Here Are the Only Pranks That Are Acceptable In These Post-Satire Times

You can't just go filling cars with stuff anymore. We live in a society.

Scott Hines

01 Apr 2026 — 5 min read

Don't do this. How am I going to get to work if you do this? (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Today is April Fool's Day.

I'm saying that up front both as the thesis statement to the newsletter that is to follow, but also as a heads-up. Hopefully, The Action Cookbook Newsletter is the first thing you read on the internet on the days that it arrives in your inbox, but in the event that it was not, well, there's a good chance that you've already been had. Anything you read before this was likely to be rank flimflammery. Utter baloney. Sheer malarkey. Hokum, hogwash, hooey, or straight-up BS.

This is the one day each year when the internet (and in some cases, our real lives) is filled wall-to-wall with feeble attempts at deception, trickery and "humor", most of which fall flat on all counts. It's a tradition that dates back centuries, but one that's especially ill-suited for These Times We Live In.

How's that, you say? Well, just open a newspaper, why don't you? I'll wait.

[checks watch, whistles "Chain of Fools"]

Bad, right??

We live in a post-satire age, a time where no story you could fabricate is more preposterous than the actual headlines. You can't make up a news item that I wouldn't believe, just as you can't make a movie about the president being kidnapped anymore:

Meanwhile, these particular circumstances have us all so collectively on edge that the other main genre of prank–that is, some form of mild-to-moderately-inconvenient surprise–has the potential to push us completely over the edge.

Oh, you filled my car with packing peanuts? What a lark!

[begins sobbing, enters three-day-long disassociative fugue]

No, I'd argue that the vast majority of traditional April 1st tomfoolery simply isn't acceptable in today's messed-up world. That doesn't mean we need to throw the tradition out entirely, though: we just need to do something more carefully-considered than "hiding the car keys" or "faking your own death".

Here are the few forms of April Fool's pranks that, in my humble opinion, are still acceptable:

1) I am going to do something really nice for you, in the form of a prank

Most pranks are mean! Dwight Schrute may have been an easy target, but Jim Halpert was, frankly, kind of a dick.

It doesn't have to be this way, though, and that's perfectly illustrated by one of my all-time favorite videos on the internet, when the BBC's Graham Norton organized an Adele-impersonator contest, then had Adele herself enter it in disguise:

Look at these reactions. The other performers have very much been pranked, but their realization of the gag is also THE GREATEST MOMENT OF THEIR LIVES. This would be like telling me that I'm going to be on a podcast talking about the Cleveland Guardians, and then you reveal I'm actually going to play Mario Kart with Jose Ramirez.

Okay, maybe it's not exactly like that, but I would like to play Mario Kart with Jose Ramirez, and if any of you have the capacity to make that happen, you are welcome to prank me in this manner.

I understand that most people do not have ready access to Adeles and/or Joses Ramirez, of course, so I've got some other options.

2) Unexpected Cake

I have stated up front that I am not on board with being inconvenienced in the name of a prank. If you hide my stapler and I need to staple something, I'm not going to find it especially funny.

BUT, if you replace my stapler with cake that looks like a stapler? Well, I'll respect the effort that you put in to pranking me with such a realistic fake, and I'll have unexpected cake. That's the sort of thing that can turn a day in a positive direction.

I never did watch this show, but I met Johnny Knoxville once and he was really nice. I've shared that here before but I think it's important to share again.

Moving on.

3) Release an actual game-changing product on April 1st

This is sort of a reverse prank: you introduce a product so good that it sounds like a prank, but you announce it on April 1st and everyone assumes that it's a joke. The fact that it's not a joke becomes the joke itself, and–much like the unexpected cake–there is also now a good product in play. The best example of this that I can think of was when Google introduced GMail, with its then-practically-unthinkable 1GB of storage, on April 1st, 2004. I thought it was a joke! Lots of people did! It wasn't, and it changed consumer email for the better!

The major problem with this as a prank genre today is that Big Tech has not had a good idea in at least a decade, and most product announcements boil down to "we're putting AI in something else that you don't want it in."

4) Get a boat stuck in the Suez Canal

Okay, this probably would actually inconvenience a lot of people, which is counter to my stated goals here today. In fact, we know it would cause a lot of problems, because it did that one time that it happened before, and there wasn't another critical waterway in the Middle East closed to ship traffic at the same time.

Also, it's not the kind of thing that most of us have the ability to make happen. I personally have even less access to a cargo ship than I do to Adele or Jose Ramirez or a chair made out of cake.

BUT, if you DO have access to a cargo ship, and you DO happen to be traveling through the Suez Canal today, it WOULD be a very funny thing to do.

You should at least consider it.

5) Swap famous people in their iconic roles

The best example of this prank is one that's close to home for the roughly 8% of ACBN readers who are also former Jeopardy! contestants, and that's when Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune hosts Alex Trebek and Pat Sajak swapped shows on April Fool's Day 1997:

Now, to be fair, I would have been disappointed if I made it on to Jeopardy! and got Sajak instead of Trebek. I would respect the prank, though, and be reassured in the knowledge that its unique nature would cause it to be shared in niche internet newsletters nearly 30 years later.

The biggest problem with pulling off a prank like this today is that we don't have nearly the monoculture that we did in 1997.

Who could you even swap that would have the impact of 1990s Trebek and Sajak?