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The quest to prank, punk or trick others takes centre stage Monday — April Fools’ Day! It’s a strange tradition that dates back hundreds of years.

Early settlers in Calgary — maybe even a great, great-grandparent — would have seen the Daily Herald in its early years of the 1880s and 1890s already reporting on April Fools’ Day tricks that occurred. Details were sometimes sketchy, as this April 3, 1895 report shows.

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That story is almost as intriguing as this one from April 2, 1901 — one sentence, no further explanation given. Guess you had to be there . . .

By 1908, the paper was showing its own sense of humour with this one-sentence story/joke published on April 1.

By the time the 1920s hit, newspapers had discovered the power of pictures. Illustrations could often be found accompanying feature stories. Here are a few April Fools’ Day features from the Herald of that decade showing amazingly detailed drawings, that are also, perhaps, a tad confusing. (Must be 1920s humour.)

April 1, 1923:

March 29, 1924:

April 1, 1936:

The occasional April Fools’ Day joke can go wrong, as this April 1, 1946 story showed.

There’s one website, the Museum of Hoaxes, that ranks the best April Fools’ Day tricks of all time. Based on creativity, notoriety and number of people fooled, the museum says the number one April 1 hoax was the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest. A TV news program staged a fake story in 1957 about Swiss families harvesting spaghetti off trees; the spaghetti farmers said this was a bumper crop because the winter had been mild.

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Number two on the museum’s list was a hoax played by Sports Illustrated in April 1985. It told the story of a baseball pitcher who could throw pitches at 168 mph with complete accuracy, about 65 mph faster than previous record of the day. Other hoaxes on this list include Burger King’s left-handed whopper (designed to be eaten by left-handed people); flying penguins; bra underwires that were causing interference in TV and radio signals; and the fact that Big Ben in London was changing to become a digital clock.

Here are a few other things you may or may not know about April Fools’ Day.

* In some countries, including Canada and Australia, people generally follow the practice of jokes lasting only until noon. In other countries such as the United States, Italy and Japan, the jokes occur all day.

* In France, it’s common practice for a child to paste a picture of a fish on a friend’s back and then yell “April fish,” or as they say in France, “poisson d’avril,” notes Encyclopedia Britannica.

* April Fools’ Day dates back hundreds of years, with early stories of hoaxes going back to times of Chaucer and Ancient Rome.

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