Notable April Fools' Pranks[]
The Misplacement of Notré Dame[]
Pierre-Antoine Asselineau was a Parisian entertainer of middling talent, born in 1866. In 1917, when the citizenry of Paris were facing shortages and rationing due to the war effort, he put on his grandest performance to date in an attempt to provide levity and comic relief to the city. At the top of the show, however, Asselineau's aging body betrayed him and a single stumble sent him tumbling into the stage dressings. The show was ruined, the set was destroyed, and the audience cajoled and laughed at him relentlessly. News of the catastrophic event spread through the city like wildfire, and Parisians would mock him wherever he went.
Seeking revenge for the ceaseless cruelty, Asselineau plotted one final performance - a show that would shock the entire city into awe. He spent the rest of 1917 and the start of 1918 planning and developing the event. In March of 1918, he hired local children to plaster advertisements for the upcoming performance all around the city. The venue: the plaza of Notré Dame.
A photograph taken from the ground in front of Notré Dame, looking up at where the iconic rose window should be. The cathedral is notably absent. (1918, colorized)
On April 1st, Asselineau stepped onto a temporary stage in front of the cathedral. Massive scaffolding had been erected around Notré Dame, and hundreds of Parisians watched as he used a series of winches and pulleys and ropes to pull huge sheets of fabric up around the cathedral, blocking it from view. An hour later, Asselineau performed his trick - he cut the ropes holding up the fabric and when the fabric fell, the cathedral was nowhere to be found.
The audience nearly rioted, demonizing Asselineau and demanding that he bring the cathedral back. Under mob rule, he once again erected the fabric and performed the trick in reverse - only this time, it didn't work. Notré Dame didn't return when the fabric was released.
Asselineau was arrested and jailed for grand theft cathedral, and he died in prison just a few short months later, in September of 1918.
Two years later, a backpacking couple discovered that Notré Dame had been hiding in the forests west of Strasbourg, and French officials were able to coax the cathedral back to Paris.
The Fandom Wiki Project[]
In August of 2021, Fandom held a friendly competition to create wikis for each of the twelve months of the year. The month of April (which bills itself as "[t]he month with built-in mischief"[1]) decided to populate its contents with comedic misinformation.
An April Fools' prank being performed on the December wiki.
Furthermore, April undertook an effort to infiltrate the other eleven months' wikis, inserting links that would direct a user back to an April Fools' page on the April wiki.
These efforts did not result in a win for April. Instead, November won because they "put in a lot of work" and "created a lot more pages than everyone else" and "made their wiki look good." Winning by honest effort and good work? How dare they.
The user responsible for the pranks, Tlake-fd, got a friendly ban, though; for a month whose patron saint should probably be Loki, that's arguably a win in its own right.
References[]