Impressive April Fools' Day pranks that aren't just marketing stunts

Brace yourselves, people of the internet, for your feeds are about to be flooded with links to wild new products, services and (apparently) celebrity romances – all of them so crazy that you might even drop your jaw for a second before looking at the date.

Or maybe not. It's getting hard to actually dupe anyone on April Fools' Day now that every company with a website seemingly earmarks part of its marketing budget each year for "pranking."

With some exceptions (hello, Google Maps!), the online world has grown collectively sick of being "trolled" by brands on this most hallowed of pranking holidays.

"April Fools' Day has been clickbaited into ruin... sliced into lumps of flesh and sold to advertisers by the pound," wrote VICE UK's Joel Golby of the phenomenon last year. "We deserve better. We deserve fake dog turds and toothpaste-filled Oreos. We deserve hot sauce doughnuts and sugar in the salt. We deserve to have our own [pee] trampolined back onto our pants thanks to a tight layer of cling wrap over the toilet."

Hear, hear!

Fooling the masses with a seven-figure spoof ad (or straight-up lies) might attract some attention, but aggressively branded hoaxes that bank on social buzz aren't original anymore – if ever they even were.

That's why we've decided to shine a spotlight this year on some of the most memorable and widely shared April Fools pranks carried out by regular people over the past decade. People who are clever. People who work tirelessly to terrify their loved ones without getting paid for it. People who prank for the love of pranking.  

Below are five examples that prove you don't need millions of dollars or promoted tweets to go viral on AFD. Sometimes, a creative brain and hilarious victims are all it takes to be recognized as the infamous jokester you truly are.

Students prank their macroeconomics professor with a fake pregnancy call during class

Cellphones in the classroom? No problem for this Grand Rapids, Mich., university professor – as long as his students answer every single call they get during class on speaker phone, for everyone to hear. Toss the news of an unexpected positive pregnancy test into the mix, and macroeconomics have never been more entertaining. The professor's reaction alone is worthy of the more than 50 million YouTube views this prank has accumulated since 2014.

Fake WhatsApp breakup message backfires beautifully

A Scottish teenager rose to instant Twitter fame last year after screenshotting the results of an April Fools' Day joke she'd played on her boyfriend... or ex-boyfriend, rather, after the prank. 

The car covered in Post-it notes

It's hard to know whether or not this prank was ever pulled off in the days before internet usage was common, but this timeless trick has gone viral several times over since the mid 2000s – and for good reason. It's a classic. Here's one of YouTube's most viewed versions of the Post-it note car prank, circa 2007:

Teacher pranks his students with multimedia math class magic

California math professor Matthew Weathers sparked an entire wave of viral educational pranks in 2010 with video footage of a spectacular interactive presentation that made it appear as though he were being usurped by his own shadow mid-class. This wasn't the first (or last time) he demonstrated his humorous multimedia chops in math class. You can see more of the Biola University professor's pranks on his YouTube channel – including last year's prank, which also went viral.

The Nicolas Cage mouse-block move (aka "Caging")

Looking for the perfect way to pull one over on a co-worker without breaking a sweat, nail or piece of company-owned equipment? This classic prank, which involves taping a photo of actor Nicolas Cage's face under an optical mouse so that it doesn't work, has been going around for years, thanks largely in part to the Nic Cage-loving communities of Tumblr and Reddit. It never gets old. We may not know who started the trend, but it's safe to say the world is thankful for their ingenuity — and all Nicolas Cage pranks in general.

Also commendable? Nic Cage ice cubes:

Share your own best or most memorable April Fools' Day pranks in the comments below.