April Fool's Day An Obituary

We are sad to announce that April Fool’s Day, a tradition of japes and falsehoods dating back as far as the 16th Century, was finally laid to rest today after a long and brave struggle.

It was at least 400 years old .

The custom’s demise was confirmed in Britain on Monday following weeks of you-can’t-be-serious political developments that made left-handed toilet paper seem a credible alternative to getting yourself out of a shitty mess.

April Fool’s Day passed away while touring a spaghetti field in Switzerland . Its last words are reported to have been “Oh, what’s the fucking point any more.”

A coroner’s report revealed that April Fool’s Day had been dually afflicted by an increasingly incompetent political class and the year-round gullibility of some social media users.

It had planned to spend today trying to convince people that a Tory MP had voted for a Brexit deal they helped create, just months after calling it rubbish and resigning over it, but was pipped to the post by Dominic Raab.

A life in laughs 

After peaking in the 80s by convincing BBC viewers Big Ben was going digital , the tradition began to ail in the 90s with the creation of the internet.

In 1994 April Fool’s Day was a victim of its own success – an attempt to stop drunk people using the world wide web , which had already been dubbed a “Lair of Slop”, was widely interpreted as a prank. Just days later, the first internet troll was born.

The turn of the century passed relatively uneventfully and April Fool’s Day initially thrived in a fledgling digital tech world filled with wonders such as Google’s Toilet Internet Service Provider  and Rick Astley’s YouTube-revived second coming .

But behind the LOLs, social media and our political class were slowly ruining everything. After the 2012 Olympics ushered in the brief and glorious period known as Peak-Great Britain, everything turned to sludge.

April Fool’s Day was struck down with its eventually fatal condition on 21 April, 2014 when Ed Miliband ate a bacon sandwich while impersonating an acid rain-ravaged gargoyle. 

This moment is widely thought to have set off a series of events that in 2016 allowed then-Prime Minister David Cameron to fulfil his lifelong dream of penning his memoirs in a £25,000 shed , free of EU Regulation 2015/1185 which would have rendered his hideaway’s cosy wood-burning stove illegal.

The subsequent rise of fake news that accompanied the EU referendum and the election of Donald Trump made the existence of April Fool’s Day ever more perilous.

Its health deteriorating, it stumbled through 2017/18 finding it increasingly difficult to make itself heard over the president’s Twitter feed and a story shared over a million times on Facebook about a man who died from E.Coli after trying oral sex for the first time .

The final nail in the coffin came in the last weeks of March this year when 650 elected UK officials voted to have a say on Brexit and then said absolutely nothing at all .

Shortly after Boris Johnson compared himself to Moses on the front page of The Telegraph, a haggard and stricken looking April Fool’s Day was seen boarding an EasyJet flight to Geneva accompanied by the hope and dignity of a once proud nation.

April Fool’s Day is survived by Boris Johnson and two Russian men with a totally innocent and not at all suspicious penchant for cathedrals.