With finals around the corner, students and staff alike welcomed a little fun with friends to take their minds off the stress of studying and grading. April Fools’ day, a time for japes and goofs with friends, gave the Pitt family a well-deserved break.
Luca Kold, a visiting lecturer in the English department, said that the holiday offered such a great distraction that he could hardly bring himself to start working again.
“I told my friends that I didn’t participate this year,” Kold said. “I already had a lot on my plate and now after April Fools’ Day, I just don’t know how I’m going to finish out the year. Stupid David never listens.”
David Aphro, an associate professor in the English department, pranked Kold in a way he’ll always remember.
“He slept with my wife,” Kold said. “13 years, but yeah, great prank. I came home from work, heard some weird noises coming from the bedroom, walked in and there they were, still going at it under a banner hung above our bed that said ‘April Fools!’”
Kold loved the prank so much, he could not stop reminiscing about the day’s shenanigans for nearly 3 hours.
“My teenager called me and told me he heard what happened, that he’ll always be there for me and he would ask the court to give me custody,” Kold said. “I started crying because I wanted to hug him, but then he, my wife and David all shouted ‘April Fools!’ through the phone.”
The staff weren’t the only ones making the most of the world’s beloved day of pranks. Rose Black, a senior economics major, got her roommate to fall for a classic April Fools’ Day joke.
“In the middle of the night I took the filter out of the Brita,” Black said. “And, y’know, one day of Pittsburgh tap water isn’t really enough to matter, so I also gathered some lead paint from my grandparents’ house, ground it into a fine powder and stirred it into the water in the Brita.”
Black said it’s all part of a tit-for-tat dynamic the girls have with each other. They always go back and forth, but they never reveal their pranks to each other until the other one catches on.
“I’ve been doing this every year since we moved in together and she hasn’t noticed,” Black said. “But she got me good this year by turning all the T-shirts in my closet inside out! Then she said she had a headache, and I said ‘Gee, I can’t imagine why. Here, a glass of water might help.’”
Many students say they love the freedom April Fools’ Day offers them, and this is what differentiates it from other holidays. Ryan Edwards, a junior biology major, said it’s the looseness of the holiday that makes it so great.
“Valentine’s Day, you gotta buy flowers. Christmas, you gotta buy presents,” Edwards said. “But ‘April Fools’? Hell, you can do anything. I killed a man last year. Broad daylight on Flagstaff Hill. You think you can do that on Arbor Day?”
Kold drew attention to his coworker’s special take on the holiday, appreciating their initiative to reinvent the typical formula of an April Fools’ Day prank.
“Usually you say ‘April Fools’ and it means, like, ‘Ha, look, this thing didn’t actually happen!’” Kold said. “But no, not for David. I mean I had a clear view of the groin area, and that definitely happened. Was happening. Actively.”
The students at Pitt all have different preferences for how to handle pranking their pals. Some, like Black, use the same joke each year, but others, like Edwards, like to switch it up to keep things fresh.
“I keep it avant garde, you feel?” Edwards said. “Freshman year, threw a goose at my boyfriend. Sophomore year, killed that chump on Flagstaff. This year, locked my roommate in a pillory and threw tomatoes at him. Then senior year? Get this — Covid 2.”
Edwards points out that, though he loves April Fools for the great pranks and the endless laughs, a lot of students look forward to the feeling of camaraderie that comes with a good joke.
“You pull these pranks any other day on someone random and they’re like, ‘Dude, stop giving my baby Adderall! What the hell is wrong with you?’” Edwards said. “But on April Fools’, when your buddy takes the batteries out of your carbon monoxide detector and then cranks your gas stove while you’re sleeping, that’s when you know they’re a friend for life.”
Thomas “Riley” Woolf learned to write from their great, great grandmother, Virginia Woolf. April Fools. If you fell for that, go grovel in their inbox at [email protected].