SHARING MANA‘O

Did you get through April Fools Day without being pranked or falling for a tall tale? I almost made it. After many years of knowing better, I was tricked last Monday by an announcement that a friend was buying a home in Las Vegas after hitting a huge jackpot over the weekend. I’d been feeling so smug, too, after scrolling past the annual Facebook posts about kupuna pregnancies and social media addicts declaring “I’m done.” I haven’t attempted to April Fool anyone in a long time. As a kid, I was relentless, but my mother always beat me to it. I think I was a second- or third-grader when she first pranked me by preparing a full fool’s breakfast. She replaced my usual hardboiled egg with a raw one. After cleaning the mess, she gave me a perfectly cooked egg, but I quickly discovered she had filled the salt shaker with sugar. And my juice glass contained colored water. Mom’s April Fools jokes were always good-natured and fun; she never set me up for disappointment. Some of the pranks I see on social media are downright mean-spirited and potentially dangerous. My boss at the KAOI Radio Group forwarded the annual reminder from our attorney, advising us that the FCC prohibits stations from broadcasting false information about a crime or catastrophe if it’s likely that the broadcast will cause substantial public harm. The most famous on-air hoax was perpetrated not as an April Fools pranks, but as a Halloween offering by The Mercury Theatre on the Air in 1938. Orson Welles’ adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel “The War of the Worlds” reportedly caused nationwide panic, as naïve listeners thought they were hearing actual news coverage of a Martian invasion. Historians have since concluded that the hysteria was nowhere near the proportions originally reported, but the public outrage was certainly real. Newspaper editorials and public officials demanded the FCC address the hoax, but Welles apologized the next morning at a press conference, and no action was taken against him or CBS Radio. I did participate in what could be considered an on-air hoax, while working as a reporter for KITV-4 in Honolulu. It was elaborate but harmless and, like Mom’s pranks, all in good fun. The Hyatt Regency Waikiki featured a beautiful atrium with a lush tropical garden and a two-story waterfall. The hotel’s engineering department rigged one of the garden’s trees with pineapples in various stages of ripeness, and even planted an identification sign, “Hyattus Pineapplus,” at its base. Hidden behind the waterfall, my cameraman filmed dozens of tourists snapping photos of the pineapple tree, while I lurked nearby with a shotgun microphone, recording their comments. “Look at that, Harold! I didn’t know pineapples grew on trees!” “Well, of course, Maude, everyone knows that. Where did you think they come from?” The Hyatt folks may have gotten the idea from a 1957 April Fools Day report by the BBC, claiming that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record spaghetti crop, complete with footage of workers harvesting limp noodles from trees. Other memorable media pranks of the past include a 1985 Sports Illustrated article about a rookie pitcher whose fastball was clocked at 168 miles per hour, and an announcement by Taco Bell, nearly 30 years ago, that the fast food company had purchased the historic Liberty Bell, which would henceforth be called the Taco Liberty Bell. Even the venerable National Public Radio has committed April Foolery. In 1992, NPR listeners were flabbergasted to hear former President Richard Nixon announcing his intention to run for the office again. The spot was, of course, recorded by a vocal impersonator, and while it fooled many people, it didn’t cause the kind of panic that the FCC frowns upon. Now that I think about it, much of what we call news today is just as outlandish as the hoaxes of yesteryear. I guess Mark Twain wasn’t fooling when he wrote, “April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.”