April Fool. An icon of practical jokery, an inspiration to countless pranksters of today, regarded by the world as one of the finest to ever wear the squirting flower lapel. Who could forget Madame Fool’s decades-spanning career, with highlights such as the Woodstock Music Festival, introducing zebra mussels to Kentucky and convincing George W. Bush that the word was pronounced “nucular?”
However, this piece, while written with great respect for Madame Fool, is not a tribute to her. Countless biographers have already chronicled her storied career, but seldom have they done justice to the achievements of April Fool’s eleven siblings, all of them named after months. (The Fool parents ran a calendar-selling business out of their log cabin; historians are divided on if they found symbolic significance in the month names or, after the stress of each birth, were simply getting name ideas from nearby objects.)
Of these 11, the most cunning and ambitious was March Fool. Old March, as they presumably called him, whoever they are, had difficulty making acquaintances: whenever he introduced himself, his interlocutor, thinking they had been directed to “march, fool,” would feel both dismissed and affronted, and would depart in the manner of a soldier. Occasionally they would simply begin marching in place, but this disheartened March as well, for anyone who accepts being called a fool without protest is hardly an honorable pranking target.
Friendless, March became an outcast, logging trees in the remotest reaches of the Michigan peninsula. During his lumberjacking career, March shrewdly realized that after a long, dark winter, society would be eager for any measure that promised to delay sundown, and would even overlook glaring design flaws. Through connections in Congress, March submitted a plan to set clocks forward one hour every spring; a patient dreamer, he hoped that the shifts would add up until the whole country was eventually going about their days entirely at night. The bill was passed, and March Fool seemed certain to go down in history. Tragically, however, his upstart brother November had had a similar idea, and had bluffed it through the House and Senate with equal efficacy. Thus the brothers’ pranks negated each other, and years would pass before they reconciled, on the grounds that one day a year being less than a day long, and another being more, was still pretty good for an accidental joint effort.
With Daylight Saving Time, as it is now known, becoming increasingly automated, the legacies of March and November Fool are dwindling. Readers, heed my words: Next time you adjust your car clock or analog watch, take a moment to recognize the two greatest unsung pranksters this nation has ever seen, and their bold, uncoordinated efforts to plunge us all into generations of darkness as a joke.
