Category:April fools' comics

Comics that were put up on April Fools' Day as an April Fools' Day joke.

Randall first posted an April Fool's comic on Sunday, April 1, 2007. This comic was not numbered; sequentially, it came between 242: The Difference and 243: Appropriate Term. It has not been preserved in the official xkcd archives, though it survives on a thread in the xkcd forums.

For April Fools' Day 2008 Randall created 404: Not Found, which is a meta-comic, since it in fact doesn't exist. But that he considers it a comic is both made clear in the explanation for said "comic" and also since he links to it in his 2018 April fools' comic 1975: Right Click, from a fools' menu that links to all his comic alphabetically by title.

The comic for April 1st 2009 (563: Fermirotica) has no obvious ties to April Fools' Day, but on that day Randall, Jeph Jacques and Ryan North altered their DNS records to point to each others websites. xkcd.com would show the page from Questionable content, questionablecontent.net would show the page from Dinosaur comics and www.qwantz.com would show xkcd.

April 1st, 2010 didn't coincide with a comic release. However, on that day the site was altered to mimic a Unix command line interface (see 721: Flatland).

Starting on Friday, April 1, 2011 with 880: Headache, Randall has released a real April Fools' Day joke annually. Beginning with the following year with 1037: Umwelt, he began releasing an April Fools Day comic on April 1st, notwitstanding what day of the week it fell on by shifting the comic's release to that day, except for April 1st, 2017, where no comics were released. But in 2018 he once again moved the release day from Monday April 2nd to Sunday April 1st with 1975: Right Click.

Randall discusses several April Fools comics in his talk at Øredev 2013.