April fools is no laughing matter. Wait, or is it?

We’re nearing that time of year again, April 1st, also known as April Fools’ Day; and, we have collectively decided that on this day… on this day… everyone can be funny. That’s right. On April 1st, no matter who you are, you can joke and prank and hoax, and then shout “April Fools!” at your recipients to expose and explain your behavior.

It’s a day when tech companies often announce features or products that could be real, but they aren’t, because it’s April Fools’ Day, silly. Take Google’s self-driving bike hoax, or the time they introduced Screen Cleaner in the Files app, which uses Smudge Detector API to identify imperfections with geometric dirt models and a haptic micromovement generator to dislodge dirt, smudges, and more.

These pranks are usually hit or miss, leaving some laughing and a substantial number of other people disappointed; it’s kind of like learning you *didn’t* actually win that million-dollar sweepstakes prize because it was a phishing attack.

It’s a day when the media may invent fake headlines with fake accompanying stories. And this is good, because it’s not as though we have an actual, real problem with fake news. In fact, if there’s anything the internet - a place where we already doubt truthfulness - needs more, it’s false information.

In case you didn’t know, those last two sentences were written in jest, so I’ll just go ahead and shout “April Fools!” to clear the air.

The point is, even when April Fools’ Day pranks are basically harmless and don’t cause widespread confusion, they’re often cringe-worthy and not funny.

Just like dad jokes!

Which is why we thought we’d throw some into Shortcut for the day.

Dad jokes are so popular these days, they’re more like little one-line parodies: a joke about a type of joke. It’s almost like making fun of April Fools’ Day on April Fools’ Day.

To mansplain what a dad joke is: a dad joke, according to Oxford Languages, is “an unoriginal or unfunny joke of a type supposedly told by middle-aged or older men.” For Dictionary.com, it’s a “corny and generally unfunny joke reminiscent of the types of remarks made by middle-aged or elderly fathers to their children.”

But you don’t have to have children to tell a dad joke. As far as we know, Shortcut doesn’t have any children, but that’s not stopping the app from having a little fun on a Friday.

So for one day only, you’ll see that we’ve added a dad joke to the loading screens for all customers, just for the day. You’ll see the joke in the bottom right hand corner of your screen. And if one is not enough, you can click “Tell me another joke!” to keep April Fools’ Day alive.

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A visual tour of the new feature

This experience will end on Friday night at midnight, so make sure you show up and have a full, hard day of work on Friday.

Joy is in the DNA of Shortcut. Our team wants you to feel joy in each interaction, to make work a bit more fun. The goal of adding joy to Shortcut has been a mission of ours since the company was founded.

You can add joy on this page:

But you can also kill joy, if you want, by using the “kill joy” setting. This is not a joke. Or is it?