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Type: Open-Ended
Category: Supporting Details
Level: Grade 4
Standards: CCRA.R.6, RI.4.6
Author: szeiger
Created: 10 years ago

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He must have been a merry person who invented All Fools' Day, but no one can tell when he lived, where he lived, or what was his name. All we know about the matter is that the custom of fool-making upon the First of April is very old, and that it prevails over nearly the whole of Europe.

The great thing on the First of April is to have a good memory. Most people know about April fooling, but many people forget about it when the special day arrives. Some of you children, no doubt, have forgotten; with the result that the joker with a good memory has made of you an April Fool.

In coming down to breakfast you have been asked quite solemnly, let us say, why your hair is brushed to the wrong side. If you have gone and peeped into a looking-glass there was an instant burst of laughter, and then you have become aware that All Fools' Day has come round again. Some boys and girls get angry when they have been thus fooled; but that only adds to their foolishness. A good plan is to laugh with those who are laughing; and you can better this plan by catching the joker off his guard. By so doing you may, if you are clever at keeping a solemn face, make a fool of the joker in his turn. Then the laugh is with you, and you can feel quite pleased with yourself until the next All Fools' Day.

This is the great festival of the Practical Joker, and all is well when his jokes are simple and amusing. To pin a piece of paper on someone's back, or to send the school Dunce into a bookseller's shop for a "History of Adam's Grandfather," is quite good fun. But there are some jokes which are carefully prepared in order to give pain to the persons upon whom they are played; they are not amusing, but merely cruel. It is not a good joke, for instance, to balance a bowl of water upon the top of a door, so that the first person to enter the room gets drenched. Neither is it nice fun to send an innocent boy upon an errand with a letter containing the instruction: "Send the fool another mile." This is not fun, but a stupid form of cruelty.

Grade 4 Supporting Details CCSS: CCRA.R.6, RI.4.6

Give an example of an April Fools' Day joke that the author would find funny.