Burning Violin #7 - History of the Fools

Ah, April Fool's Day, the least understood of the major holidays. Commonly believed to have been invented by greeting card companies in the early twentieth century, the holiday actually dates back to prehistoric times. Ancient Mayan and Chaldean astronomers established incredibly precise calendars, including the solstices and equinoxes, but equally as important to their astronomic projections were the so-called temeredies. On these days, specifically April 1st and October 1st in our modern calendar, the ratio of daylight to darkness is completely random, varying wildly with no discernable pattern from year to year. During one memorable period at the height of the renaissance, the ratio was exactly 12 hours of darkness, 12 hours of daylight for sixteen consecutive years, but that anomaly never has been fully explained. The most extremely skewed ratio in recorded history occurred on April 1st, 1809, on which day there was an astonishing 37 hours of daylight and -13 hours of darkness.

The Fool's Guild, a secret society with roots in every major religion and culture since before the beginning of recorded history, adopted the two temeredies as its official days of remembrance in Atlantis approximately a century before the destruction of that island civilization. Ever since, the history of Fools has been intertwined with the histories of April 1st and October 1st.

What are Fools? They are insane, but joyously and purposely so. They are the most human of archetypes for they combine the rational with the irrational, and thus should not be confused with absurdists, idiots, or the religious. Fools chose the temeredies as their signature days, because they foresaw their role as agents of anarchy in societies sociopathically designed for structure.

Fools are one of the two main determinants of human civilization: ants are the only other animals to wage war, hyenas an entire species of Fools, but only human beings combine the two impulses. This leads on occasion to spectacular combinations of events such as La guerra del fútbol (The War of Soccer) in 1969. But it also led to the invention of American football, hockey, rugby, as well as all track and field events involving running around in a circle repeatedly. Baseball and cricket were not the responsibility of Fools, who while they may be insane are never boring. These two sports actually were invented by General Electric as an excuse for large installs of outdoor electric lights in the 1930s. References to baseball and cricket before the 1938 GE Sports Expo are frankly fictional and do not hold up to historical scrutiny. Babe Ruth is perhaps the most obvious hole in the artificial history of baseball, the persona named after a candy bar by drunk advertising interns, who were stunned to find that the joke had slipped by their bosses and into print within a few days.

Fools have been around longer than any other profession, but they do not technically count as the oldest profession because they were not paid until the invention of the other two. Only with the advent of politicans and prostitutes could Fools turn a profit and thus become an official profession. A common misconception is the assumption that artists must be one of the oldest professions, but since artists cannot profit without becoming prostitutes, art in and of itself cannot properly be described as a profession at all.

Curiously, very few Fools existed in the Americas prior to European colonization. Archaeological evidence suggests that most Fools in the native American population were massacred soon after the population migrated into modern North America over the Bering land bridge, which collapsed behind them. Surviving fragments of legends indicate that the entire migration had been based on a Fool's insistence that he knew a shortcut to the Indus. The etymology of the worst Aztec obscenities can be traced from the ancient phrase "dude, it's seriously just one more day away."

After the fall of Atlantis, the core of Fool power shifted north to Greenland. Fools had insisted on the existence of seven continents since time immemorial. They of course did not agree that mountains represented continental barriers and so counted Europe and Asia as a single continent. The seventh continent by their count was Greenland, which any accurate map clearly depicts as the fourth largest landmass.

Ancient tradition holds that Fools are given complete freedom of speech. It is one of the five ancient traditions universally held in all cultures, although only two survive in the modern age: Fools can say whatever they want, don't have sex with your relatives, be hospitable to houseguests (they're probably gods in disguise), don't record anything you don't want your wife or mother to see, and don't mess around with Jim. The tradition of Fool freedom of speech was only broken on one occasion prior to the Fool Genocide of 1893, when Vlad the Impaler personally impaled Illych de Loone after the Fool pointed out that the impaling fetish might simply be an overdeveloped case of compensation. Illych's last words are reported to be "I've had bigger", although this may be apocryphal.

The middle ages were of course the height of Fool hegemony, with the explosion of the importance of jesters in medieval courts. The growing power of jesters though was a blade that cut both ways, and led to a schism in the Fool's Guild that would never be healed, and eventually led to the grand tragedy of the fifteenth century: the great Fool civil war. Known (depending on the Fool's allegiance) as either the War of Joker Aggression or the Jester Revolution, the war was fought on every continent, in every city. After 76 years of bloody (and often ironic) fighting, the Traditionalists managed to annihilate the jesters with a spectacular stroke of strategy. The Traditionalists declared that forevermore April 1st would be Fool's Remembrance Day, and so just to be difficult, the Jesters naturally declared October 1st to be Jester's Remembrance Day. The trap thus sprung, the Traditionalists simply eliminated October 1st from the calendar, and thus no one, not even the Jesters themselves, remembered the Jesters or their rebellion. To this day, October 1st does not exist, contrary to overwhelming popular sentiment.

The civil war weakened Fool influence for many centuries and led to the greatest tragedy of Fool history, the 1893 Fool Genocide in Florin. The King of Florin, descended from a pair of the only surviving jesters and hell-bent on revenge, commissioned the construction of a wormhole generator, drawing from both the secret notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and the prophecies of Nostradamus. The device pulled Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher back in time so that their art could be used as an elaborate mechanism to trap Fools in space and time. Very few Fools escaped the entrapment, and most of those who did fled to safety with the mole men whose realm can only be reached via an Icelandic volcano.

The utter humorlessness of most of the twentieth century, in particular communism, fascism, sitcoms and observational humor, has been definitively proven to be caused by the lack of quality Fools and excess of overly serious morons in positions of power both in the political and entertainment worlds.

The last two officially recognized Fools in existence (made immortal by a pair of clever bets with the Devil and God, respectively) are kept locked in a room by the secret world government of Illuminati and Forest Rangers.  Loki the Red and Loki the Blue continuously play a game of their own devising with ever evolving rules, involving a chess set, seventeen dice, the mummified remains of the last midget emperor of New Zealand, and a seventy-five thousand year old circuit board unearthed in Antarctica. The ebb and flow of their game is analyzed by economists and generals to determine policy. An unexpected coughing fit by Loki the Blue in 1937 resulted in the Second World War.

The 21st century has seen the resurgence of the Fool in popular culture, although his numbers are still too low to allow for natural breeding to take over. Luckily in 2003, a Fool militia group replaced large quantities of sperm bank stock with their own semen, which should lead to a widespread reintroduction of Fools into the areas that need them the most: upper class, conservative households. Contrary to conservative ideology, Fools do not burst out through the mother's chest cavity, although they have been known to slip out of the uterus while their mother is sleeping in order to sneak a quick smoke and gamble with the troll/elf hybrids that live inside the walls of most modern suburban households. This does not seem to cause any problems, save when the Fool fetus in question brings back a friend to the womb for a little action.

You can be assured that the contents of this brief synopsis are quite historically accurate, as the author has verified the events with the time machine he built in his garage out of a refrigerator box, a sharpie, three hundred paperclips, and the pelts of three zombified squirrels.