April Fools’ Day is an old holiday, even in Puritan-blooded New Haven. Just how old is anybody’s guess.
Under the headline “April Fools,” a writer in the April 4, 1811, edition of the New Haven Post-Boy tickled readers’ ribs while wondering the same thing. “Many of us are fools, all our lives. Others soon begin to show ‘symptoms of wisdom,’” he wrote, before imploring someone to “produce some probable account of the origin of this custom of rendering each other ridiculous on the first day of April.” If he were still alive, he’d still be waiting: It seems nobody’s yet uncovered an authoritative origin story.
We do, however, have accounts of the holiday in practice. On April 2, 1880, the New Haven Evening Register published an entry titled “A Day of Fun / Observing April Fool’s Day—All Sorts of Pranks Played by the Boys.” Calling the occasion “a grand holiday for fun for all classes, conditions and ages of people,” it described what might have been a typical April Fools’ experience for a New Haven family: plucking “kite-tails off their back[s]” at breakfast while listening to “highly sensational and exciting stories told by one of the members of the family, holding a newspaper before his eyes, throwing out the idea that all the nonsense is being read out of the telegraph columns.”
The writer recounted a woman who made tempting but inedible pancakes for her husband, producing a “volley of laughter” when, upon the first taste, she called him an “April Fool.” There was also a tale of grocers who used the occasion to target “inveterate loungers who hang around the store all day, thrusting their hands into the sugar barrels.” The proprietors, the writer said, baited the moochers with a sweet-looking concoction resembling unrefined sugar, which was instead a mouth-puckering, eye-watering, stomach-turning muck of salt and molasses.
A local prank pulled more than a century later probably tasted about as astringent. It was 1992, by which time the media were getting in on the fooling. Radio station KC101 had spread word of a secret show that night at Toad’s Place featuring Bruce Springsteen. Fans lined up outside, then “staked out spots inside Toad’s without bothering to check the calendar—April fools, all,” the New Haven Register noted.
Many Aprils later, in 2014, it was an artist, not a medium, doing the pranking. Believe in People, a.k.a. BiP—the then-preciously anonymous guerrilla graffiti prankster whose Banksy-like work often interacted with Yale, including while being erased by it—had already announced that he was moving on from the Elm City.
But not without playing one more prank. Early on April Fools’ Day, a wooden plaque made to look like bronze suddenly appeared on the front of the Yale University Art Gallery. It memorialized the work of fictitious street artist Sam Dilvan—anagram: “vandalism”—with a highbrow description of Dilvan’s lowbrow contributions to the arts.
The plaque created a stir and was quickly removed from YUAG’s hallowed facade, but the gallery then did something unexpected: It got in on the joke. Curators displayed the plaque in a glass case outside and added their own highbrow description.
Having determined not to keep the object, YUAG then asked BiP to reclaim it or, failing that, promised to donate it to the local gallery Artspace, which was then still active, on the proposition that it could be auctioned off during an upcoming fundraising gala. But BiP had more tricks up his sleeve. Like Lucy pulling the football away, the artist heaped praise on YUAG for taking the original act in stride, then ripped it for suggesting that a piece of what he dubiously described as “public art” should be sold to a private owner under any circumstance.
Choosing to let the artist decide, Artspace rejected the fundraising proposal and accepted BiP’s offer to make a replica plaque to auction off instead. But BiP never furnished the replica, and though Artspace would soon secure the original for some undetermined future purpose, the ostensibly point-driven piece of “public art” never got any real public ending at all.
In other words, the artwork non grata turned out to be a vessel for pranking from conception to non-conclusion, and just like April Fools’ Day itself, the joke was on everyone.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. This updated story was originally published on March 31, 2015.
