Listen.

Put your ear up to screen and you will hear the ocean. Really.

Here’s the thing about April Fools’ tricks: The truly epic ones are imports. Specifically, made in Britain.

First of all, let me make the landscape clear. I’m not talking about the common April Fools’ Day prank. Not that I have anything against the salt in the sugar bowl, the whoopee cushion in the chair, the bucket of water over the door, the soap masquerading as cream cheese in the bagel, the shoelaces tied together. It’s just that these are so traditional as to be almost universal. More important, they show limited imagination.

I’m not saying that Americans can’t pull off April Fools’ Day pranks. I love the one Vermont television producer Greg Bemis set up.

“At an old job,” he says, “each member of my department sent our boss an e-mail letter of resignation over the course of the day. The reasons given for leaving were completely plausible.”

The trick here, of course, was timing. “We scheduled it out so she would be sent a new e-mail from a different employee every 45 minutes or so,” Bemis says. “I had an office right across the hall from her. The day started out well enough, but by the time lunch rolled around, she was just sitting at her desk with her head in her hands.”

Skillful, yes. Mischievous, yes. But not epic.

No, a truly epic April Fools’ trick needs an epic target, not just the bossy big sister, the annoying little brother. A truly epic April Fools’ trick, like a great work of art, stalks far bigger and more powerful game. It’s not a prank but a hoax. It bubbles up from more vast and lingering resentments. It embodies the wishes of not just the prankster but an entire class of pranksters. It requires a strange and unnatural combination of brilliance, boldness, and deeply repressed hatred. In short, it takes a Brit.

What? you cry in disbelief. What about the famous Collapsing Capitol hoax of 1933, when the Madison Capital-Times reported, along with convincingly faked photo, that the Wisconsin state capitol building lay in ruins following a series of mysterious explosions, attributed to “large quantities of gas, generated through many weeks of verbose debate in the Senate and Assembly chambers”? What about the great Michigan Shark Experiment of 1981, when according to the Herald-News of Roscommon, Michigan, the federal government was about to spend $1.3 million on stocking three lakes in northern Michigan with blue sharks, hammerheads, and Great Whites to see if sharks could survive the Wolverine State’s cold climate?

Those aren’t bad, not bad at all. But a couple of states—even all 50—couldn’t match the motivation the Brits bring to April Fools’ hoaxes, not just a chip on the shoulder but a chip on generations of shoulders, generations that lack the motive, means, or opportunity to carry it out. Until someone does. Not sure what I’m talking about? OK, let’s compare and contrast American and British hoaxes, category by category. Here’s the first of three.

I. The Anti-Empire Hoax

The epic hoax, the prank that strikes coast to coast, is a product of the mass media: newspapers, radio, television, the Internet. The point is, though, that not all media are equally funny. With all due respect, a prank carried out by the Madison Capital-Times is small potatoes—or perhaps, given the location, small cheeses. A news source that creates a hoax deliberately punctures its own authority. The greater the authority, the greater the wheeze of escaping gas. What are the great thunderers of American media? The New York Times? The Cronkite-era CBS News? Where are their April Fools’ gags? As far as I can tell, nowhere.

Let’s cross the Atlantic, go back to 1957, and visit the British Broadcasting Corporation, an entity so staid that for a time it required newscasters to read the news in full evening dress on the radio. The BBC was not just state-owned broadcasting; it was state-owned broadcasting that spoke in the plummy accents of an entire history of old-school-tie privilege. With all due respect, we’re not in Madison anymore.

On April 1, Richard Dimbleby—think of a Walter Cronkite ­figure so godlike that he presented the news and did the play-by-play at royal weddings—announced on the TV news program Panorama that the early spring that year meant an early harvest in Switzerland—of spaghetti.

Viewers saw footage of cheery Swiss villagers harvesting strands of spaghetti from spaghetti trees. (Bear in mind that the English still saw spaghetti as an exotic foreign food, preferring to stick to things like fish and chips, bangers and mash, bubble and squeak, toad in the hole, and spotted dick.) Meanwhile, Dimbleby burbled on about the dangers of frost and the pesky spaghetti weevil, now thankfully conquered.

Some 250 viewers jammed the BBC switchboard. Where could they go to see the spaghetti harvest? Where could they buy the plants so they could grow their own? “Many British enthusiasts,” producer Michael Peacock reportedly told them, “have had admirable results from planting a small tin of spaghetti in tomato sauce.”

Howls of outrage ensued, of course. Questions were probably asked in the House of Commons. How could the BBC ever be taken seriously again? Harrumph, harrumph.

And that’s the point: The spaghetti-harvest hoax wasn’t just a way of making someone look like an idiot—a prank, in my terminology. By making fun of the BBC’s tradition of British infallibility and the diehards who still lived in the Victorian splendor of the nation’s past, the network struck a blow against the Empire, let out a polite little belch in the face of hypocrisy and pompous tradition. The spaghetti harvest did what Monty Python would do 15 years later: It made you never quite trust what you saw on television again. And a good thing, too.

II. The Sports Hoax

Sport attracts April foolery because sport is essentially a series of children’s games that adults take way, way too seriously. Not surprising, then, that America’s greatest and most inventive April Fools’ hoax involved baseball. The send-up of the national pastime appeared in the pages of Sports Illustrated, and it was the work of the journalist George Plimpton.

Plimpton was something of a hoax in his own right: He more or less invented undercover sports journalism, persuading the Detroit Lions to let him attend training camp as a backup quarterback, pitching against the National League All-Star team, and sparring against both Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson. Anyone accustomed to that degree of physical abuse can’t have been especially fazed by the prospect of messing with the minds of readers of the country’s top sports magazine, and in the issue for the first week of April 1985, Plimpton broke the story (add your own air quotes) of Sidd Finch, a rookie pitching phenom who could throw a fastball 168 mph.

The backstory clearly fired up Plimpton’s imagination. Finch, he wrote, had been raised in an orphanage in England, adopted by a famous archaeologist, educated at Harvard and then taught control of the mind and the baseball in a monastery in Tibet. Despite never having played baseball, Finch turned up at training camp in Florida with one foot bare and the other in a hiking boot and blew every batter away.

A surprising number of readers fell for this malarkey—notably the baseball team of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, which invited Finch to its annual banquet—even though Plimpton embedded in his article two clear warnings that the story was bogus. One hint was the fact that the subtitle ran: “He’s a pitcher, part yogi, and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent lifestyle, Sidd’s deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball.” This was an acrostic: Take the first letter of each of the words before the dash and you get “H-A-P-P-Y A-P-R-I-L F-O-O-L-S D-A-Y.” The other hint that the whole thing was a trick—or am I imagining this?—was that the team Finch tried out for was the Mets.

Nice attention to detail. Good inventiveness. Eight out of 10. But let’s take a closer look.

First of all, the reason Plimpton pulled off such a passable hoax was that he actually considered himself an honorary Brit. He went to Harvard, yes, but also Cambridge. He was not only a journalist but editor of the Paris Review, a literary magazine of the highest tone. And he adopted a kind of mid-Atlantic drawl. Somewhere in all that other-side-of-the-pondness he picked up the Brit tradition of irony.

Yet the Sidd Finch trick doesn’t make it into the highest ranks of April Fools’ jokes for the simple reason that baseball just isn’t funny. The fact that baseball fans can clutch the concept of Field of Dreams to their bosoms along with peanuts and Crackerjacks, and that they can weep manly tears at the scene in The Natural when Roy Hobbs hits the home run that shatters the stadium lights—these people do not appreciate irony. Recall that all great pranks require an audience that wished they had pulled off such a work of genius. So we remember Plimpton’s trick as just a joke rather than the home run that shattered the ponderous image of Sports Illustrated or the absurd seriousness of the baseball fan.

Want to see how an expert does a sports hoax? Well, we turn to the British Isles, of course, but we also need to need to take a closer look at a truly comic sport: astronomy.

From the late ’50s until this very day, the BBC has had a kind of astronomer-in-residence named Patrick Moore. Unlike the ultra-earnest Carl Sagan, Moore effectively turned astronomy into a sport, hopping around from foot to foot as he spoke, waving his arms wildly and possessing a pair of eyebrows thick enough to grace a woolly mammoth and apparently in constant eccentric orbit around the twin planets of his monocle and his domed head. If that doesn’t qualify in your mind as a sport, he once swallowed a fly live on the air. Difficult stuff.

In 1976, Moore announced on BBC Radio that at 9:47 a.m. on April 1, Pluto would pass directly behind Jupiter. He claimed the two planets’ combined gravitational pull would be so potent that Earth’s own gravity would lessen, and if anyone jumped into the air at that moment, he’d feel a floating sensation.

Still don’t think astronomy qualifies as a sport? Such is the authority of the BBC that (a) hundreds of people called in to say they had jumped, and (b) most of them said yes, they had felt that very sensation. One woman said that she and 11 friends had floated up from their chairs and drifted around the room.

One telltale sign of an epic hoax, of course, is its effect on its hoaxees, and here we have something close to perfection. Plimpton fooled a baseball team into inviting a nonexistent player to a dinner; Moore got people to believe they had left the surface of the Earth. This is not only dizzyingly, delightfully surreal; it is entirely appropriate for the sport in question—namely, astronomy. Did Plimpton’s gag have people writing in to claim that they had seen someone throw a baseball as fast as the top speed of a Porsche? I think not.

III. The Faraway Hoax

At this point we leave every American April Fools’ Day prank behind and head into a realm of hoaxes on the scale of great art, hoaxes so imaginative that they make us realize that Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal were, in their way, April Fools’ jokes for the ages. In other words, we leave for the islands of San Serriffe.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The most creative, the most skillfully satirical, the most long-lasting, the most professional—heck, it even made its way into the English language—April Fools’ Day joke struck on April 1, 1977, all over the United Kingdom. There’s no point in mentioning an American challenger. This one stands alone.

Are We Going to Take This? Tim Brookes may sell the line that the U.K. beats the U.S. in the hoax business, but Spirit isn’t buying. We pitted some of America’s most famous hoaxes in several categories against those of our neighbors across the pond. We chose winners based on creativity, longevity, and the number of people duped. The results prove without a doubt that we Yanks win.
Fairytale Hoax United states A New York tobacconist in 1869 creates a 10-foot statue he passes off as a petrified giant in exhibitions across the country. The hoax later becomes a literary inspiration for writers ranging from Mark Twain to Stephen King. united kingdom Young cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in 1917 present photographs of themselves playing with fairies in Cottingley Village. The photos look so convincing that even author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle falls for the hoax. The winner: tie The giant obviously casts a larger shadow, but it’s not easy to fool the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Imposter Hoax United states P.T. Barnum draws huge audiences across the country in 1835 to see Joice Heth, a woman who claims to be the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. united kingdom A beautiful stranger turns up in 1837 in Bristol, identifying herself as Princess Caraboo from the exotic island Javasu. The captivated English public soon learns she is a British maid. And the island? Fake also. The winner: u.s. Not only did Barnum make his name with this hoax, he also convinced people that someone could live a hundred years past the life expectancy at that time.	Faraway Hoax United states The New York Sun in 1835 publishes a series of articles announcing the discovery of life on the moon. The paper described bison, unicorns, and humanoids with bat-like wings. united kingdom London newspaper The Guardian in 1977 publishes a supplement touting the fictional island nation of San Serriffe. The winner: u.k. Creating a nation based on words from typography requires slightly more imagination than cheap comic-book imagery. But only slightly. Broadcast Hoax United states Orson Welles broadcasts “The War of the Worlds” in 1938 on CBS radio, causing listeners all across America to panic about an invasion from Mars. united kingdom BBC airs a news report in 1957 that Switzerland expects an early harvest of spaghetti trees. Hundreds of viewers call in to ask where they can purchase the trees. The winner: u.s. Welles’ narrative was so convincing that a New Jersey man mistook a water tower for a spaceship and blasted it with a gun. No one hunted spaghetti anywhere. — Jon Nicholas Jackson	Literary Hoax United states Clifford Irving and Richard Suskind land a major book deal in 1970 by concocting a faux manuscript purporting to be Howard Hughes’ autobiography. The hoax was recently the basis of a Richard Gere film titled, er, The Hoax. united kingdom While in contention for a Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing publishes a book in 1983 under the pseudonym Jane Somers. She wants to show how hard it is for new writers to become established. The book sells about 4,500 copies. The winner: u.s. Lessing didn’t need to go through all that trouble to prove what everyone already knows.

It looked harmless enough: a special supplement to the national daily newspaper The Guardian. You’ve seen this kind of thing: a few pages dedicated to a particular country, touting its economy and puffing up its value as a tourist destination, giving a brief overview of its history that conveniently omits mention of regimes notorious for torture, and in general providing a bogus pretext for selling advertising space to businesses with interests in the area.

The journalists who write this nonsense know, of course, that drivel is drivel. The Guardian itself once had to bring the presses to a screeching halt when someone noticed that an editor had written “Are we really sinking so low as to print this tendentious rubbish?” beside the advertorial copy, and this comment had been mistakenly typeset along with everything else.

The purpose of the hoax, then, was a suitably noble one: to get readers to think more critically about the garbage that is all too often laid in front of them in the name of journalism. The stage was set for an April Fools’ joke that was not just a prank or a trick but a kind of performance art or political guerrilla theater. In short, it’s the best of its kind.

I got The Guardian that day and, I admit, I barely glanced at the “special supplement” on San Serriffe. By the time I got to work, though, everyone, but everyone, was reading it, calling people over, laughing so hard they slid off their seats. San Serriffe—OK, this is your last hint: Think sans serif, think typography—was a pair of islands, shaped suspiciously like a semicolon, in the Indian Ocean. The north island was called Upper Caisse, the south island Lower Caisse. The country’s leader was General Pica. Its capital was Bodoni, and all its townships sounded suspiciously like the names of fonts.

Article after article gave straight-faced accounts of the history, language, sports, culture, and natural resources of San Serriffe. The Arts section, for example, reported the annual Festival of the Well-made Play, when San Serriffi actors would perform the complete cycle of plays by minor English playwrights in English, Caslon, and Ki-flong (the languages of the island). Not that the islanders liked or even understood the plays; they were mysteriously drawn to what they took to be rituals, and would “applaud wildly whenever an actor appears wearing a Harris tweed hacking jacket with a centre vent and cavalry twill trousers and a paisley cravat.” The newspaper also encouraged travel during the summer solstice so visitors could see the “Dance of the Pied Slugs.”

The Guardian let advertisers in on the joke, making everything about the supplement seem more plausible. Texaco offered a contest whose first prize was a two-week trip to Cocobanana Beach in San Serriffe. Kodak ran an ad saying, “If you have a picture of San Serriffe, we’d like to see it.”

The hoax was a spectacular success with both those who got the joke(s) and those who didn’t. Travel agents and airlines were inundated with calls asking for tickets to the island nation, and the newspaper was inundated with calls asking for extra copies of the supplement, which was then reprinted multiple times as a stand-alone publication.

The term “San Serriffe” became part of the comic vocabulary of Britain. The joke’s author, Geoffrey Taylor, became a folk hero. A series of scholarly books were written about San Serriffe’s publishing industry. The fictitious islands lived on, achieving almost literary status. San Serriffe reappeared in The Guardian on April Fools’ Day in 1978, 1980, and 1999, each time in a different ocean. It became a modern-day version of Swift’s floating island of Laputa, last sighted off the coast of New Zealand.

Look out of the window of this aircraft. If you happen to be passing over a body of water, you may see San Serriffe, its semicolon shape perhaps the right way up, perhaps upside down, perhaps on its side. Please report it to a member of the cabin crew.

Tim Brookes is a fisheries expert from Maine. No, just kidding. He’s the director of the Professional Writing Program at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. No, really....