Tom Clyde’s column last Saturday reminded me of my own hometown newspaper indulgences on April Fools’ Day, the one time fake news is OK.

Or is it?

Like most humor, these stories are hard to pull off well. They can be too subtle for readers to understand as a joke. Or more often, they’re too slapstick or frankly stupid to be funny.

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Ridiculous fake bylines, wearying attempts at sitcom level humor (cue the laugh track, sigh), even dumber headlines so, wink-wink, you get it. Oh do you get it.

April Fools’ was one Vail Daily publisher’s favorite edition. He came from advertising, and I’m not sure he read the paper the rest of the year. I couldn’t have dropped it if I wanted to, and I wanted to.

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The cornballs in the newsroom loved it, and without fail I found my dread of their April Fools’ pieces fully merited. New Yorker magazine wit this was not. Junior market standup, then? Nope, not even that. Generally more like a “Bazooka” cartoon wrapped around a little brick of bubble gum.

But there were some good ones: Vail Mountain’s front side stripped of all trees to reduce skier injuries and deaths; the valley’s ski slopes closed because mammoths were cloned from DNA in amber and now protected in their ancient habitat; a town 50 miles downvalley (known for a flagpole annexation to grab a Costco next to another town) acquiring a large development on unincorporated land near the ski resorts through a narrow pipeline of annexations on up and over the valley.  

Maybe the most clever of all, while also incredibly stupid if you thought about it for a second, ran in my first paper, a weekly, when an edition landed on an April 1.

Our star writer convinced me, recently promoted to editor, we should run a lone April Fools’ piece on page one, no signals or other indication this was as fake of news as I still can imagine. Well, next to those endless Trump whoppers.

Don’t even say April Fools’ anywhere in the story, the headline, illustrations, anything, she urged. Just run the story. Trust me, she said, everyone will get it. It’s too silly not to.

The story, the first of this type ever at the paper, did lean toward the absurd: clouds of rabid California condors feasting on dead cattle piled up and blocking each end of the lone highway through the county.

The brilliance of the piece lay in the subtleties that captured the actual personalities, issues and how the county supervisors tended to work together in real life.

We did have an issue with outsider city folk wanting to move in and ruin everything, according to anyone who had already moved to our community, even if yesterday. Among the genuine characters on the board, we had a county supervisor prone to weird witticisms who ran cattle for a living, didn’t much like the city influx, and who would fit the phrase “dumb like a fox,” at least in his mind. I’m not sure I’d add the fox part myself, if being strictly accurate.

The reporter had him rail in fake quotes and take umbrage at being blamed for the situation, which had cut off the county, emptied all the grocery stores of their staples, caused the gas stations to run out of fuel, and so on in this scenario.

The only clue — well, besides the utter lack of actual condors rabid or otherwise, the fact of no dead cattle on the highway, the perfectly full shelves at the stores, the easy drive to Reno — was his last quote.

“I may not be the brightest bulb,” he supposedly said, “but I’m nobody’s fool.” The end.

Get it?

Well, about half the readership did and found the parody scintillating and spit-out-your-coffee funny, especially those at all familiar with the board of supervisors.

The other half? They were pissed mainly because they didn’t get the joke until the other half more or less politely pointed out how stupid it would be to take any of it seriously. Rabid condors, … really?

But they had read the story as real. My own very bright uncle, who built and ran a successful custom refrigeration company for decades, chewed me out. So did many other people I knew to be smart, attentive and kept up with community affairs. Letters, calls, and we lived in a small town where the editor was guaranteed plenty of in-person, um, feedback, which I certainly got.  

Oh, it was a great piece for attracting attention, all right. I imagine today posting it on Facebook, Nextdoor, X. Then again, social media addicts accept stuff a lot more absurd than this as just the truth. To think I had considered my community then foolish indeed to buy that one in print as much as they did.

Ah, but I was the fool. The edition really was a survey on the power of credibility. The paper was assumed to at least be trying to tell the truth, always. Readers felt betrayed because they believed the paper would not let them down. Even on April 1.

The fact was we kind of did. I had my little laugh at people’s gullibility. But I was the one who got it all wrong. How foolish was that?

Signaling a story or pages as April Fools’ hah hah gives the joke away and invariably is not that funny, even when reasonably clever.

“Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show” can pull it off, at least to a degree, sometimes, batting average successfully, I’d say. The newsroom hard-boileds for the rest of the year do not switch over so easily straining to be funny for a day. I’m with the witticism about fish climbing trees on this one. Leave comedy to the professionals.

In a way, though, I’m comforted by our resounding failures in fake news, at least where you’re likely as not to run into the sources and targets of your reports.

And I learned in the one edition long ago it’s even worse if you do pull it off well.

Still, that was one wickedly funny piece. I laugh and wince even now.

Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached atdrogers@parkrecord.comor (970) 376-0745.