For the last four years, we’ve come up with a series of fake products at Archie McPhee to celebrate April Fool’s Day. The most popular by far is the Bacon Tuxedo shown above. (I wrote the description you can read if you click the link) This year, we decided not to do the fake products. Instead, we’re giving away a hundred free Rubber Chickens.
The Bacon Tuxedo was so popular it even inspired a puzzle.
Here’s an article I was interviewed for called The Business of Making People Laugh.
So what works? Beyond the juxtaposition of the unexpected, as in waffle-flavored dental floss or a vengeful unicorn doll that comes with figurines to impale on its horn, Wahl cautiously posits that a successful gag, by McPhee’s standards, comes from “something that people probably think is a private joke. The product allows them to share in the idea that here’s a community of people who share that joke. Every culture on the Earth has something with bacon, so bacon bandages allow people to connect over something specific that’s actually very broad. Those are the things that people think are funny.”
When I first met my wife, she collected issues of Weekly World News and was Bat Boy obsessed. Little did I know that a decade later in 2002 I would be quoted in this esteemed newspaper. The reporter was amazed that I was happy to talk to the Weekly World News. One shocking fact I learned, Max Durango is a woman!
