Today is April 1, the one day out of every year where the standards of rigorous fact-checking on the internet are relaxed, and we all have a little fun telling some funny lies—sometimes labeled “pranks”—for the simple delights of others. Whereas every other day of our existence is a stolid and honest exploration of sincerity and the simple standards of basic human truths, April Fools Day is the one day out of every year where people loosen up a little and feel comfortable Just Making Up Shit on the internet.
But we kid our own fracturing senses of consensus reality: The fact is, April Fool’s Day 2023 has been a pretty quiet one, at least so far. In an environment where most things have become grimly believable, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for inaccurate japery, and so a “holiday” that used to be fraught with rampant misinformation is now mostly playing host to…a depressingly normal amount of rampant misinformation.
But! But: There is a silver lining to our gloom, and that silver lining is the handful of actually good jokes that have managed to crop up here and there Like, for instance, the DND Memes sub-reddit deciding to dedicate itself wholly to memes about Oliver Darkshire’s Potato, a one-page tabletop game that is entirely about being a hobbit trying to eat some damn potatoes. Or Sega releasing a free visual novel about investigating the murder of Sonic The Hedgehog. Or the simple joy of Oscar The Grouch flipping reality on its head:
If we had to pick a winner of April Fools Day 2023, though, it’s not an especially hard competition: It’s gotta be Women Talking writer-director Sarah Polley’s 11-year-old kid, who apparently presented their mother today with a letter, “signed” by now-former Academy president David Rubin, informing her that she had been given her recently won Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in error, and now needed to give it back.
You can read the letter yourself, so we won’t belabor every lovely little joke included, but we do appreciate that the “Academy” wanted to avoid another “Year of the Moonlight,” as well as the concise explanation of why it’s a total coincidence that Polley might be getting this letter on April 1.
Anyway, congratulations to All Quiet On The Western Front for your Oscar win, and to Sarah Polley’s kid for winning this stupid day.