The end of foolishness?
I used to love April Fool’s Day. In high school, we had an annual April Fool’s Day edition of our newspaper that we called the Reject Review. We had plenty of fun (and occasionally got in trouble) for the humorous stories and cartoons we put in that issue.
It’s hard to come up with that type of humor in 2024. Reality comes up with outrageous stories that defy the most inventive comedian. Doors falling off of aircraft? A Kennedy running for president on an anti-vax platform? Another presidential candidate posting a video that shows his opponent tied up in the back of a truck? Conspiracy theories blaming a tragic bridge accident on cyberattacks and false-flag events? And you can’t tell a joke without a segment of the population believing it as fact. How many The Onion satirical articles have been passed around as actual reporting?
We’ve also been living with an impending sense of doom. It’s like we’re the happy Jewish family in 1930s Europe. Everything is going well for us, and we don’t realize the Gestapo will soon be kicking in our door and sending us to Auschwitz.
How can you have April Fool’s Day in a world like this? How do you laugh when little in the world seems all that funny?
Humor remains a great coping mechanism. It helps us regain perspective and deflates those who try to take themselves too seriously. Danger can be…
