The 5 Most Misguided April Fools' Pranks of All Time

5 Those Wacky Husseins!

We need to make something clear right now: This article itself is not an April Fools' prank -- everything below actually happened, as far as we know (always feel free to check our sources). We have to tell you that now, because everything in this entry sounds like bad, gruesome parody. It's not -- Saddam Hussein's regime really was a bunch of wacky pranksters.

For instance, on April 1, 1998, the Babil newspaper (owned by Saddam's brutal son Uday) quoted President Bill Clinton in a front page story, saying the U.S. had decided to lift sanctions against Iraq. This was potentially lifesaving news for impoverished Iraqis living under the strict sanctions, so you can only imagine their tears of joy ... which quickly dried when they turned to page two and saw, "April Fools'! It is the beginning of spring. Many happy returns!" Ha! You starving kids just got Uday'd!

Uday had a whole year to think about how to top himself, and on April 1, 1999, the paper's fake headline stated that monthly food rations would now include bananas, Pepsi, and chocolate. You can guess how that thigh slapper went over.

But then, like all great comedians, the Husseins eventually started recycling material, reusing the crowd-pleasing sanction gag in 2000 and the oh my aching sides! ration one in 2001. Unfortunately, Captain Bringdown, er, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdula Aziz bin Abdullah Al al-Sheikh ground the clown car to a halt by banning April Fools' Day altogether in 2001 for some strange reason.

But there would be one last hurrah for the wacky Iraqi pranksters. In March of 2003, Iraq was invaded by a coalition of forces led by the U.S. and UK. As thousands of American-led coalition troops stormed across Iraq, the Iraqi Ambassador to Russia, Abbas Khalaf Kunfuth, held a press conference. It was expected he would announce that Iraq conceded defeat. Instead he held up a piece of paper that he identified as a news flash from Reuters and read, "The Americans have accidentally fired a nuclear missile into British forces, killing seven ..."

He paused, to allow the reporters to absorb the horror of the situation, before shouting, "April Fools'!"

Again, we want to make it clear: That absolutely happened.

4 Playboy Runs a "How To Beat Your Wife" Guide

There was a time when a respectable publication could joke about domestic abuse and everyone would just have a good-natured laugh about it (after all, isn't that what The Honeymooners was about?). That time was not the year 2000.

On April Fools' Day of that year, the Romanian edition of Playboy published an article giving their readers some handy tips on how to beat their wives senseless, a piece easily identified by its title: "How to Beat Your Wife without Leaving Prints." In this, men were advised to grab them by the hair to make sure they couldn't get away, and then hit them with a variety of items including sticks, washing machine belts, and kitchen knives. Ha! Just the kind of gentle ribbing we all love on this fine holiday!

Oh, and the tips were ostensibly provided by an ex-policeman, so readers could be sure that no one could ever find out about their heinous acts of fuckshittery. Meanwhile, men who showed hesitation at the thought of beating their women to within an inch of their lives were told to take up knitting, apparently because they aren't cut out for being a REAL MAN.

Now, this would have been considered a shitty and grossly-offensive piece of satire if it had been published in any other country. But in Romania, this was just a step shy of bringing Nicolae Ceausescu back to life to conduct the beatings himself. You have to understand that at the time, Romania just happened to have one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the world, a situation exacerbated by widespread poverty and a poor education system. And, while we don't mean to sound creepy here, those tips look pretty goddamn authentic.

Rightly, an almighty shitstorm soon ensued, with protests taking place in the country's capital of Bucharest that were supported by 51 organizations all over the world. Playboy apologized and pledged to donate money to a variety of anti-domestic violence programs, including those that would provide shelters for victims, some of which it may or may not have sent there.

True to form, however, one of the Editors responsible for the piece tried to defend it by saying that the tips wouldn't have worked anyway, making this whole "hate crime" thing completely moot. That's right, he'll surely figure out that beating a woman with a kitchen knife doesn't work! It just kills her! April fool!

3 The Classic '"Fake Your Own Death'" Bit

You know who doesn't celebrate April Fools'? Cops. Much to the surprise of pranksters everywhere, "April Fools'" is actually not a valid defense in court. So before you plan your wacky prank, please make sure the thing you're doing isn't against the law. For instance, did you know that in many places it's a crime to fake your own death? It's true! Damn it, it's treating people with respect run amok!

So, it was April of 2004 and a guy named Randy Wood from rural New York decided he would play a prank on his ex-wife. In a stunt that we're pretty sure could have accidentally killed him for real at several points, he rigged up a harness in a tree in his front yard, with a fake noose, to make it look like he had hanged himself. He calls her up and tells her to come over, because he had something to show her. Then he climbs the tree and manages to get himself into his fake suicide setup without actually murdering himself in the process.

Of course, it's impossible to know exactly how he thought this would play out. Remember, this was his ex-wife. Did he think she would run up in tears and hug his lifeless body, and suddenly remember how much she missed him? Or did he think she would scream in horror, at which point he would open his eyes and say "BOO!" and try to induce a heart attack?

Because what actually happened is his wife did what you're supposed to do when you see somebody dangling by their goddamned neck from a tree limb: She called 911. Then they sent fire trucks, ambulances, and cop cars to the scene. At which point Wood had to either admit that it was all a stupid prank, or try to pretend that he had tried to kill himself with a harness that looped around his crotch due to a gross misunderstanding of human anatomy.

As it turns out, faking an incident to dispatch emergency services is punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail. "He said he did it as an April Foo's' joke, but obviously it's not a funny matter," Sherriff Reuel Todd said. Damn, we guess they set the bar pretty high in West Monroe.

2 April Fools Apocalypse Documentary Fools Everyone (by Airing in June)

On June 20, 1977, Anglia TV in England broadcast a documentary titled "Alternative 3" as part of a regular, not-fake series called "Science Report." The announcer explained the documentary had started as a piece about British scientists leaving the country to find better jobs, but that in the course of the investigation they had realized scientists weren't just disappearing from Britain, they were dying mysteriously -- especially physicists, engineers, and astronomers. Could this be some sort of conspiracy?

The documentary producers then said that they had not only uncovered evidence of an unknown space program, but that these scientists were leaving the earth. They claimed to have uncovered evidence of a conspiracy between world governments that was unfolding in a three-stage plan to deal with impending environmental disaster:

Alternative one: Curb population.
Alternative two: House government officials underground until the impending disaster had passed.
Alternative three: Send humanity's brightest minds to a secret Noah's Ark colony on Mars.

The documentary filmmakers had discovered that "Alternative Three" was a reality! They even had an interview with an American astronaut who claimed he stumbled upon a secret lunar base! Holy fuck!

It's impossible to know how many people took the show as real versus how many were merely confused (again, this was not a fake news show and this was not April Fools' Day), but Anglia TV was flooded with calls from people who thought it was, and large parts of the Internet still do. You can still watch the documentary online and find literally dozens of websites claiming it's the truth. Here's a lady telling a radio show she was just invited to join the Mars colony in 2007:

And all of this is because their wacky April Fools' hoax got delayed by a strike that required them to air it more than two months after the holiday. Guys, in the future, just save that shit for next year.

1 Israeli Intelligence Officer Commits Prank, Near-Act of War

Everyone gets bored on the job sometimes, even military intelligence analysts for countries surrounded by other countries who have vowed to annihilate them. So in 1986, an Israeli intelligence officer decided to spice up his April 1st work shift by creating a report stating that the Lebanese Shia leader Nabih Berri had been seriously wounded in an assassination attempt. Ha! It's that old "assassination of a Muslim political leader" classic! And made even better by the fact that Israel and Lebanon were (and still technically are) at war.

The report was sent out to Israeli government officials, and, upon hearing the news, the Defense Minister burst into a parliamentary meeting to announce the attack (a situation which we can't imagine taking place without a huge set of double doors being flung open). And, even worse, the report was sent out to the state-run radio station, who reported it to the masses for most of the morning. This meant the report was also being broadcast to Muslim supporters of Berri in the area, who were already distrustful of Israel on account of the whole "war" thing. In other words, even after it was announced as a hoax later that day, some probably still saw it as the Israeli government making a veiled threat.

And what of the analyst who set this off? Well, after having to watch his boss (the aforementioned Defense Minister) squirm his way through an apology to the exact same parliamentary meeting he interrupted earlier, he was thrown in prison for 35 days.

If you like his words, you can find more from Adam at his site or by following/bothering him on Twitter. You can also contact him with writing gigs at adamwearscracked@gmail.com.

For more ill-advised pranks, check out 5 Wacky Internet Pranks That Can Get You Jail Time and 6 Office Pranks That Went Horribly Awry.