Are hoaxes funny? Yes, in some circumstances they can be. Most people enjoy the holiday dedicated to hoaxes, April Fool’s Day.

Hoaxes out of season can be funny too. Students at MIT, for example, went to enormous trouble to construct an upside-down room, with a pool table, casual seating, and a sleeping cat. That was funny, creative, and harmed no living thing, since it wasn’t a real cat.

MIT students are famous for creating hoaxes, which they call hacks. In 1982, a helium balloon popped up on the fifty yard line during the hotly contested Harvard-Yale football game. MIT, its lettering read. Again, no one was harmed, a rivalry was deflated, and many were amused.

Jonathan Swift and the astrologer

Hoaxes can deflate imposters, too. Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels and other satires, once hoaxed an astrologer he seems to have considered a fraud. He began by publishing a fake almanac, with predictions for the coming year.

Posing as Isaac Bickerstaff, he predicted that John Partridge would die of a fever at 11 pm on March 29. On March 30, he published another almanac, in which he described a visit to the dying Mr. Partridge. According to Swift’s story, the astrologer had made a deathbed confession that he was only a fraud.

Mr. Partridge published a pamphlet in which he protested that he was alive. Mr. Bickerstaff (Swift) replied that no living man could have published such rubbish.

This hoax mocked the astrologer’s predictive abilities, and caused some in the public to lose faith in his star charts. For people who did not believe in astrology, and who considered some of its practitioners charlatans, this hoax was a public service, and funny too.

Inappropriate hoaxes

Hoaxes that embarrass or alarm the innocent are not funny at all, and certainly not kind. Pranks that make a mess, or waste a community’s resources are not funny either, especially to the people who have to clean them up. Hoaxes intended to get victims to hand over money or property are simply fraud. The police do not laugh at fraud.

People who enjoy a hoax are liable to call it a prank. If a prank is not successful though, or has unintended consequences, it will often be called a hoax.

In anther MIT hack, a police car, lights flashing, was arranged on top of a famous college building. That’s not so funny, assuming it was a real police car. People could be endangered and money wasted. People who perpetrate hoaxes must think about the consequences of their actions. They also must consider all the ways that their innocent hoax could go wrong. In the right season and the right spirit, though, hoaxes can be funny indeed.