I used to love April Fools Day. It was a day for kids to pull pranks on each other and as long as nobody got hurt, is relatively harmless. Now with the advent of social media, every company social media department feels the need to have some sort of April Fools joke and the quality varies.
But April Fools Day is something different now. Now it involves everyone from a blog to a Fortune 500 company to come up with something for April Fools Day just for the sake of April Fools Day. One soccer team decided to be too subtle and plan their April Fools joke around something that actually could happen and has happened in the past.
Charlotte Independence in USL announced on Friday that they signed NFL legend and current ESPN NFL analyst Randy Moss to be goalkeeper. Considering this is March 31 and we had a scenario in 2011 where Chad Ochocinco had a tryout with Sporting Kansas City, it would be completely realistic to think that the team and Moss would actually do this.
For one thing, Moss would have great hands to be a goalkeeper and Charlotte could market him to sell tickets. I don’t know how Moss would handle the other aspects of playing the position and soccer in general but it’s entirely plausible. And after reading the announcement as well as watching the video, there’s no obvious indication that this was an April Fools joke (especially since it’s March 31).
The only indication of this being an April Fools joke is that the first letter of every sentence in the announcement spells out “April Fools.” And therein lay my issue with April Fools Day.
Not only was this done in March and involved a situation that has legitimately happened before, it’s not even that good of a prank. And the joke was revealed in such a subtle way that 99% of people would have no clue the first letters of each sentence spelled out “April Fools” unless they were told that beforehand.
Especially in this day and age of “fake news” seeping through what we read to get our news, the last thing we need is reputable sites trying to do it for a joke just because everyone else is doing it. Even if the New York Times came up with something obviously fake like “The NFL switches its fields to the metric system,” that still shows up on search engines along with everything else that’s legit. It may be a barely amusing joke for a minute or two but it’s not really a joke when someone comes along your joke article in the middle of September, didn’t notice that it was written on April 1 and believe that it’s true because the New York Times is a reputable and quality source.
So this Saturday, or worse Friday if someone wants to be even more insufferable, we’ll all be forced to not believe anything we read for the next couple days and have to sit through some uncomfortably unfunny jokes from people who think they’re very clever. Think of this like stand-up comedy. Everyone thinks they can be a comedian but when they actually do it, it’s usually an uncomfortable train wreck. Leave the jokes to the professionals and let places like The Onion and our site Sports Pickle handle satirical news. For everyone else, this is one holiday where you don’t need to do something, just for the sake of doing something.
Now I’m hoping nobody at The Comeback decides to do something tomorrow and really make me look like an idiot.
