NYC April Fools' Day Parade: The Joke Is On The 'Buttholes'
NEW YORK CITY — Rep. George Santos dressed as Pinocchio, Will Smith look-a-likes randomly smacking the crowd, and a route tracked by a Chinese spy balloon: this is the April Fools’ Day Parade New York City has been promised.
Is it a giant April Fools’ joke? Yes! And no. Bear with us.
The gloriously foolish “event” is the brainchild of avowed prankster Joey Skaggs, who promises in a read-it-to-believe-it (but don’t believe it) press release that the 38th Annual April Fools’ Day Parade will assemble noon Saturday at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street.
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“The weather is going to be s—–, but we have some diehards,” Skagg told Patch. We then reminded him this is a family website and he kindly went PG-13. “The parade is a natural extension of saying, ‘I’m sick of these buttholes.'”
The annual “parade” — and its decades of satirical, cheekily over-promising press releases — is a long-running prank that occasionally slips into already-absurd reality.
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Several news outlets were duped into showing up for the event in 2000 only to reportedly find they had been pranked.
“They arrived at 59th Street at noon and patiently waited for the parade to start,” Hoaxes.org reports. “It never did.”
Then again, in 2017 it seems the prankster’s fans actually conjured the dream into a very odd existence when they gathered in costume outside Trump Tower on April 1 that year.
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All this to say, one thing is certain: the “parade” will not go down as promised, should people (who’ve now been amply warned) choose to attend.
For example, Patch highly doubts Tucker Carlson will be providing live national coverage, although we did email Fox News to be sure. (They, shockingly, did not respond.)
According to the press release (written by a prankster for fools and “buttholes”), the parade is funded by the sale of Hunter Biden’s paintings. The theme this year is said to be “Countdown to Complete Idiocy.”
“The parade Grand Marshall this year is New York Representative George Santos dressed as Pinocchio,” the release states.
“He’ll be followed by Ye (a.k.a. Kanye West) in his motorized golden chariot playing a re-mix of totalitarian national anthems on a pipe organ while unsellable Adidas sneakers are flung at the crowd. “
President Joe Biden would also allegedly make an appearance in a functional capacity:
“His Corvette [will be] towing the Escalator float on which Donald Trump perpetually tries to go down an up escalator,” the press release promises. “Both will be tossing top secret documents to the crowd.”
The route would theoretically proceed downtown to Washington Square Park, where a big party will be held that culminates in a climatic crowning of the King of Fools, or so the release claims.
Fact Check: The only street closures scheduled this weekend on the parade route is for “knuckle boom operations” at Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza. Patch is sure that will be fun too.
For Skaggs, who loves a good joke so much that a documentary about him is titled “Art of the Prank,” the “parade” is about more than a chance to make fun of some fools, he told Patch.
“Laughter is a great healing gift,” he told Patch in what appeared to be an unguarded, genuine moment.
And it’s a gift that comes in handy when dealing with the ever-growing cavalcade of cretins at the levers of power over the past 38 years, Skaggs said.
“It’s like inflation on buttholes,” Skaggs said.
Or, as he says on his website, “The light at the end of the tunnel is a colonoscopy.”
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