Humor is the hardest thing to translate

I think this NPR bit was my favorite April Fool's news prank today. It's not only the subject ("cetaceaculture" - in the Midwest, no less), they do a great job of spoofing their listeners' letters and even their own on-air corrections.

"In achieving three-part harmony in whale song, I think we have tied nature's most wondrous sound to a great barbershop tradition."

I was cracking up in the car on the way home from work. Then their teaser was a report that some Kindle readers have been injured by faulty online popup books. Ha!

Did you also hear you can get squeezable bacon now? And Star Wars fans rejoice, because a tauntaun sleeping bag is available. It's brilliant if you're familiar with The Empire Strikes Back. It has an intestinal lining! Features:

* Classic Star Wars sleeping bag simulates the warmth of a Tauntaun carcass
* Glowing Lightsaber zipper pull
* Teach your children about the best Star Wars movie ever

The Guardian is switching all its reports to Twitter format. ("JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?") Oh, and finally a tartan sheep!

When warning/explaining to my students about the traditions of April Fool's Day, I let them look at the Wikipedia homepage for awhile. It had an article on the "Museum of Bad Art (MOBA)" and news briefs about the Irish prime minister being spotted naked in downtown Dublin and NASA reporting falling diamonds. The students were complete blanks; I couldn't get a reaction out of them at all. It's really hard to tell what's going on with a class at 8 a.m.; are your teaching methods inadequate, is the cultural context not translating, or have the students' brains merely not woken up yet? Today, I'm going to say it was the latter, because from the second class, at 10 a.m., I got a much more lively reaction. It may have also helped that I showed them this video of the BBC's classic 1957 prank story on the Swiss spaghetti harvest.



It helped illustrate my point that a good spoof or prank uses specific details to establish plausibility. I have a powerpoint presentation on satire which I put together one semester after a student turned in an assignment using an article from The Onion as a source, but it only seems to work when I have French students in class. Bless the French, they do appreciate satire.