DDH – Happy Boskin Day!

Let’s be honest—history has a sense of humor. And on April 1st, it’s often the joke that writes the history. This week on Dave Does History with Bill Mick on WMMB, we dove into the tangled, hilarious, and flat-out fraudulent roots of what we call April Fools’ Day. Or, as I now prefer to call it: Boskin Day.

We started in the dusty lanes of 14th-century England, where Geoffrey Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale may—or may not—have dropped the earliest clue to the tradition. The tale of a cocky rooster getting fooled by a fox is charming, but the date reference? Possibly a scribal error. Chalk that one up to the medieval version of autocorrect.

Then we met Eduard de Dene, a 16th-century Flemish poet who penned a delightful prank involving a nobleman sending his servant on pointless April 1st errands. Think of it as the Renaissance equivalent of being sent to fetch “relative bearing grease” or “the umpire’s game face.” That’s our first solid evidence. Chaucer? Maybe. Eduard? Definitely.

But the real star of the show was Professor Joseph Boskin of Boston University. In 1983, after being prodded by an AP reporter for the origins of April Fools’ Day, Boskin invented a completely fictitious story about Roman Emperor Constantine appointing a jester named Kugel to rule for a day. Kugel declared April 1st a festival of absurdity. The AP published the whole thing—hook, line, kugel. No fact-checking. No follow-up. Just pure, printable pranking.

Weeks later, a student in Boskin’s class—who also happened to be the school paper editor—called him out. Boskin confessed. The campus laughed. The Associated Press did not.

Add in tales of spaghetti trees from the BBC, the Taco Liberty Bell, Burger King’s left-handed Whopper, and NPR’s fake Nixon comeback, and the picture is clear: April 1st isn’t just prank day—it’s gullibility on parade.

From fish taped to your back in France to Iranian picnics filled with pranks, it’s a global celebration of nonsense. And a reminder that sometimes, the best way to understand history… is to laugh at it.

So Happy Boskin Day, everyone. Trust nothing. Question everything. And whatever you do, check your back for fish.