We have tracked in these pages the fall and rise of the April fool puzzle. Once a staple of crosswording, it seemed almost to disappear in the 2010s – just at the time that every brand from hipster to megacorp attempted engagement using unfunny jokes signed off by committees, making the entire morning of 1 April a joyless, wretched chore.
Happily, there’s much less organised fun these days, and each year brings more signs of the recovery of a unique kind of fooling. A crossword setter plays tricks and conceals their real intentions every other day of the year, so what happens on 1 April?
Anything goes.
Here, for example, is what solvers of the New York Times saw:
A grid partially filled. Are the scrawled entries correct? Incorrect? Partly correct? Solve and find out (link for subscribers only). Incidentally, this is the clearest demonstration I’ve seen of the usefulness of writing an S at the end of an entry which you’re pretty sure is, say, a plural. Or is it?
Staying in the US, the Los Angeles Times went for a light theme of long answers which begin with words for nonsense, indicated by the entry FALSE STARTS. And the Wall Street Journal’s puzzle (“Final Score” by Lynn Lempel) was reminiscent of the previous day’s (“Final Score” by Lynn Lempel), suggesting an editorial error – but in one the scores are sporting and in the other musical. Identical grids, too; lovely stuff.
In the UK, the setter known locally as Harpo set a Financial Times puzzle in which the fooling is by no means restricted to the baffling preamble. It’s one where you think you’ve spotted what’s going on and you haven’t quite. And in the Independent, those looking for something hidden by Phi in the unchecked letters will be certain they’ve seen a MISPRINT or two …
… before discovering that they have indeed seen two, but of a different kind. Or should that be four?
In this newspaper, I was delighted as editor to be able to continue the tradition of April fool puzzles where you know that something’s wrong but you have to work out what that something is: a daft puzzle by Ludwig, a name used by various Guardian setters. I’ll leave the archived puzzle without a warning preamble, so that future solvers can discover it for themselves. But if you’ve come here in bafflement, each across answer needs to be replaced with a soundalike before entry and a word within each down clue needs to be replaced with a soundalike before solving.
Crosswords are a game with rules which, once understood, benefit the solver far more than the setter. It’s in everyone’s interests, once a year, to rewrite them for a day and imagine what else might be possible, or simply to be silly. For our next cluing conference: how would you clue SOUNDALIKE?
Meanwhile our cluing conference for DOGE is another instalment where it’s well worth your time returning to see many more excellent takes than will fit here. We can squeeze in an audacity award for Gussalufz’s “Follow the trail of ketamine for this office”. The runners-up are Montano’s “Ultimately, head honcho ruling Venice” and Mr_Rob_T’s “Heartless US car company that’s led by Elon Musk”. The winner, so long as we’re interpreting TA as meaning “thanks to”, is “Declining state spending thanks to this lot?”
Kludos to Newlaplandes and please leave entries for SOUNDALIKE below, along with any favourite clues or puzzles you have spotted.
