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Personal Targets
While the politicians and famous personalities have
always been the mos popular butts of jokes, people have also targeted
their competitors and rivals on April Fools' Day to play a prank that is
profitable to them and may prove to be a pain in the neck for the
victim. The incidents narrated below are absolutely true and had evoked
such a widespread and immediate reactions that they went down in the
history as some of the most popular April Fool hoaxes.
- In Providence, Rhode Island, America, Carolyn Fox, a disc jockey
along with the management of WHJY chose 1st April 1986 to play a
prank on their rival station WPRO-AM. They announced that
'Providence Labor Action Relations Board Committee' has decided
close the city for the day and people can call at the given number
for more information. The number of course belonged to WPRO. Not
only WPRO received hundreds of calls that day from people enquiring
about the announcement but the City Hall, the police and the offices
in the city also had to respond to a number of enquiries that day.
Later, WHJY management confessed that they hadn't imagined such a
dramatic impact of their joke on the city.
- In 1996, Virgin Cola targeted the newly designed bright blue cans
of Pepsi that it had just launched into the market by announcing
that they had integrated a new technology related to customer safety
into their cans that will turn the color of the cans into bright
blue, when the cola reaches the expiry date. Thus, the consumers
were requested not to buy any blue cola cans.
- Poor teenage sensation Britney Spears was reported to be of 28,
instead of 17, her actual age, on the music website of the Wall of
Sound in 1999. The site said that the cover of Rolling Stone of
Britney being eleven years older than her reported age has been
blown. The evidences cited in favor of this claim included specific
details such as the allegation that the true name of Spears was
Belinda Sue Spearson in West Baton Rouge on August 7, 1970. It was
also said that she had attended Robert E. Lee High School and her
former classmates were ready to confirm her true age. Hundreds of
Britney's fans were taken in by the hoax and they called her record
label to inquire about her age.
- In 2001, 'This Morning', the radio program of Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation aired the former President Jimmy Carter
being interviewed by Michael Enright, the famous host of its Sunday
Edition. The audience was shocked when Enright suddenly turned very
rude and insulted Carter by calling him 'a washed-up peanut farmer
from Hicksville'. Carter seemed stunned too and he hung up calling
Enright a 'rude person'. The controversy caught on as the Globe and
Mail reported the interview as fact in their leads the next day.
However, Enright had already revealed by then that the interview was
fake and the Toronto comedian Ray Landry was impersonating Carter's
voice. Many people didn't find the joke funny.
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