The joke’s on you – KN, Spaghetti trees and Martian invaders

Apr 03, 2016 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols
April isn’t a particularly noteworthy month for Guyanese nationally, except when the Easter weekend or a

holiday falls in the early part of the month. But it does have this one day when we people remind themselves that laughter, from head-shaking chuckles to belly-busting howls, may indeed be the best medicine, for any number of physiological or social ills, hence the April Fools’ pranks and hoaxes that can be traced back to pre-medieval days.
Pranks have customarily been of the light-hearted kind and the ‘April Fool’ usually understood that. One of the more unkind jokes was to send some dimwitted fellow on a fool’s errand by giving him a note addressed to someone who, knowing the jest, would send him on to another, who would do the same, and have the poor guy on his feet until someone took pity on him or he realized he was being played.
Be careful though, there’s a fine line between appreciation and outrage, as Kaieteur News found out last year with its US visa revocation story. There were those who actually felt that the article had a more sinister motive, and was deemed a hoax only after the American embassy voiced its disapproval over the ‘April Fools joke’ and demanded its retraction. And hoaxes are not limited to April 1st.
The pranking tradition is a vibrant one, and although many people have been taken for a proverbial ‘ride’ it is usually received in good spirit and tolerated as great fun. Not always though! Here are two of the more notable hoaxes, which happened in Great Britain and the United States during the last century. (Goodness knows we need some monkeyshine diversions while trying to figure out what will happen in the U.S. if Trump or Sanders gets his party’s presidential nomination, or how BK became a ministerial advisor in Guyana. {Sort of})
I was a toddler in 1957, but probably being a skeptic even then, I would have found something fishy in the BBC TV programme on April 1 of that year which featured a family from Switzerland engaged in its annual ‘spaghetti harvest’. Yes, picking strands of spaghetti from a tree and putting them to dry in the sun! In a country where pasta wasn’t well-known then, and considered an exotic delicacy by many, the intrigue was evident. Some wanted to know where they could purchase spaghetti plants, while others were more struck by the idea that the strands are the same length due to years of research and hard work.
With his clipped British accent accompanying the video, broadcaster Richard Dimbleby sounded quite believable, especially when he stated that late March was an anxious time for spaghetti farmers, since “the late frost while not entirely ruining the crop, generally impairs the flavour and makes it difficult for (the farmers) to obtain top prices in world markets.” He said that year’s bumper crop was partly due to the “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil” before showing a Swiss family having a traditional meal to mark the harvest. (Check You Tube for the black-and-white video)
Like KN, the BBC was censured by many viewers who, with typical British stiffness, failed to see the funny side of the otherwise factual show. It seemed the only spaghetti those poor folks knew were the canned variety preserved in tomato sauce. When they asked how they could get their own trees, BBC staff dryly told them to place a piece of spaghetti in a tin of sauce and hope for the best. It was reportedly the first time that television was used to stage an April Fools hoax.
Now where the Kaieteur News backlash is concerned, I guess some Americans don’t take too kindly to so-called hoaxes, April Fools or other, and with good reason. A deception, intentional or not, can have serious and unanticipated consequences.  Maybe some of the older Americans remember the 1938 War of the Worlds stunt pulled by American actor and radio personality Orson Welles during a pre-Halloween airing of a highly-dramatized version of the H.G. Wells science fiction novel by the same name.
On the night of October 30, 1938, a Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio programme of orchestra music was interrupted by a reporter announcing that astronomers had detected explosions on the surface of Mars. A second interruption followed with news that a meteor had crashed into a New Jersey farm. The situation quickly escalated. It wasn’t a meteor but a spacecraft. Martian aliens had invaded Earth and were attacking, blasting onlookers and soldiers alike with death rays, releasing toxic gas, and spreading fear and chaos all the way to the New England area. Seven thousand guardsmen had been killed!
An announcer reported that widespread panic had broken out, which ironically was happening in real life. The Martian ‘invasion’ caused thousands of people to panic. Some prepared to flee their homes while others hid in cellars. Highways were jammed. Some people begged for gas masks to save them from the toxic air. A woman ran into a church in Indianapolis allegedly yelling “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die! Rumours that some people had committed suicide were however never substantiated.
A concerned Wells was forced to go on air and remind listeners that the whole thing was just fiction. He added that it was not a planned hoax, and that if they had listened to the programme from the beginning, they would have known it was a theatrical production. However the fact that many people did not tune into CBS until later in the broadcast, the realistic character portrayals, and the advanced sound effects employed gave merit to the assumption made by the listeners.
In like manner, the KN management had pointed out that a couple of ‘signposts’ in the visa revocation story should have alerted readers that the article was a prank. These were that the newspaper became aware of the development at the embassy on February 29 (2015 was not a leap year) and that the story was continued on Page 38 in an issue that had only 32 pages. But, one may ask, how many people would have been discerning enough to spot those clues in such a provocative piece?
Now to finish off, this folk prank told to me by my mother many moons ago. George, a Mahaicony labourer, was resting under a tree after a tough day’s work. Suddenly he saw a man with a crazed look on his face rushing at him, cutlass in hand. Forgetting his tiredness, George took off with the man in hot pursuit. After about half a mile later he collapsed by the roadside, and waited for the fatal blow. His chaser still with the crazed look, stopped about three feet away, thrust the cutlass at his cowering ‘victim’ and cackled, “Heh heh heh, now is you turn fuh chase me!”
With the revelation of that punch line, the rest is left to your imagination. Oh, by the way, have you heard that Donald Ramotar has accepted the position of PM in the coalition government? Check Friday’s Kaieteur News, and if for a second you believed that article, well, the joke’s on you!

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