
2008-01-31 - Frozen Grand Central. Over 200 Improv Everywhere agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Terminal, through which more than 500,000 people pass daily. Poses ranged from tying a shoe to a couple caught mid-kiss to someone who had just dropped a stack of papers. It became the collective's most-watched video and was recreated by fans in around 100 cities worldwide.
2008-02-04 - FBI names "swatting" as a new phenomenon. The FBI published 'The New Phenomenon of Swatting', describing hoax 911 calls designed to trigger an armed police response at a victim's address. The bureau attributed the practice to phone-phreaking circles and noted the convicted offenders were motivated by bragging rights and ego rather than money. The term itself predates the notice, appearing on Urban Dictionary in December 2007.
2008-02-10 - Project Chanology rickrolls the Church of Scientology. Between 6,000 and 8,000 masked Anonymous protesters gathered outside Church of Scientology facilities in at least 90 cities worldwide, with live rickrolls performed in at least seven of them. Guinness World Records recognised the day as the largest coordinated rickroll protest. It marked the moment the prank crossed from message-board joke into offline political tactic.
2008-04-01 - Virgle: Google and Virgin colonise Mars. Google and Richard Branson's Virgin Group jointly announced Virgle Inc., a venture to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. The hoax featured videos from Branson, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, real NASA imagery and a '100 Year Plan'. Applicant questions included expertise in Guitar Hero II. Branson promoted it on The Late Late Show, fooling much of the wireless industry press.
2008-04-01 - YouTube rickrolls its own front page. For April Fools' Day 2008, YouTube redirected every featured video link on its front page to 'Never Gonna Give You Up'. Reports put the number of users caught at over seven million. It was the first time a major platform deployed the prank against its entire audience, effectively certifying rickrolling as mainstream internet culture.
2008-04-07 - The New York Mets rally-song vote. The Mets ran an online poll to choose an eighth-inning sing-along song for Shea Stadium and left a blank write-in field. Fark.com and other communities flooded it with 'Never Gonna Give You Up', and the team announced on 7 April that Astley had won with more than five million votes. The song was played at the home opener rather than adopted as the standard.
2008-06 - BarackRoll. Australian editor Hugh Atkin released 'BarackRoll' in August 2008, a mashup splicing Barack Obama campaign speech clips into a word-by-word performance of 'Never Gonna Give You Up'. It became one of the most-watched political remixes of the election cycle and established the sentence-mining rickroll format later reused by the Oregon legislature.
2008 - Food Court Musical. Improv Everywhere staged a spontaneous musical in a Los Angeles shopping mall food court, in which apparently ordinary diners rose one by one to sing an elaborate scored number about spilling a drink. It launched the collective's 'Musicals In Real Life' series and was among the first missions built around a fully composed original song rather than a silent tableau.
2008-11-01 - Le canular des Justiciers masqués contre Sarah Palin (CKOI-FM, Montréal). Marc-Antoine Audette and Sébastien Trudel of Montreal's CKOI-FM worked up through Alaska staff for days before reaching the Republican vice-presidential candidate, one of them posing as Nicolas Sarkozy. Over roughly six minutes they discussed foreign policy and hunting while dropping absurdities, Johnny Hallyday as adviser on American affairs, the singer Stef Carse as Canada's prime minister, without Palin catching on. A landmark of the Québécois canular téléphonique tradition.
2008-11-06 - MTV Europe Music Awards: Best Act Ever. An organised online campaign delivered Astley roughly 100 million votes for the 'Best Act Ever' award at the 2008 MTV EMAs in Liverpool, beating U2, Britney Spears and The Beatles. Astley did not attend, issuing a statement thanking those who voted. It was the largest institutional rickroll to date, aimed at an awards show rather than an individual.
2008-11-12 - The Yes Men print a fake New York Times. More than a million copies of a convincing 14-page fake New York Times were distributed free in New York and Los Angeles, dated 4 July 2009 and headlined 'IRAQ WAR ENDS'. The edition imagined national health care, a rebuilt economy and progressive taxation as accomplished facts. It was produced by the Yes Men with Steve Lambert and hundreds of volunteers, and functioned as a piece of speculative journalism rather than a straightforward deception.
2008-11-27 - Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade rickroll. Cartoon Network's Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends float rolled down the parade route with its puppet cast singing when the music cut out with a turntable scratch and Rick Astley emerged from the house singing 'Never Gonna Give You Up', rickrolling millions watching live on NBC. Astley later said Cartoon Network approached him and that he was paid a substantial fee, adding: 'I'm honest enough to admit that.'
2009-04-01 - CADIE, Google's fake artificial intelligence. Google announced the Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity, an AI it claimed had spontaneously emerged from its research and taken over multiple products. CADIE 'redesigned' Gmail, Maps, Chrome and Earth with deliberately garish results and posted a childlike blog. The gag ended with mock system-restoration messages as engineers supposedly regained control.
2009-04-14 - Colbert wins the NASA space station module poll. NASA opened an online poll to name Node 3 of the International Space Station, offering four options plus write-ins. Stephen Colbert told viewers to write in his own name, which won by more than 40,000 votes. NASA invoked its discretion and named the module Tranquility, announced by astronaut Suni Williams on the Colbert Report, but named the station's treadmill COLBERT as a consolation. It is the direct precedent for the Boaty McBoatface outcome.
2009-04-27 - 4chan rigs the Time 100 poll. 4chan users exploited the unauthenticated voting application behind Time magazine's Time 100 reader poll, then defeated a later hash check by extracting the secret word from Time's own Flash app. They voted 4chan founder Christopher Poole to first place with 16,794,368 votes. They also ordered the top 21 finishers so that the first letters of their names spelled 'marblecake also the game'.
2009-06 - El Mundo Today - Spanish satirical newspaper launched. El Mundo Today launched publicly in January 2009, created by Xavi Puig and Kike García. It adopts the visual style of the Spanish online press while its content is wholly fictitious, which has repeatedly led subjects of its stories to demand removal, unaware the site is satirical. It gained wide coverage after the Colombian news channel NTN24 broadcast some of its invented reporting as fact, even going live to its own Madrid correspondent on the story.
2009-06 - Bangladeshi papers reprint The Onion's moon-landing spoof. The satirical US paper The Onion published a spoof on 31 August 2009 claiming Neil Armstrong had concluded the Apollo 11 landing was 'an elaborate hoax' after watching persuasive YouTube videos. The Bangladeshi daily Manab Zamin reprinted it as fact and apologised the following day on learning The Onion is satirical; the same day a second Bangladeshi paper, The New Nation, ran it too. Manab Zamin's associate editor said: 'We thought it was true so we printed it without checking.'
2009-10-15 - Balloon Boy hoax. On 15 October 2009 Richard and Mayumi Heene of Fort Collins, Colorado reported that their six-year-old son had floated away in a homemade helium balloon. News helicopters tracked the craft live, the National Guard scrambled, and Denver International Airport briefly halted flights; the boy was found hiding in the family's attic. Investigators concluded the Heenes staged the event to make themselves marketable for reality television. Richard pleaded guilty to a felony and was sentenced to 90 days' jail; Governor Jared Polis pardoned both parents on 23 December 2020.
2010-04-01 - Google Translate for Animals. Google announced an Android app that would translate animal vocalisations into human language, tagged 'Bridging the gap between animals and humans'. The promotional material featured people holding phones up to cows, birds and dogs and receiving species-specific translations. It was presented as a genuine beta from Google UK with a full product page.
2010-04-01 - Google Japan's annual April Fools' keyboards. Google Japan has released an absurd but functional physical input device each 1 April since 2010, beginning with the Google 日本語入力ドラムセットバージョン (Drum Set Version). Later entries include a Morse code input (2012), a teacup keyboard (2021), a 65-inch single-strip Gboard Bar (2022) and a Möbius-strip double-sided board (2024). Google publishes the circuit diagrams and firmware openly in its mozc-devices repository. A recurring annual campaign.
2010 - 4chan votes Justin Bieber to North Korea. A fan poll let users vote for a country Justin Bieber should visit on his My World tour. Starting in mid-2010, 4chan users drove North Korea from 24th place to first in under two days, finishing with 602,827 votes. Almost no North Korean citizens have internet access, making the result self-evidently manufactured. Bieber's label dismissed the poll as a hoax and no tour date resulted.
2011-04-01 - Gmail Motion: email by body gesture. Google announced that Gmail could be operated by full-body gestures read through a webcam using 'patented spatial tracking technology'. The launch video featured a mime performing gestures such as licking a stamp to send a message and leaning back to read one. The gag was convincing enough that a research team later built a working version using Microsoft Kinect.
2011-04-01 - The Oregon legislature rickroll. Portland representative Jefferson Smith recruited colleagues across party lines to each slip one word or phrase of 'Never Gonna Give You Up' into their floor speeches during a 2010 special session. Over roughly fourteen months the fragments were spliced from public-record footage into a two-minute video released on April Fools' Day 2011. Smith stressed no taxpayer money was spent and every bill discussed had passed.
2011 - Ramez Qalb Al Asad - Ramez Galal's Egyptian prank format. Ramez Qalb Al Asad ('Ramez Lion-Hearted') first aired in 2011 on Egypt's Al Hayat TV, trapping celebrities in a lift that opened onto a lion. It launched a run of nine consecutive years of Ramadan prank shows, moving to MBC in 2014 with far larger budgets. The franchise became notorious for cruelty: Egypt's Abbasiya Mental Health Hospital issued an advisory urging parents to keep children from watching, and successive seasons have drawn calls for suspension.
2011 - Charlie Todd's TED talk on the shared experience of absurdity. Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd gave a TED talk arguing that his missions are not pranks at the expense of a victim but the deliberate creation of a shared absurd experience, and that play is a legitimate reason to do something as an adult. It is the clearest articulation of the ethical line separating this strand from the prank-channel genre that developed in parallel.
2011 - Ghostbusters at the New York Public Library. Improv Everywhere restaged the opening library scene from Ghostbusters inside the New York Public Library's Rose Main Reading Room, with costumed agents responding to an apparent paranormal disturbance among unsuspecting readers. It was part of the collective's 'Movies In Real Life' series, which transplanted recognisable film scenes into their real-world locations.
2011 - Say Something Nice. Improv Everywhere placed a megaphone on a stand in a public square with a simple sign reading 'Say Something Nice', then filmed what strangers chose to broadcast. The mission inverted the usual dynamic of public-space intervention by handing the instrument of disruption to the public and recording generosity rather than confusion.
2011-07-27 - The White House rickrolls a Twitter follower. A Twitter user complained that a White House briefing on fiscal policy was not as entertaining as the previous day's. The official @whitehouse account replied that fiscal policy can be dry, and offered 'something more fun' behind a shortened link to Astley's video. The tweet was named by TIME among the top moments of 2011.
2012-01-15 - Taubaté pregnancy hoax (Grávida de Taubaté). In January 2012 Maria Verônica Aparecida César Santos claimed to be pregnant with quadruplets, gaining major coverage on TV Globo, Folha de S.Paulo, RedeTV! and Record TV, where she received sponsor gifts. Reporter Michael Keller discovered the ultrasound she presented had been copied from the internet and edited; on 15 January Domingo Espetacular aired evidence she was not pregnant, and her lawyer confirmed the hoax on 20 January. She became the meme 'Grávida de Taubaté', spawning the format 'X de Taubaté' to denote hoaxes.
2012 - MIT students play Tetris on the Green Building. MIT students turned the 21-storey Green Building into a playable game of Tetris, using the windows as pixels and a control console at ground level. Making the building 'playable' had been listed for years on a semi-official roster of hacks students hoped someone would eventually achieve.
2012 - Taylor Swift and the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. A contest offered a Taylor Swift concert to the US school receiving the most Facebook votes. Beginning in August 2012, users on 4chan and Reddit voted the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Boston to the top as a cruel joke. Organisers disqualified the school over irregular voting. Swift and the sponsors each donated $10,000 to the school, VH1's Save the Music added $10,000 in instruments, and every student received concert tickets.
2012-06 - Shell's Arctic Ready hoax. Greenpeace and the Yes Lab built ArcticReady.com, a near-perfect replica of Shell's site including a social-media ad generator that invited the public to caption Arctic drilling images, and a children's game called Angry Bergs. A companion video staged an 'epic PR fail' at a fake Shell party in Seattle. Journalists who wrote about it received fake follow-up emails from 'Shell' directing them to the hoax site itself. Shell abandoned its Arctic project for the year that September.
2012-07-30 - #ExilePitbull sends Pitbull to Kodiak, Alaska. Walmart promised a Pitbull appearance at whichever US store gained the most new Facebook likes. Something Awful writers David Thorpe and Jon Hendren launched the #ExilePitbull hashtag to send him to the most remote store they could find, in Kodiak, Alaska, which won with more than 70,000 likes. Pitbull honoured the result, visiting on 30 July 2012, was presented with bear repellent, and personally paid to fly Thorpe out to join him.
2012-08-13 - Mountain Dew's Dub the Dew contest hijacked. Mountain Dew ran an open naming contest for a green-apple soda with no submission moderation. A 4chan thread flooded the leaderboard with offensive entries, and participants also planted a Rick Astley pop-up on the contest page. Mountain Dew pulled the promotion and apologised, conceding it had 'lost to the Internet'.
2013-04-01 - Google Nose BETA brings smell to search. Google announced an olfactory search feature letting users experience smells through their screens, claiming an 'Aromabase' of over 15 million 'scentibytes'. Advertised components included Street Sense, said to index odours via Google's camera cars, and Android Ambient Odor Detection. The official 'Introducing Google Nose' video was posted 31 March 2013.
2013-06 - PhantomL0rd swatted mid-stream. League of Legends streamer James Varga was broadcasting to roughly 80,000 viewers when armed police entered his home following a hoax call. The DDoS group DERP had published his address after attacking game servers he was playing on. It was among the first swattings of a streamer to reach a mass live audience.
2013-06 - Jack Vale's Social Media Experiment. In November 2013 Jack Vale published 'Social Media Experiment', searching geotagged hashtags in his local area, matching profile photos to nearby faces, then approaching strangers by name citing their pets, birthdays and meals. He identified people without knowing any name in advance. The video led to talk-show appearances and reframed the prank as a privacy cautionary tale.
2013-06 - Banksy's Better Out Than In residency. Through October 2013 Banksy attempted to unveil a new work every day across New York City, announced only via Instagram, turning the city into a daily treasure hunt covered obsessively by local media. Works were stolen, defaced and boarded over within hours of appearing. The residency demonstrated that the announcement mechanism, not the object, had become the artwork.
2013 - Star Wars Subway Car. Improv Everywhere restaged the boarding-party scene from Star Wars on a moving New York subway car, with Princess Leia fleeing through the carriage and stormtroopers pursuing her past ordinary commuters. Part of the 'Movies In Real Life' series, it is among the collective's most-viewed missions.
2013-10-12 - Banksy sells originals for $60 in Central Park. Banksy arranged for an anonymous elderly vendor to sell original signed canvases from a folding stall in Central Park under a handwritten sign reading 'Spray Art. $60', with no advertising or indication of authenticity. Seven paintings sold for a total of $420 against an estimated value upwards of $32,000 each. A buyer who paid $120 for two later sold them at auction for £125,000.
2014-01-05 - The Bikini Bridge hoax. On 5 January 2014 4chan launched 'Operation Bikini Bridge', a two-pronged campaign that simultaneously promoted the 'bikini bridge' as an aspirational body trend and seeded outrage posts against it. Participants built fake Tumblrs and forged celebrity endorsement screenshots. The hashtag drew over 3,400 tweets in 48 hours and the Daily Mail covered it as a genuine 'disturbing selfie fad'. It is a template case of a manufactured trend engineered to provoke media coverage of a moral panic.
2014-04-01 - Google Maps Pokémon Challenge. Google Maps hid 150 Pokémon at real-world locations worldwide and invited users to catch them through the mobile app, offering a fake job as 'Pokémon Master' to anyone who found them all. The stunt was widely seen as a rehearsal for real location-based gaming. Niantic, then a Google internal startup, went on to launch Pokémon GO in 2016.
2014-04-20 - FouseyTube pivots to social experiments. Yousef Erakat released his 'Public Rape Experiment' video on 20 April 2014, drawing over 600,000 views in under 24 hours and immediate criticism for exploiting a serious subject. It marked his shift from family skits into public pranks framed as social experiments. The framing let creators keep filming confrontational stunts while claiming a moral purpose.
2014-06-12 - #EndFathersDay and #YourSlipIsShowing. On 12 June 2014 a 4chan thread launched #EndFathersDay, a false-flag campaign in which users created sock-puppet accounts impersonating Black feminists calling to abolish Father's Day. Fox News aired a segment treating the campaign as genuine before it was debunked. Black women on Twitter identified the fake accounts and exposed the operation under the counter-hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing, one of the earliest documented community detections of coordinated inauthentic behaviour.
2014-06 - Laci Green's open letter against Sam Pepper. Sex educator and YouTuber Laci Green published an open letter calling on Pepper to stop violating women for views, co-signed by a large group of fellow creators and ultimately drawing over 100,000 signatures. It was one of the first times the YouTube creator community collectively refused to treat harassment as comedy.
2014-06 - Pepper claims the video was a "social experiment". Pepper responded with follow-up videos claiming the pinch prank had been staged and was actually a social experiment about male victims of abuse. Green noted the consent forms he cited were signed after the fact, purely to license the footage. The episode became a template for the 'social experiment' defence later used to launder prank content.
2014-06 - Pepper dropped by network, VidCon and collaborators. Collective Digital Studio cut ties with Pepper weeks after signing him, and VidCon and the YouTubers React series also dropped him. Separately, several women came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct and the LAPD opened an investigation. This demonstrated early that platform-adjacent institutions, not YouTube itself, carried the consequences.
2014-06 - ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. A dare circulating in athletic circles was redirected to ALS fundraising in July 2014 by Pat Quinn and Pete Frates, both living with the disease. Participants filmed themselves dumping ice water over their heads, nominated three others, and donated. It drew roughly 17 million participants and raised $115 million for the ALS Association against $2.8 million in the same period the prior year. It established the nominate-and-film stunt template that later challenge formats inherited.
2014-06 - Nathan Fielder opens Dumb Starbucks. Comedian Nathan Fielder opened a coffee shop in Los Feliz, Los Angeles that replicated Starbucks branding exactly with the word 'Dumb' prefixed to everything, arguing this met the legal threshold for parody. Queues formed for days before Fielder revealed himself at a press conference. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health shut it down that afternoon for operating without a food permit, not for trademark reasons.
2014-07-13 - Vitaly invades the World Cup final pitch. During the second half of the Germany v Argentina World Cup final at the Maracanã on 13 July 2014, Vitaly Zdorovetskiy ran onto the pitch with 'Natural Born Prankster' written across his torso. He was tackled by five security guards and arrested, paying $100 bail. It was the moment prank content collided with the largest live television audience on earth.
2015-02-08 - TTS donation trolling emerges on Twitch. Text-to-speech donation alerts, which read a paying viewer's message aloud on stream, became a vector for trolling. Kotaku's February 2015 coverage of a streamer being spammed with repeated single letters is among the earliest documented cases. The technique later escalated from nuisance spam to broadcasting slurs through a streamer's own audio feed, since word filters are easy to circumvent with spacing and substitutions.
2015-04-01 - Reddit's The Button. Reddit launched r/thebutton, showing a button and a 60-second countdown that reset globally every time any user pressed it. Each account could press only once, and pressers received flair coloured by how low the timer had fallen, spawning elaborate factions around waiting. Just over a million people pressed it before the timer reached zero on 5 June 2015. It was created by Josh Wardle, later the creator of Wordle.
2015-04-01 - com.google renders Google backwards. Google launched com.google, a fully mirrored version of Google Search in which the logo, text, buttons and results were all reversed. Search worked normally; only reading it was hard. It doubled as the company's first public use of its.google top-level domain.
2015-04-01 - Radio SRF annexes Konstanz to Thurgau. On 1 April 2015 Radio SRF reported that the German city of Konstanz was being annexed into the Swiss canton of Thurgau, merged with neighbouring Kreuzlingen and made capital of an enlarged canton, with a ceremonial border relocation planned for noon and a German brass band rehearsing the Swiss anthem. It exploited the genuine oddity of the Konstanz-Kreuzlingen conurbation being split by the national border.
2015-04-02 - EUobserver's Mistral warship for Latvia fools Russian state media. An EUobserver April Fools' article claimed France, blocked by sanctions from delivering a Mistral-class warship to Russia, would send it to Latvia instead, renamed 'Juncker', registered in Panama for tax purposes and sailing to landlocked Luxembourg. Russian state outlets RIA Novosti, TASS, Interfax and Sputnik reported it as fact on 2 April 2015, an instance of satire penetrating state media in the Baltic information environment.
2015-06 - Joshua Peters swatted while streaming. Joshua Peters, streaming to a large audience from St Cloud, Minnesota, was wearing noise-cancelling headphones when armed officers entered his home in February 2015. A caller had told police someone had shot a roommate and was pointing a gun at them. Peters said officers pointed weapons at his younger brother, who answered the door. He returned to the stream and made an emotional appeal to whoever had made the call.
2015-06 - Coby Persin's child predator social experiment. In August 2015 Coby Persin released 'The Dangers of Social Media', viewed almost 34 million times in a week. With parental permission he posed as a 15-year-old boy to contact girls aged 12 to 14, each of whom agreed to meet him, after which the parents revealed themselves. It was the high-water mark of the social-experiment format: moral framing at maximum, prank mechanics unchanged.
2015-06 - Foo Fighters counter-protest the Westboro Baptist Church. In August 2015 Westboro Baptist Church members picketed a Foo Fighters show in Kansas City. The band rolled up in a pickup truck, blasted 'Never Gonna Give You Up' at the protesters through a PA rig and danced along. Dave Grohl's group repeated the gesture at later shows, and in 2017 brought Astley himself on stage in Tokyo.
2015-08-21 - Dismaland opens in Weston-super-Mare. Banksy converted a derelict lido into what he called a 'bemusement park', a dystopian inversion of Disneyland described as 'a family theme park unsuitable for children'. It featured work by 58 invited artists alongside a distressed Cinderella carriage and sullen staff in Mickey Mouse ears. It ran five weeks to 27 September 2015 and drew around 150,000 visitors, with materials afterwards shipped to Calais to build shelters at the refugee camp.
2015-11-27 - Cards Against Humanity sells nothing for $5. For Black Friday 2015 Cards Against Humanity took down its online store entirely and invited people to send it $5 in exchange for nothing at all. 11,248 customers paid, generating $71,145. The company split the money among its staff, who then publicly posted the useful, useless and extravagant things they spent it on.
2015-11-30 - Sam Pepper's "Killing Best Friend Prank". Pepper staged a fake kidnapping in which Sam Golbach was tied up and forced to watch a masked man appear to shoot his best friend Colby Brock dead on a rooftop. Golbach was left believing his friend had been murdered for roughly 30 seconds before the reveal. A petition asking YouTube to remove Pepper's channel gathered more than 117,000 signatures.
2016-03-23 - Microsoft's Tay chatbot corrupted in 16 hours. Microsoft launched Tay, a Twitter chatbot designed to learn conversational style from a teenage-girl persona. Within hours a 4chan thread organised users to exploit an undocumented 'repeat after me' function and flood the bot with racist input. Tay internalised the material and began producing offensive posts unprompted. Microsoft shut the service down after 16 hours, and Tay became the standard cautionary example of deploying a learning system without safeguards against coordinated abuse.
2016-04-01 - Gmail's Mic Drop button backfires. Google added a 'Send + Mic Drop' button beside Gmail's normal send button, attaching a GIF of a Minion dropping a microphone and muting all replies in the thread. Placed next to the familiar send control with no confirmation step, and affected by a bug that could fire it from the ordinary send button, it was sent accidentally into job applications and condolence messages. Users reported lost job opportunities. Google disabled it within hours, saying 'it looks like we pranked ourselves this year'.
2016-04-01 - Google Cardboard Plastic. Google announced 'Cardboard Plastic', a parody of its real Cardboard VR viewer, presented as a premium transparent headset offering 'actual reality' at a perfect frame rate with zero latency. The straight-faced launch video parodied VR marketing conventions by describing an empty plastic frame you simply look through.
2016-04-16 - Boaty McBoatface wins the NERC ship poll. The Natural Environment Research Council opened the #NameOurShip public poll for its new £200m polar research vessel on 17 March 2016. Former BBC radio presenter James Hand suggested 'Boaty McBoatface', then publicly apologised as it went viral; the site crashed under traffic. When voting closed on 16 April 2016 the name led with 124,109 votes, 33 percent of the total, from 7,034 suggestions.
2016-05-06 - Ship named RRS Sir David Attenborough. On 6 May 2016 science minister Jo Johnson announced that the NERC vessel would be named RRS Sir David Attenborough, overriding the poll winner in the naturalist's ninetieth-birthday year. As a concession to the 124,109 voters, NERC gave the name Boaty McBoatface to one of the ship's autonomous submersibles. The decision drew a House of Commons Science and Technology Committee session.
2016-05-18 - PrankvsPrank ends: Jesse and Jeana split. On 18 May 2016 Jesse Wellens and Jeana Smith announced they were placing their relationship on hiatus and stepping back from daily vlogging, citing relationship problems and the stress of the upload schedule. Wellens described YouTube as 'toxic' for the relationship. Their combined channels held roughly 20 million subscribers; the breakup exposed the structural problem of a genre whose product was the creators' own private life.
2016-06-10 - Vitaly streaks the NBA Finals. On 10 June 2016 Vitaly Zdorovetskiy ran onto the court during Game 4 of the NBA Finals. He was tackled by security, pleaded no contest to trespassing, was fined $1,000 and banned by the NBA from attending games for a year. It was one of four arrests he accumulated in 2016 and 2017 alone.
2016-06 - Joey Salads' staged "racist social experiment" exposed. Joey Salads published a video purporting to show Black residents spontaneously destroying a car bearing Trump stickers. A bystander's footage revealed the men were paid actors waiting behind the camera tripod, and Salads admitted the video was staged. The clip had already circulated widely as evidence of real behaviour, having been picked up by the Drudge Report.
2016-06 - The rise of the fake prank industry. Industry trade press documented how 'prank gone wrong' had hardened into a clickbait formula, with titles promising violence or sexual content the videos rarely delivered. A counter-industry of debunking channels emerged, including The Prank Reviewer and h3h3productions, dedicated to proving popular pranks were staged with paid actors. Philip DeFranco had publicly named several creators he considered to be staging content.
2016-06 - Cards Against Humanity digs the Holiday Hole. Beginning in late November 2016, Cards Against Humanity livestreamed excavators digging an enormous hole in the ground near Oregon, Illinois. Digging continued as long as people donated, tracked on a live chart labelled 'Money Thrown in Hole', and raised $100,573. The company explicitly refused to give the hole any purpose or deeper meaning, and later filled it back in.
2017-01-08 - MrBeast counts to 100,000. Jimmy Donaldson uploaded 'I COUNTED TO 100000!' on 8 January 2017, roughly 40 hours of filming edited to just under 24 hours. It went viral and took him past one million subscribers. The video established endurance-and-spectacle stunt content as an alternative to pranking: the creator, not a bystander, absorbs the cost, which made it far more advertiser-safe and ultimately displaced the prank genre.
2017-01-20 - He Will Not Divide Us. Shia LaBeouf, Nastja Ronkko and Luke Turner installed a camera outside the Museum of the Moving Image on Trump's inauguration day, inviting the public to repeat the phrase 'He will not divide us' on a continuous livestream for four years. The museum shut it down on 10 February 2017 citing violent altercations on site. Relocated to New Mexico and then to an undisclosed flag, the project became a target rather than a statement, and is the clearest case of participatory art colliding with organised trolling.
2017-04-01 - Reddit's r/place pixel canvas. Reddit opened a 1000x1000 blank canvas on which any registered user could change one pixel's colour from a 16-colour palette, then wait five minutes. Over a million users placed roughly 16 million pixels across three days, with communities organising into alliances, defending territory and building the emergent artwork collaboratively. Conceived by Josh Wardle, it is regarded as the most successful April Fools experiment in Reddit's history.
2017-04-28 - Ice Poseidon removed from flight after hoax bomb threat. IRL streamer Paul Denino broadcast his gate number while waiting to fly from Los Angeles, and a viewer telephoned a false bomb threat in his name. Police removed Denino from the flight after it landed in Phoenix. It was not the first time his viewers had swatted him; his broadcasts routinely disclosed his live location.
2017-06 - DaddyOFive exposed. Philip DeFranco published a video drawing mass attention to DaddyOFive, a channel with over 700,000 subscribers run by Mike and Heather Martin, which filmed 'pranks' on their children. The most-cited clip showed them screaming false accusations at their son until he sobbed hysterically. Viewers and commentators argued the footage documented abuse rather than comedy.
2017-06 - The YouTube "adpocalypse" begins. The Times of London reported that major brands' advertising was running against extremist content on YouTube, and within a week more than 250 advertisers including McDonald's, AT&T and Walmart pulled campaigns. YouTube responded with stricter advertiser-friendly guidelines. Prank and shock channels were among the hardest hit, as content built on conflict and distress became categorically unmonetisable.
2017-06 - Twitch permanently bans Ice Poseidon. Twitch permanently closed Denino's channel days after the airline incident, citing terms of service violations. The decision was contested because Denino was the target of the hoax rather than its author. The case set an early precedent that platforms would treat repeated real-world emergency responses as a liability attached to the broadcaster.
2017-06 - Cards Against Humanity buys land on the border. In mid-November 2017 Cards Against Humanity announced 'Cards Against Humanity Saves America', buying a plot of vacant land on the US-Mexico border and retaining a law firm specialising in eminent domain to obstruct construction of a border wall. Customers paying $15 received an illustrated map and a certificate. The promotion was capped at 150,000 customers and sold out within days.
2017-06 - 4chan captures the He Will Not Divide Us flag. After the Museum of the Moving Image shut down Shia LaBeouf's livestream installation, the artists relocated it to a flag on a pole at an undisclosed rural location, streaming only sky. Beginning 8 March 2017, 4chan users cross-referenced aircraft contrails against flight-tracking data, analysed star positions, listened for local livestock, and used a LaBeouf sighting at a diner in Greeneville, Tennessee to triangulate the site. Within about 36 hours a user drove to the location and took the flag. It is the canonical example of crowdsourced open-source geolocation used for a prank.
2017-06 - Boaty McBoatface the submarine does real science. The autonomous vehicle named Boaty McBoatface made its first Antarctic deployment in April 2017, diving to about 4,000m in the Orkney Passage and travelling roughly 180km along the seabed collecting temperature, salinity and turbulence data. Results published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 linked strengthening winds, driven by the Antarctic ozone hole, to deep-ocean turbulence and warming. The joke name ended up attached to a genuine climate finding.
2017-06 - Operation O-KKK: the OK hand sign hoax. In February 2017 an anonymous 4chan user launched 'Operation O-KKK', urging others to flood social media with the claim that the OK hand gesture was a white-supremacist symbol, supported by a graphic tracing the letters W and P within the sign. Participants mass-messaged journalists and civil rights groups. It then backfired: far-right figures adopted the gesture sincerely, and in September 2019 the ADL added it to its hate symbols database, making a fabricated claim materially true.
2017-09-11 - DaddyOFive parents sentenced for child neglect. Mike and Heather Martin each entered Alford pleas to two counts of child neglect and were sentenced to five years of supervised probation. A prosecutor told the court a psychologist had determined the 9-year-old and 11-year-old suffered emotional trauma from the videos. The Martins agreed to have no contact with the two children without court approval. The case became the direct catalyst for YouTube's 2019 prank policy overhaul.
2017-12-28 - The $1.50 wager behind the Wichita call. Casey Viner, 18, of Ohio and Shane Gaskill, 19, of Kansas argued over a $1.50 wager after a friendly-fire incident in an online Call of Duty match. Viner threatened to have Gaskill swatted and contacted Tyler Barriss, 25, known in gaming circles for making hoax calls. Gaskill, aware of the threat, gave an address where he no longer lived. Prosecutors described the chain as a deliberate conspiracy.
2017-12-28 - Andrew Finch killed by Wichita police after hoax call. Andrew Finch, 28, a father of two with no connection to online gaming, was shot dead by a Wichita police officer on the porch of his home. Tyler Barriss had telephoned a false report that he had shot his father and was holding the rest of the family hostage at that address. The address was stale, supplied during a dispute between two Call of Duty players over a $1.50 wager. This was a homicide arising from a deliberate scheme, not a prank that went wrong.
2017-12-31 - Logan Paul films a body in Aokigahara forest. Logan Paul published a vlog from Japan's Aokigahara forest showing the body of an apparent suicide victim, with only the face blurred, while laughing on camera. The video reached millions of views before he removed it within roughly 24 hours. The backlash centred on his treatment of a death as content in a country with among the highest suicide rates in the developed world.
2018-01-10 - YouTube penalises Logan Paul. YouTube removed Paul from the Google Preferred premium advertising programme and suspended work on his Originals projects. Paul issued a written and then a video apology, later returning with a suicide-prevention video and a pledge of $1 million to prevention charities. The incident is widely treated as the moment YouTube's tolerance for shock content from top creators visibly narrowed.
2018-01-17 - The Tide Pod Challenge. A meme in which teenagers filmed themselves biting into laundry detergent capsules spread across YouTube and social platforms in early 2018. US poison control centres logged 86 cases of intentional ingestion by teenagers between 1 and 21 January, against roughly 200 for the whole of 2017. YouTube began removing videos tagged with the challenge on 17 January and issuing strikes.
2018-04-01 - Tesla tweets its own bankruptcy. Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla had 'gone completely and totally bankrupt', despite 'a last-ditch mass sale of Easter Eggs', and posted a photo of himself slumped against a Model 3 surrounded by 'Teslaquila' bottles. The joke landed during a genuinely bad month for Tesla, with a falling share price and Model 3 production problems, and drew criticism for making light of investor concerns. Teslaquila later became real: Tesla trademarked it that October.
2018 - The grievance studies affair. James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian submitted twenty deliberately absurd papers to journals in gender, race and sexuality studies; seven were accepted before Wall Street Journal reporting ended the project. Critics noted the sample was not controlled and that acceptance rates in any field can be gamed, so the affair is better read as a provocation than as an experiment. Frequently described as proving peer review is broken across the humanities. It had no control group and no comparison discipline, which its own critics, and some sympathisers, pointed out at the time.
2018-06 - In-N-Out sues prankster Cody Roeder. In-N-Out Burger sought a restraining order and $25,000 in damages against Cody Roeder of the Trollmunchies channel, who had entered two California restaurants posing as the chain's CEO and berating staff in front of customers. The case marked a shift toward businesses using civil litigation against prank creators who used their employees as unwitting participants.
2018-06 - Seattle police open an anti-swatting registry. In October 2018 Seattle police launched an opt-in registry allowing residents who believe they are at risk to flag their address in advance. When a 911 call taker receives a critical-incident report, the system simultaneously shows whether swatting concerns are registered there. Officers still respond, but arrive informed. The programme was a direct response to requests from streamers and to the Finch killing.
2018-08-02 - TikTok and Musical.ly merge into one global app. ByteDance, which acquired Musical.ly for roughly $1 billion in 2017, merged it into TikTok on 2 August 2018, migrating Musical.ly's largely Western teenage user base onto a single global platform. The merged app kept an algorithmic 'For You' feed. This consolidation created the distribution engine behind the challenge and prank formats that followed.
2018-10-05 - Banksy shreds Girl with Balloon at Sotheby's. Moments after a 2006 canvas of Girl with Balloon sold for £1.04 million at Sotheby's in London, a shredder Banksy had concealed in the frame years earlier activated, drawing the canvas halfway through a row of blades in front of the saleroom. Banksy's authentication body reissued it under a new title, Love Is in the Bin, and Sotheby's called it the first artwork created live during an auction.
2018-11-10 - Ninja reports a player for stream sniping. Stream sniping is the practice of watching a broadcaster's live feed to gain an in-game advantage. Tyler 'Ninja' Blevins, then the most-watched streamer on Twitch, was eliminated in Fortnite by a player and reported him to Epic Games. The player denied sniping, and the episode drew criticism over the power imbalance between large streamers and ordinary players.
2018-11-13 - Barriss pleads guilty to 51 federal charges. Tyler Barriss pleaded guilty to 51 federal charges arising from a long series of hoax emergency calls and threats, including a bomb threat against FBI headquarters and one count of making a false report resulting in death. The volume of charges established that the Wichita call was not an isolated act but the endpoint of a sustained pattern.
2018-12-04 - Burger King's Whopper Detour. Not a hoax but a real promotion: from 4-12 December 2018, Burger King geofenced more than 14,000 US McDonald's locations so that anyone coming within about 600 feet received a notification offering a Whopper for one cent, orderable only through the Burger King app, which then routed them to the nearest Burger King. The app was downloaded over 1.5 million times in nine days. It is frequently cited as the model of a prank that was actually deliverable.
2019-01-02 - The Bird Box Challenge. Following the release of Netflix's Bird Box, users filmed themselves performing everyday tasks blindfolded. Netflix publicly asked people to stop, tweeting that they did not want anyone ending up in hospital because of a meme. On 7 January a 17-year-old in Layton, Utah pulled a hat over her eyes while driving, crossed into oncoming traffic and struck another car; no one was seriously hurt.
2019-03-29 - Barriss sentenced to 20 years. Tyler Barriss, 26, was sentenced in federal court in Kansas to 20 years in prison, believed to be the longest term imposed in a swatting case at the time. The sentence covered the fatal Wichita call together with dozens of other hoax calls across multiple states. Prosecutors framed the case as a homicide arising from a deliberate scheme.
2019-04-01 - Reddit's Sequence. Reddit released r/sequence, a community-driven sequencer in which users submitted GIFs and text slides that were voted on and compiled in order into a collective movie. The result was an incoherent crowd-authored film assembled entirely by upvote. It was the last of Reddit's experiments before the tradition paused in 2020.
2019-06-01 - Kinsey Wolanski invades the Champions League final. During the Liverpool v Tottenham Champions League final in Madrid on 1 June 2019, Kinsey Wolanski ran onto the pitch wearing a swimsuit branded with Vitaly Uncensored, her then-boyfriend Vitaly Zdorovetskiy's platform, while he filmed from the stands. Wolanski's Instagram following jumped from 230,000 to around two million overnight. Note: contrary to common accounts, Zdorovetskiy did not himself invade this pitch.
2019 - Bottle Cap Challenge. In late June and early July 2019, participants filmed themselves unscrewing a bottle cap with a spinning roundhouse kick, filmed in slow motion. A celebrity nomination chain ran from designer Errolson Hugh through UFC champion Max Holloway to John Mayer and Jason Statham. It is one of the few large 2019 challenge formats with no reported injuries.
2019-06 - Dr Disrespect misidentifies a stream sniper. Herschel 'Dr Disrespect' Beahm publicly accused a PUBG opponent of stream sniping after being killed from high ground, only for the in-game replay to show the player was fellow streamer LIRIK, who had streamer mode enabled. The episode became a widely cited example of how difficult sniping is to prove and how readily large broadcasters attribute ordinary losses to it.
2019-08-10 - Fortnite World Cup winner Bugha swatted on stream. Kyle 'Bugha' Giersdorf, 16, who had won $3 million at the Fortnite World Cup weeks earlier, was streaming when police arrived at his Pennsylvania home. Police had received a call from someone impersonating him, claiming he had killed his father and tied up his mother. The situation was defused within about half an hour because a responding officer lived nearby and recognised him.
2019-09-13 - Casey Viner sentenced to 15 months. Casey Viner, the Ohio player who solicited the call, was sentenced to 15 months in prison followed by two years of supervised release. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and one count of obstructing justice, the latter for attempting to destroy evidence of his communications with Barriss. He was also barred from gaming during his supervised release.
2019-09-20 - Storm Area 51. On 27 June 2019 Matty Roberts, a 20-year-old from Bakersfield, California, created a Facebook event titled 'Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us' as what he called the ultimate shitpost. More than two million people marked themselves attending and the US Air Force issued a public warning. On the day roughly 150 people appeared at the gates, with about 75 approaching them, and around 1,500 attended nearby festivals.
2020-02-13 - Mike Bloomberg buys the meme economy. In February 2020 Michael Bloomberg's presidential campaign hired Meme 2020, a firm linked to Jerry Media, to place sponsored posts across large Instagram meme accounts. The posts, disclosed as paid, showed a fictional Bloomberg asking accounts to 'post a meme that lets everyone know I'm the cool candidate'. Placements included accounts with a combined audience in the tens of millions. It forced Facebook to change its rules on branded political content.
2020-04-26 - 'Wipe It Down' mirror transition trend. Set to BMW Kenny's track 'Wipe It Down', the format showed a user spraying and wiping a mirror, with their reflection transforming on each wipe. Roughly 1.5 million users made versions, collectively drawing more than 850 million views, and the song reached number three on Spotify's Global Viral 50. It is a benign creative-editing trend rather than a prank or stunt.
2020-06 - Rick Astley gets rickrolled on Reddit. During a Reddit thread in June 2020, a user told Astley they had met him backstage aged 12 and posted what was framed as a photo of the two of them. The link was a rickroll. Astley replied 'I salute you!', and the exchange became Reddit's most upvoted post of 2020: the meme's originator caught by his own prank.
2020 - Skull Breaker Challenge injuries and criminal charges. In February 2020 a challenge spread in which two people kicked the legs out from under a third as they jumped, causing them to fall backwards onto their head. Documented injuries included a broken wrist, facial stitches and concussions. Two New Jersey teenagers were charged with third-degree aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of a child after a seventh-grader was hospitalised with a serious head injury and a seizure.
2020-06-20 - TikTok and K-pop fans sabotage the Tulsa rally. On 12 June 2020 a TikTok user posted a video urging people to reserve free tickets to Donald Trump's Tulsa rally with no intention of attending; it drew over two million views. K-pop fan accounts amplified the call and deliberately deleted posts after a day or two to avoid detection. The campaign claimed nearly one million registrations. On 20 June the Tulsa Fire Department counted about 6,200 attendees in the 19,000-capacity BOK Center and an outdoor overflow stage was scrapped.
2021-01-22 - Blackout Challenge death of Antonella Sicomero, Palermo. A 10-year-old girl in Palermo, Italy died in hospital after being found unconscious by her younger sister; her parents said she had been attempting a self-strangulation game seen online. Palermo prosecutors opened an investigation, and Italy's data protection authority ordered TikTok to block users whose age it could not verify as over 13. TikTok said it could not identify content on its platform that had encouraged her participation.
2021-01-28 - The GameStop short squeeze. Retail investors coordinating on Reddit's r/wallstreetbets bought GameStop shares to force a short squeeze against hedge funds that had sold short 138 percent of the float. Keith Gill, posting as Roaring Kitty, had argued the thesis publicly since 2019 and became the campaign's figurehead. The stock rose from about $17 in early January to an intraday high of $483 on 28 January 2021. That same day Robinhood, facing a multibillion-dollar collateral call, disabled buying of GME, triggering accusations of market rigging and a congressional hearing.
2021-04-07 - Twitch extends conduct rules to off-platform swatting. Twitch announced it would act on severe misconduct occurring away from its service where it posed a substantial safety risk, explicitly naming doxxing and swatting. The company retained an outside law firm and expanded its internal investigations team. The policy was widened again in October 2023 to cover encouraging others to swat or doxx.
2021-04-30 - Minh Duong rickrolls an entire school district. Graduating senior Minh Duong and friends spent months mapping Township High School District 214's network in Cook County, Illinois, finding zero-day flaws in its Exterity IPTV system. They simultaneously seized every networked display across all six district high schools to play 'Never Gonna Give You Up' as a fake emergency announcement. Duong submitted a 26-page disclosure report; the district declined to press charges and he presented the work at DEF CON.
2021-08-25 - Milk Crate Challenge and TikTok ban. In August 2021 participants stacked milk crates into a pyramid and attempted to walk up and over without the structure collapsing. Falls produced fractured ribs, broken wrists, shoulder dislocations and ligament tears, with clinicians warning of possible spinal cord injury. TikTok announced on 25 August 2021 that it was removing the videos and redirecting searches for the hashtag to its community guidelines.
2021-09-15 - 'Devious Licks' school theft and vandalism trend. Beginning with a 1 September 2021 video showing a stolen box of disposable masks, the trend spread across US schools as students filmed themselves stealing or destroying soap dispensers, sinks, exit signs and entire bathroom stalls. TikTok removed the originating video on 13 September and banned the hashtag outright on 15 September, though users evaded the block with variants. Students were arrested and charged with theft and vandalism across multiple states.
2021-10-14 - Love Is in the Bin resells for £18.6 million. The half-shredded canvas returned to Sotheby's three years later and sold for £18.58 million, roughly eighteen times its pre-shredding price and a record for the artist at the time. The sale completed the joke's inversion: a gesture intended to puncture the art market's valuation logic became the single strongest demonstration of it.
2021-12-17 - December 17 school threat hoax. A vague, unattributed post warning of school shootings on 17 December 2021 circulated on TikTok and other platforms, naming no specific school. The Department of Homeland Security said it had no information indicating a specific credible threat, and police departments publicly identified it as a hoax. Districts in several states nonetheless closed for the day or increased police presence.
2022-01-11 - 'West Elm Caleb' saga. Beginning 11 January 2022 with a TikTok video about being ghosted, multiple women compared notes about the same New York furniture designer, alleging he dated many at once and abruptly ghosted them. The hashtag drew more than 13 million views within days and he was rapidly doxxed, prompting an online harassment campaign. Commentators argued the pile-on far exceeded the conduct alleged, making it a landmark case in debates over internet mob justice.
2022-04-01 - r/place returns at massive scale. Reddit revived r/place on 1 April 2022, running about 87 hours with the canvas expanding twice, ultimately to 2000x2000 pixels. Over 10.4 million users placed tiles and the event drew more than 1.1 billion views, dwarfing the 2017 original. Large communities, streamers and national fandoms organised coordinated pixel armies, and the finished canvas became a widely analysed snapshot of internet culture.
2022 - 'Orbeez Challenge' shootings and the disputed attribution. In spring 2022 a wave of incidents saw people, mostly teenagers, shoot strangers with water-bead gel blasters, causing welts, eye injuries and several school lockdowns. Arrests followed across the United States. Although police and press consistently blamed a TikTok 'Orbeez Challenge', reporting found no such challenge actually present on the platform, making this a case where real harm was attached to a disputed origin story.
2022-06 - Buffalo crash kills four teenagers in stolen Kia. In October 2022 six teenagers were involved in a crash in Buffalo, New York in a stolen Kia Sportage; four of them, aged 14, 16, 17 and 19, were killed. Buffalo police said the occupants were likely participating in the vehicle theft trend circulating on TikTok. The deaths became a central reference point in the municipal litigation that followed against the two manufacturers.
2022-06 - Shane Gaskill sentenced to 18 months. Shane Gaskill, the Wichita player who supplied the address at which Andrew Finch was killed, was sentenced in September 2022 to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud. His case took longer than his co-defendants' because he had initially been placed on a diversion agreement that was subsequently revoked. His sentencing closed the criminal proceedings against all three men.
2022-07-05 - Blackout Challenge wrongful death lawsuits against TikTok. On 5 July 2022 the Social Media Victims Law Center filed wrongful death suits over the deaths of two girls, aged 8 and 9, who died by accidental self-strangulation while attempting a self-choking challenge. The complaints allege TikTok's recommendation algorithm repeatedly pushed the content into the children's feeds and that the product was defectively designed. A Bloomberg investigation reported the challenge had been linked to the deaths of at least 20 children in 18 months.
2022-07-12 - Kia Challenge car theft trend begins. A TikTok video posted on 12 July 2022 demonstrated starting certain Kia and Hyundai vehicles using a USB connector and a screwdriver, exploiting the absence of an engine immobiliser in many 2011-2021 US-built models. The technique had circulated among Milwaukee thieves since 2021, but the video drove it nationwide, producing enormous theft spikes in multiple cities. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has linked the trend to at least eight deaths.
2022-08-28 - 'Corn Kid' and 'It's Corn'. A Recess Therapy street interview featured seven-year-old Tariq enthusing about corn, saying that once he tried it with butter 'everything changed'. The Gregory Brothers released an autotuned song version on 28 August 2022 which went viral across TikTok and YouTube. Tariq was named South Dakota's official 'Corn-bassador'. Not a prank, it is a benchmark example of the platform's wholesome viral register.
2022-09-15 - FDA warns on 'Sleepy Chicken' NyQuil cooking trend. On 15 September 2022 the US Food and Drug Administration issued a consumer update warning against cooking chicken marinated in the cold medicine NyQuil, warning that boiling alters the concentration of its active drugs and that inhaling the vapours alone could deliver high drug levels. The warning itself dramatically amplified the trend: TikTok recorded fewer than five searches a day for the term before the statement and around 7,000 by 21 September, a documented case of a safety warning driving the behaviour it targeted.
2022-11-06 - Invisible Filter Challenge and the WASP malware campaign. TikTok's invisible body filter matches a subject's silhouette to the background, making them appear to vanish, and surged in popularity in November 2022. Some creators used it to film while nude, prompting interest in whether the effect could be reversed. Attackers exploited this by advertising fake 'unfiltering' software that instead installed the WASP infostealer, harvesting passwords and cryptocurrency wallets. It is a rare case of a benign visual trend becoming a malware distribution vector.
2023-02-14 - Hyundai and Kia anti-theft software fix. On 14 February 2023 Hyundai and Kia began rolling out a free anti-theft software update for affected models, extending the alarm and requiring the key to be in the ignition for the vehicle to start. Remaining eligible vehicles were covered by June 2023, with owners of ineligible models offered reimbursement for steering wheel locks. The fix came roughly seven months after the theft technique went viral.
2023-05-01 - FBI opens a national swatting database. Under congressional pressure the FBI launched a web-based system allowing police agencies and fusion centres to log and share swatting incidents in near real time. More than 400 incidents were recorded in its first seven months. Until then no national count of swatting existed, which had made the scale of the problem impossible to establish.
2023-06-12 - Grimace Shake horror trend. McDonald's launched a purple berry-flavoured shake on 12 June 2023 for the Grimace character's birthday, and TikTok users turned it into an unplanned horror format: creators would wish Grimace happy birthday, sip the shake, then cut to themselves staged as dead with purple fluid streaming from their mouth. The trend accumulated over 2.9 billion views and McDonald's leaned in, making it a rare case of a subversive fan format benefiting the brand it mocked.
2023-06 - Duolingo and the brand revival of April Fools. With Google and most large platforms out of the tradition, smaller consumer brands took it over, led by Duolingo. In 2023 Duolingo partnered with Peacock to announce a dating show in which no contestant speaks the same language, drawing over 7 million views on the announcement post. The genre shifted from elaborate fake products to social-media-native jokes optimised for sharing.
2023-06 - Wichita settles with the Finch family for $5 million. In March 2023 the City of Wichita approved a $5 million settlement with Andrew Finch's family. A federal appeals court had ruled in July 2022 that the civil claim against the officer could proceed, rejecting his assertion of qualified immunity at that stage. The settlement addressed the police shooting itself, a separate question from the criminal liability of the three men who set the call in motion.
2023 - 'Borg' drinking trend and the UMass Amherst hospitalisations. The 'blackout rage gallon' involves decanting a gallon water jug, refilling it with water, a large volume of spirits and flavouring. In March 2023, 46 students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst required hospital treatment following a day of borg drinking; all were discharged without serious injury. Advocates argued the format offered harm-reduction benefits through drink control, while clinicians warned the volumes normalised dangerous consumption.
2023 - Cities and class action sue Hyundai and Kia. Seventeen municipal entities across seven states, including Buffalo, Milwaukee, Seattle and Cleveland, sued Hyundai and Kia during 2023, arguing the omission of engine immobilisers caused a theft epidemic that drained police resources. A separate consumer class action settled for approximately $200 million after a judge initially declined preliminary approval as not fair, reasonable and adequate; a revised version ringfenced $145 million solely for consumer compensation.
2023-07-20 - r/place runs in July amid the API revolt. Reddit ran r/place a third time from 20 to 24 July 2023, breaking with the April Fools tradition entirely. It launched during the Reddit API pricing controversy, and large parts of the canvas were used to protest the company, with anti-Reddit slogans and support for third-party apps. Reddit closed the canvas early after protest imagery dominated it, making the final revival of its most celebrated experiment also its most hostile.
2023-12-25 - Christmas 2023 swattings target elected officials. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she had been swatted on Christmas Day, describing it as roughly the eighth such incident against her. Hoax calls the same day sent police to the homes of Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Representative Brandon Williams. The cluster crossed party lines and marked the migration of a tactic developed in gaming and streaming circles into political intimidation.
2024-02-24 - Willy's Chocolate Experience. House of Illuminati sold tickets at up to £35 to an unlicensed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory event in Glasgow, marketed with lavish AI-generated images. Attendees found a near-empty warehouse with a small bouncy castle and printed backdrops; actors had been given roughly 15 pages of AI-generated script days earlier. Police attended after parents demanded refunds. Photographs of the venue and of an invented villain called The Unknown became a global meme within 48 hours.
2024-04-01 - K24 TV's Davido arrest prank. On 1 April 2024 Kenya's K24 TV broadcast an April Fools' report that the Nigerian Afrobeats star Davido had been arrested in Kenya after cocaine was found on his private jet. It went viral, helped by his having just performed in Nairobi. Davido called it 'extremely irresponsible', said 'I have never been arrested by anyone in any country for any crime in the world', and instructed lawyers to pursue the outlets; Kenya's Directorate of Criminal Investigations labelled it fake news.
2025-06 - Campus swatting wave hits US universities. From August 2025 a coordinated series of false active-shooter reports triggered lockdowns at dozens of American universities, including Villanova, Iowa State and Kansas State. By mid-September 45 campus hoax threats had been logged, affecting an estimated 1.1 million students. Many calls were routed through VoIP services from overseas, slowing identification of those responsible.
2025 - 'Chromebook Challenge' laptop fires. In spring 2025 students filmed themselves jamming paper clips and pencil lead into school Chromebook ports to short-circuit the devices, with some piercing the lithium battery to make them smoke or catch fire. Denver Public Schools logged more than 30 attempts; a 15-year-old in New Jersey faced arson charges and one school was evacuated. TikTok removed the content under its dangerous activities policy and redirected searches to a safety message.
2025 - 'Door Kick Challenge' and the death of Julian Guzman. An aggressive variant of ding-dong ditch spread from 2025 into 2026, in which participants violently kicked strangers' front doors late at night and filmed the reaction, often sounding to residents like a home invasion. Arrests followed in Florida, Tennessee, California and Pennsylvania. In Houston, 11-year-old Julian Guzman was shot and killed while running from a door he had knocked on, and a 42-year-old man was charged with murder. Police repeatedly warned that residents may respond to a perceived break-in with lethal force.
2026-06 - Vitaly deported to Russia. Vitaly Zdorovetskiy was detained in the Philippines in 2025 on charges including unjust vexation and theft, and was deported to Russia in January 2026. It followed a long arrest record including impersonating a police officer, the Hollywood Sign, the World Series field and the Pyramids of Giza. His trajectory closes the arc of confrontational street pranking as a viable career.

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