"The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year."
-Mark Twain
Modern man at times, seems to think he invented humour. We had vaudeville, stand-up comedians, sitcoms, cartoon strips, ad finitum ad snickeringum. But the fun started long before the twentieth century
A Year By Any Other Name
In France, people used to get out the party hats and later in the evening the lampshades, on April 1, to celebrate the New Year. Then Pope Gregory had a brainstorm, putting together 12 sheets of paper with blocks too small to write in, and cute pictures of puppies and kittens, and called it the Gregorian calendar. And the Pope said it would begin on January 1. And it was good. Except to those who had not heard his edict, or simply didn't believe it. Consequently, when they continued to party as usual, others would call them "April Fools". Not believing it in the first place, led to the tradition of telling people things that weren't true, so they too could be April Fools. You believe this?
Faked Fossils For Fractious Fellow
Johan Beringer, (1667-1740) may have been the first teacher, foxed by his students. In 1725, after he had hired some local boys to dig on a nearby mountain, he was outbid by some junior faculty members of the University. They paid the boys to provide Beringer with some amazing, three dimensional fossils on rock slabs. Beringer, in raptures at this historic find, began writing a long treatise on their significance. He was still at it a year later, when the guys finally decided to "rock" his theories. They sent him a fossil with a 3-D image of his name. He sued his colleagues, and while the case aged gracefully in court, he ran around buying up all the copies of his book, " Lithographiae Wirceburgensis"
A Town By Any Other Color
It was April 6, 1837 and the end of season races left the fox hunting fellows with time, and paint on their hands. The eccentric Marquis of Waterford and a few of his cronies, decided the town should match their hunting "pinks", which are actually red melton cloth. Thus was born "painting the town red".
Coals to Fire the Funnybone
In 1905, coal tar product salesman, Soren Sorenson Adams, (Sammy to his friends) noticed that the leavings of his goods, black dust, had the power to invoke earth shattering sneezes. He began to investigate it's giggle potential, sprinkling it through hotel keyholes, outdoors where bands played, and once, at a trapshooting competition. When he put it on the market under the name of Cachoo, one Philadelphia buyer purchased 70,000 bottles in the first three months. Cachooooooooooo! Bless you.
He Was A Real Card
After acing the sneeze powder, S.S.Adams became a real life joker, inventing over 700 of the most popular practical jokes, including squirting flowers, snakes in jars, and the famous dribble glass. For which, the joke would be outta this world. Dribble glasses do not work in space. Why? Surface tension, and no gravity. Water tends to cling to things (like dog's feet crossing your kitchen floor.). This is why water dribbles down a victim's chin instead of falling in drops. In space it would likely run up your nose.
He Was Real...No He Wasn't...He Was...No He Wasn't..
German folklore is rich in the stories of one Till Eulenspiegel, major prankster, said to have lived in the 14th century. "Eulenspiegel" literally means "owl mirror", and people theorised that in his stories, Till was wisely holding a mirror up, so people could see themselves in the tales. It was also a fairly common name at the time. It was also suspected of being the vulgar expression "Ul'n speghel" or to wipe one's arse; an interpretation that would have fit right in with his humorous stories of practical jokes. A 1500A.D. book about his life, contains a preface written by "N", someone who claims to know little of Latin or high learning, but who appears to know more than a latter day historian could, about Till's day to day life of laughter, lived from 1290-1350. Bringing people to wonder, if the real joke, was not the forging of the stories.
Real or not, the character of Eulenspiegel had the engaging habit, whenever he had pulled some particularly good piece of foolery, to write with chalk or coal over the door: "Hic fuit (He was here). So at least now we know where "Kilroy" (was here) was born.
Betty Sleep is a freelancer, author and owner of Carraig Creative Writing and Editorial Services http://www.carraigcreative.com.She is the author of “Ten Minute Trivia”, the award winning middle grade novel “Purrlock Holmes and the Case of the Vanishing Valuables”, and is a regular contributor to the Uncle John Bathroom Readers.Her latest work in print appears in one of the new series from the Chicken Soup publishers, The Ultimate Dog Lover’s Book, release date November 2008.
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