I think I’ve seen that movie.
I would probably cry during the inevitable murder-suicide
I don’t mind a bit of April foolery, though I generally do not participate, but good lord is this just way over the line inappropriate. Honestly, despite the April Fools at the end, I would seriously wonder if she was cheating and was just testing the waters for my reaction…
As a general matter of principle I think the very fact that something like April Fools’ exists exhibits a not-very-desirable side of human nature. With regards to the example you gave? A PERFECT example of what I’m talking about.
They can be funny though, like the colleague who was caught out when a friend texted her from her mobile asking her to call it because she’d lost it.
That sort of thing is quite witty and amusing, the one in the OP…not so much!
Thanks for the answers everyone!
I had a neighbor whose wife told him that she had a miscarriage as an April Fools joke. Hit him like a ton of bricks. She was a very strange person.
This would be like your boss calling you into his office and telling you you’re fired, and explaining the severance package and telling you to take your belongings home and…OH, APRIL FOOL’S!
Except that the reaction to this “prank” is that it’s NOT in the spirit of April Fools, so it’s not at all a good example.
Some pranks that are better examples:
-An NPR story about tapping maple trees in order to prevent explosions in the Vermont forests.
-A ThinkGeek new product: Game of Thrones Clue, with 48 different murder victims, weapons, and locations.
-A BBC video showing the annual spaghetti harvest from the spaghetti trees of Italy.
-(My general lame classroom shenanigans) writing the date on the board backward and upside down/putting something in the schedule like “Rhinoceros Rally”, insisting that there’s nothing strange about any of this and that the kids are trying to prank me when they point it out.
A good prank is weird and whimsical, leaving people in a state of bewildered amusement until they figure out that it’s a prank, at which point if they’ve got a compatible sense of humor they’re admiring the prankster.
There’s nothing wrong in human nature that leads to this sort of prank.
Without knowing the people involved, I won’t try to judge.
But I certainly wouldn’t pull a joke like that, and would be horrified if my wife ever pulled it on me. It would take me a long time to forgive a “joke” like that.
BBC had one on these rare flying penguins once! They even had (CGI) footage of the penguins flapping and taking off. It was awesome. That is a prank!
Simply lying about something does not a good April Fool’s joke make.
What would she have said if, instead, he’d replied “Oh what a relief, I’ve been trying to pluck up the courage to tell you I’ve got another wife and family in the next town over, and now I can go and live with them full-time”… ?
That’s just glorious. And yeah: weird, whimsical, leaves you feeling bewildered and happy until you realize it’s a prank, at which point you gotta admire the craftsmanship behind it.
You know, if she’d said she wanted to introduce her husband to her new lover, and called him in from the room where he was waiting, and the guy that came in was dressed in full clown regalia, then it’d still be terribly cruel and horribly inappropriate, but at least there’d be some humor there too, at the weirdness of the situation.
Imagine that instead of telling him this horrible lie, she’d told him one of the other things that a person rarely tells a spouse. “Honey,” she might say, “I think there’s a sale on that spaghetti sauce you like this week. April fool!” Not cruel, but still not funny, because there’s nothing weird about it. The only thing that made her think she was engaging in a prank was the cruelty of her particular lie.
No, lady. Cruelty is not the defining characteristic of a prank.
What would she have said if, instead, he’d replied “Oh what a relief, I’ve been trying to pluck up the courage to tell you I’ve got another wife and family in the next town over, and now I can go and live with them full-time”… ?
Never mind April Fools, the fact that she thought it fun not only to try this on, but also to retail his reaction to someone else, suggests something very odd about her attitude to him.
When she announced she’d met someone else and wanted a divorce I would have cried then said “Actually I’m happy for you - because I’ve just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.”
See if she thinks that’s funny…