On this date, one known for hijinks and humor, I must add a caveat: There is a basic difference between being serious about one's craft, whatever one's profession, and being self-serious. Acting too puffed-up to laugh at ourselves -- or gracefully take a joke at one's own expense -- is another matter entirely and can lead to deeply embarrassing behavior. Just ask actor Will Smith, whom I came to know at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in 2016. Believe it or not, we talked that night about him running for president. He called me this week seeking advice about damage control. I felt a little guilty, but I had to tell the truth: I've been in talks about 2024 with Tom Hanks.
Although references to April Fools' Day can be traced as far back as the mid-1500s in Europe, its historic origins are murky. As I wrote seven years ago on this date, the haziness is somehow fitting. But it can also be confusing, because the very people with an interest in such things -- even academic scholars -- tend to be people with senses of humor. And often those with a sense of humor like to play pranks.
One such jester was Joseph Boskin, professor emeritus of American humor at Boston University. Boskin is a serious historian, but his scholarship led him to study the political power of humor. He was also a man who enjoyed a good seasonal joke, provided that season is the first day of April. He demonstrated this predilection in 1983 when a young Associated Press reporter called him for an April Fools' feature story.
This is probably as a good a time as any to point out that a tall tale goes over best if there's an element or two of truth in it. For instance, I really did meet Will Smith at the 2016 White House correspondents' dinner. He was quite gracious and we really did talk, for the briefest of moments, about whether he'd consider entering politics. That was it. We never spoke again, he would not remember me, and he certainly didn't call me after the Academy Awards fiasco for advice. (Privately, I do have this odd notion about Tom Hanks saving politics, however, although we've never met.)
As April Fools' pranks go, that was a mild one, and I signaled to readers that it was coming. Professor Boskin thought he was doing the same when talking to the young AP reporter nearly 40 years ago. He may have been too clever for his own good.
In Boskin's later telling, he told the AP man, whose name was Fred Bayles, that although he'd studied political humor and was a fan of April Fools' Day, he didn't know anything about its origins. "Don't be so modest," the scribe told him. So when the reporter kept nudging him, Boskin recalled, "I created a story."
The story he told was preposterous, but contained just enough detail to make it believable. The idea for the day came from Roman jesters during the time of Constantine I in the third and fourth centuries A.D., Boskin explained. Jesters successfully petitioned Constantine to allow one of their elected members to be "king for a day." The upshot was that on April 1, the Roman Empire was controlled by a jester who dubbed himself "King Kugel."
Kugel's only decree, according to Joe Boskin, was that April 1 would henceforth feature such shenanigans. The good professor assumed that Bayles would know he was kidding. He figured the tipoff was that word "kugel," a Jewish noodle pudding imported from Eastern Europe.
"Since [he] was calling [from] New York, where kugel is famous, and it was April Fools' Day, I figured he would catch on," Boskin explained years later. "Instead, he asked how to spell kugel." And as he heard the clacking of the reporter's typewriter and Boskin realized that his goofy yarn was being accepted at face value, Boskin couldn't bring himself to set the reporter straight. Call it the pride of authorship.
In any event, the AP published up the story, which appeared in other newspapers, but when the "Today Show" called, Boskin realized the "King Kugel" business had probably gone too far.
"I thought I should have been complimented for a quacky, quirky story that was fitted to the occasion," he told National Geographic magazine years ago, adding that that jokes and pranks can offer society much-needed perspective.
Instead of getting compliments, Boskin found himself on the receiving end of an angry phone call from a senior editor at AP. Instead of the word "prank," the editor used a less benign term.
"He said I told a lie," Boskin related, "that had ruined the career of a young reporter."
But that's not the end of this story, which has a happy ending. The King Kugel caper didn't ruin Fred Bayles' career after all. He spent nearly three decades in daily journalism, as an accomplished reporter at the AP and later at USA Today, covering one big story after another with distinction before being hired to teach journalism at Boston University, Boskin's own school. He's Professor Emeritus Bayles now. That one you can't make up.
In 2009, when the BU college newspaper published a piece about this episode, Fred Bayles was given the last word. He didn't sound too happy about that story even all that time later: "Be very, very wary of what someone, particularly someone talking about April Fools' Day, tells you," he said. "It also illustrates a professor's responsibility not to screw around with someone's career --and the integrity of a university."
Fair enough. But on this day, I'll give the last word to Joe Boskin. "Good humorists are basically secular shamans," he told National Geographic. "They both heckle society on one hand and heal it on the other."
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.