April Fools' dismay
Most people reach the age of 41 before they tire of practical jokes. I was six and three-quarters
By Kathryn Hughes
The Guardian, Tuesday April 1 2008
Felix - the cat food company - has just done a survey to find out at what age we cease to find practical jokes funny. Quite why they would want to do this is a mystery. I can't remember the last time my cat made an apple-pie bed or dressed up as a fake policeman and tried to arrest me. Quite possibly, though, it's the cats who are genuinely puzzled as to why humans get such pleasure out of Borat's or Steve Penk's wind-ups, and are demanding that the company which provides their dinner should deliver some answers.
This report won't give the whiskered ones much comfort, though. Apparently it's not until we're 41 that we humans finally start to tire of the sight of Dead Ringers' Jon Culshaw accosting people in a shopping centre pretending to be Tom Baker. Yes, that's right. It's not until we reach the age when arthritis begins to nip at our fingers and life assurance seems worth investigating that we actually stop doubling up with helpless laughter at the recollection of Noel Edmonds' gunge tank.
I was actually six and three-quarters when I first discovered that practical jokes aren't funny. What they are, in fact, is acts of bullying performed with a sly grin. The physical ones - in Scotland, apparently, you have to kick someone's bottom on April Fools' Day, which must make going to work a riot - are nothing more than simple thuggery.
On any other day you would call the police, or at least go to see someone in human resources, but at this time of the year you are supposed to gurn with pleasure as someone performs a humiliating physical assault upon you. Don't join in and you are guilty of "not having a sense of humour" - itself an extra kind of social shaming. Retaliate with just a tad too much vigour - like, say, holding your tormentor down and kicking them repeatedly in the groin - and it's you who risk being escorted from the building.
And those subtler April Fools' hoaxes performed with a gentlemanly accent are no better. Apparently the Guardian did one back in the late 90s when it said that the Queen was going to start a website. And then - do hold your chuckles and try not to spray Coco Pops around the room - a few years later she actually did. It's a mad world, my masters, and you have to be mad - but in a good way, obviously, not in one that requires intervention from social services - to enter into it fully.
It's for this reason that I have always found watching those television shows which depend on embarrassing people so, well, embarrassing that I have to leave the room with flaming cheeks.
The late Jeremy Beadle was, by all accounts, a darling man, both clever and good. So what on earth persuaded him, not to mention his rapturous audience, that it was funny, or even acceptable, to tease and harry innocent people for sport? It's like bear-baiting, except that the bears mercifully lack the mental capacity to realise just how silly they've been made to look.
The answer, of course, lies in a very simple psychology. We delight in acts of cruelty performed on others because it means that, just this once, we've avoided being the butt of the joke. Laugh loudly enough and, fingers crossed, the bully's glance will not fall on you the next time he is searching for a victim.
All of which makes me very glad that I don't live in a medieval court. (You see, there are always reasons to be cheerful - they just don't involve sewing up someone else's pants.) Imagine how ghastly it must have been to have a jester hopping round like an annoying gnat, forever coming up with jokes at your expense at which you were obliged to laugh like a drain or risk getting a reputation as a sour puss. It would be like the hell of April Fools, but 365 days a year.
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