The Carnivalesque and April Fool's Day

As April Fool's Day passed by last week, I thought it interesting to reflect on the carnivalesque nature of the holiday. In the third part of his essay on "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse", Bakhtin points out that the Cyprian feasts of the Middle Ages allowed people to parody normally sombre sacred ceremonies and mock religious authority figures. Similarly, it seems to me that April Fool's Day, particularly on the Internet, allows companies and other content creators to mock things that are normally seen as serious rituals and events. For instance, last year, social news website Reddit.com made granted all users administrator privileges, thereby reversing the website's usual hierarchy and letting the servants become the masters, as it were. Similarly, following its usual tradition of mock product announcements, Google pretended to launch Google Motion, which claimed to allow users to type in e-mails using gesture control. The video mocked the tone and enthusiasm usually found in product launch videos, with Google employees acting out ridiculous gestures in order to create e-mails. It also parodied videos created by Microsoft and Sony in marketing their motion-based videogame software (Microsoft's Kinect and Sony's Move) in ways that may not normally have been acceptable for a corporation. In short, therefore, it seems that April Fool's Day lets users and companies on the Internet indulge in carnivalesque parodies and mockeries similar to those found during the Cyprian Feasts.