The beauty of a good prank is its suddenness and its simplicity. It’s like ripping a band-aid off. You keep whatever pain you inflict short and sharp. Nothing more needs to be done; it’s just one glorious – but fleeting – moment of humiliation for the prankee and then it’s over. People can recover from that. There’s no long lasting harm. Everybody moves on.
See, inflecting intentional duress in a single split second is a mere playful pratfall. But inflicting intentional duress over a sustained and lengthy period of time? That’s fucking torture, my friends. It’s cruel, needless, and unusual.
That’s why the best April Fools pranks are never long cons. The best April Fools pranks never start way the hell back in FEBRUARY promising you something magical and then leave you to dangle impotently in a breeze that gradually grows from soft to knife-like over the ensuing weeks, only to find out when the executioner’s sword finally comes down that it was made out of foam all along.
See, back in February someone – whom henceforth shall exclusively be referred to as
Pissbitch – in February Pissbitch
started a mysterious countdown clock, which was calculated to end on April 1st, indicating that
something might be happening in the realm of the much beloved but all-too-shortlived sitcom
Happy Endings.
Now, all of us, we all knew somewhere deep in our minds and hearts and loins, we all knew that it was entirely likely that this would wind up being a mere bout of month-related foolishness. We all knew. That was a distinctly plausible outcome. But the timeline – the sheer length of it – seemed needlessly lengthy and cruel for the payoff to be little more than a “GOTCHA” punchline.
Well, my friends, that day has arrived, the countdown has ended, and all of our misery has been put out. Nothing’s happened. It was all, in fact, a joke. And for this needless period of uncertainty and bubbling hope we have no one but Pissbitch to thank.
But the problem with a joke that has a timeline that long is that it allowed enough time for momentum to be gathered, which in turn almost succeeded in bringing the show back in some capacity, as unlikely as that sounds.
Creator David Caspe spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the clock, this menacing creation of Pissbitch.
“It took on a life of its own to the point that actually there was some interest in finding a place to do a few more episodes or an hourlong special. So then I couldn’t comment because I wasn’t allowed to say anything yet. But as we hit April 1, nothing has really panned out, and I don’t want to keep people hanging on, so I have to say something. Happy Endings remains cancelled for now. Hopefully one day we’ll be able to do an hourlong or a couple stand-alone episodes, and I’ve talked to the cast about even just doing a five-minute cold open. I want to apologise to anyone who is annoyed. It was just a writers’ room bit that kind of got away from them.”
To reiterate, because of some dumb, stupid, needlessly long gag, there was at least an above 0% chance that Happy Endings might have been revived – in some form – to steak us home one more night.
A much beloved cult series could have breathed new life, all thanks to Pissbitch and his/her shitty April Fools prank.
It is two thousand and fifteen, and this is the world we live in.
Who needs a drink?
