Hey, there! I’m your friend, so I didn’t want to be the one to tell you. But someone had to: Your April Fool’s Day joke sucks.

Really, it does. April Fool’s works really well if you’re either genuinely funny or if you make something that’s plausible enough to actually trick someone for a while. “Just do something stupid” need not apply. And it’s especially hard to be appropriately clever on the web.

Now, I know with my old-fashioned outdated ideas of humor I sound like one of those prescriptive grammarians gnashing their teeth over Alanis’ use of the word “ironic”. And, friend, let me tell you: Sometimes, I am the kind of curmudgeon that makes Andy Rooney look like Jessica Simpson. But that, today, is not my motivation.

No, it’s that I’m trying to help you raise the bar. Thus, a list of things which do not actually constitue a valid April Fools’ Day joke:

• “I changed my stylesheet! To someone else’s!” Why isn’t that funny? Because I still knew it was your site.
• “Our tiny company bought/got bought by a giant company. Like Microsoft!” Wow, that’s lame. Neither believable nor surprising enough to be amusing.
• “We are embracing this thing we’ve demonized forever!” So you’re a pest removal service that’s getting into the cockroach-raising business? Sigh.
• “We have a big announcement today!” No you don’t. It’s Saturday.
• “Our new product does the impossible.” You mean like making an April Fool’s joke on the web that’s actually funny.

Anyway, enough bitching. Let’s see if we’ve helped scuttle any bad ideas that were about to be inflicted on us. Happy April Fool’s!