On April 1, 1957, a news broadcaster told his British audience that Ticino, a Swiss region near the Italian border, had had “an exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop” that year. One of the most famous April Fools' Day pranks of all time is the BBC’s famous “spaghetti harvest” segment.

The ceremony is in response to a hoax broadcast by 'Panorama' on April Fools' Day 1957, in which broadcaster Richard Dimbleby reported on the growing of spaghetti trees in Switzerland. The harvesting of spaghetti from a 'vine' on the ceiling of Lo Spiedo, an Italian restaurant in London, 1961. But she remains one of the most famous protest votes in Brazilian history. Of course, she didn’t end up serving on the city council because the election board disqualified her. When the students looked at the 540 candidates vying for São Paulo’s 45 city council seats and feared that none of them would address the city’s problems, they decided to make a point by asking people to vote for the popular rhino instead.Ĭacareco won a city council seat with a whopping 100,000 votes, far more than any other candidate (the closest runner-up got about 10,000). The four-year-old had moved to the city from Rio de Janeiro when São Paulo’s zoo opened, and was scheduled to return to Rio soon. The rhino’s name was Cacareco (Portuguese for “rubbish”), and she was already a popular figure in São Paulo when the students launched her campaign. If an unlikely candidate runs for public office as kind of protest prank, but ends up winning, is it still a prank? Here’s one example: in 1959, students in São Paulo, Brazil, who were tired of the city’s overflowing sewers and inflated prices launched a campaign to elect a rhinoceros to the city council-and won. Sometimes the line between what’s a prank and what’s not isn’t always clear-cut. Pandering to the Protest VoteĪ black rhinoceros, like the 1959 Brazilian candidate. The story spread quickly through European newspapers before people realized that it was an April Fools' Day prank by Louis Viereck, a New York correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt who published the joke article under a fake name. authorities were trying to hunt down the thieves while publicly covering up the fact that the country had been robbed. The Berliner Tageblatt said the heist was organized by American robber barons, whose burglars dug the tunnel over three years and made away with over $268 million and that U.S. built its Bullion Depository in Fort Knox, Kentucky). Federal Treasury in Washington, D.C., and stolen America’s silver and gold (this was before the U.S. On April 1, 1905, a German newspaper called the Berliner Tageblatt announced that thieves had dug a tunnel underneath the U.S. Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., circa 1900.ĭecades before the Bond villain Goldfinger plotted to nuke all of the United States’ gold at Fort Knox, a prankster dreamed up another heist that was just as ridiculous. The whole escapade helped to discredit Partridge, who eventually stopped publishing almanacs. Partridge angrily published a pamphlet saying he was alive, and Swift again publicly asserted that Partridge was dead, and claimed Partridge’s pamphlet was written by someone else.

News of Partridge’s death spread over the next couple of days so that when Partridge walked down the street on April 1, people stared at him in surprise and confusion. Then, on the night of March 29, Swift published an elegy (again, under a fake name) announcing that Partridge-a “cobbler, Starmonger and Quack”-had died, and admitted on his deathbed that he was a fraud. The public was intrigued, but Partridge was irate, and he published a rebuttal to Swift’s almanac calling its author a fraud. After Partridge predicted in his 1708 almanac that a fever would sweep London in early April, Swift published an almanac under a fake name predicting that on March 29 at 11 p.m., Partridge would die “of a raging fever.” One year, satirist Jonathan Swift decided to play a very elaborate All Fools’ Day prank on John Partridge, a famous astrologer who sold bogus predictions to the public in almanacs.

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