Commentary | April Fool’s Day and Easter

If March is like watching a Khan academy video at 0.1 speed, narrated by the teacher in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” April is the same video, but at light speed, narrated by Ben Shapiro on crack. Graphed, it would look something like Jake Lloyd’s career: bumbling in anonymity until the age of ten, when he was chosen to play the most revered role of our time, little “Ani” Skywalker….then Lloyd got indicted for reckless driving and resisting arrest, a crash-and-burn hellfire analogous to the month of May. 

You know what they say: ”April showers bring May flowers…” What was last year’s slogan? Oh, right— “June bloom brings July doom…” April weather is like “Blade Runner.” Noah of Genesis took one look at this weather and said, “Man, was I let off easy!” Forget cats and dogs–it’s raining frogs like in the Book of Exodus. Sooner or later it’s gonna start raining hot dogs like in “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.”

But for every Hyde, there’s a Jekyll. April Fool’s Day is upon us. The great thing about all this pranking is that you can go out, commit grand larceny, and claim total immunity. It’s like “The Purge,”— all bets are off. The absolution of all responsibility. Sometimes I wonder if this holiday was instituted for people like Steve Harvey. You know, he has a relapse of that Miss Universe debacle, he’s got an escape route: “C’mon folks! I was only fooling!” By the same token, it’s entirely plausible that Tom Holland would post a spoiler for “Spider-Man: No Way Home” to Twitter, follow up the post with a tweet saying, “April Fools!”, then realize that it is April 2, and he just leaked the entire ending of the movie, and his contract with Marvel is now terminated.

Claiming April Fool’s is like pleading the fifth, or crossing your fingers while the “cheese touch” runs amuck at your elementary school. Your hands are tied. No one can touch you. You’re a droideka in “Star Wars,” shielded by a virtually impenetrable deflector shell. It’s a zero-sum game. It’s like you’ve got your own magician’s trap door on the stage; when things go wrong, and the scantily clad assistant doesn’t saw in half, you’ve got a sure exit.

Then there’s Easter. He is risen!

Joe Biden, I mean, from his fourth nap of the day. 

No, no, I know… stop being facetious, got it. Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, not Clint Eastwood. Then again, if something so miraculous, so jaw-dropping, so apocryphal like the resurrection were to happen today, in the age of the unsullied news media, with truth and nothing but the truth as their unflinching telos, iconoclasts and skeptics alike would remain unmoved.  

“Hey, you hear about that guy… what was his name? Hay-Zeus? Don Lemon says his tomb is empty.” 

“Yeah, and Epstein killed himself. Give me a break.” 

Yes, Christ was buried in a tomb and rose from the dead… some can’t even rise from their memory foam mattress.

Religion aside, Easter festivities are decidedly farcical. First, there’s Easter egg hunts. What’s nice about those is that you can find a plastic egg under your fridge five years down the road. It’s shivering with life-threatening pneumonia, you know, like an abandoned dog having weathered a month-long winter storm in Boston: “You… have… no idea… what’s down there…” You open the egg up, the candy Peep living inside has hardened to a brick, a colony of ants have burrowed into its once-soft entrails… you take a bite, out of asinine curiosity, next thing you know, you’re at the dentist with a chipped tooth like Ed Helms in “The Hangover.”

The holiday is very inclusive, too. There’s even an egg hunt for moms. It’s called, “Find My Car Keys.”

And the man of the hour, the Easter Bunny, is the off-brand Santa, the third Jonas brother. For Easter 2020, the drunken hare didn’t even bother to show up— in his stead, Frank the Rabbit from “Donnie Darko.”

You know how rabbit feet are a thing? Like a good luck charm, a talisman? Misfortune was so rampant last year, I’ll surmise that even the Easter Bunny himself had to get amputated. You know, he comes hobbling into the elementary school on a crutch, like a Vietnam vet who got his leg blown off by a landmine… “Hey kids, I could be better, THANKS FOR ASKING. Some WACKO sadist nutjob sawed off my foot for ‘good luck’… Yeah, I forgot the jellybeans this year… hope you’re fine with dates…”