April Fools

One of the most famous April fool’s day hoaxes was staged by the BBC April 1, 1957, dubbed The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest, a spoof on Spaghetti doesn’t grow on trees. The show’s highly respected anchor, Richard Dimbleby, closed by announcing a bumper spaghetti crop in southern Switzerland. The crop’s success was attributed to an unusually mild winter and the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil. A Swiss damsel was picking long limber strands from a tree and placing them in a basket to later be laid out to dry. The final scene pictured a spaghetti feast with Dimbleby’s convincing conclusion: There is nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti.

BBC received a deluge of calls from basically three kinds of people: Those who caught the humor and thought it a hoot; the gullible who couldn’t believe Anchor Dimbleby was pulling their leg and wanted to know how to grow their own spaghetti tree, and those who were irate that BBC would stoop to such a low-level trick.

Poor Anchor Dimbleby. There always seems to be a bell curve: Those who see the humor in life, the gullible who will believe almost anything, and the curmudgeons who scoff at everything, even on April Fool’s Day when we suffer fools gladly