Artist and activist Joey Skaggs has been inviting members of the New York City media to his annual April Fools’ Day parade along Fifth Avenue since 1986.

Press releases archived on Skaggs’ website describe the event as an attempt to “bring people back in touch with their inherent foolishness” and celebrate “the public’s right to laugh in the face of authority.” Past parades have included a President Donald Trump look-alike contest and a Y2K-themed end-of-the-world party. This year’s press release invites participants to ponder “what’s real and what’s not” at a parade led by the president himself, followed by a screening of the “Melania mockumentary” and a reading of all redacted names in the Jeffrey Epstein files, other than victims.

Various news outlets have shown up to cover the parade over the years, and high school marching bands have reached out to perform, Skaggs said in an interview. Chinese TV station SinoVision even produced a four-minute package previewing the event and detailing its history in 2015.

But the joke was on them: There was no parade.

There typically is some sort of in-person event, Skaggs told Gothamist, but not at the scale described in the press release. He said he spends all year gathering news clippings about things that “are totally absurd or I can’t believe or that pisses me off,” and then uses those stories to concoct an elaborate plan in the press release. It’s an annual trick on the media to probe what people believe and why, he said, adding that he considers pranks “part of my art.”

“I’m an artist, and I use the media like a painter would use a canvas,” he said.

The New York native said he started out as a “very serious artist” who became disillusioned with the “hypocrisy” of the industry. Out of that frustration he turned to a more iconoclast form of art, turning the streets into his theater, he said. Now, he uses satire to make political statements.

“If you can’t laugh at the situation, we’re really screwed,” Skaggs said.

Here are some of New York’s other most memorable pranks, in case you need some inspiration for your April Fools Day.

The mysterious Mets prospect

On April 1, 1985, Sports Illustrated published a lengthy feature about Hayden “Sidd” Finch, an eccentric Mets prospect who could throw a ball at 168 mph but had never played on a baseball team before.

The article described Finch as a monk-like polymath with unbelievable talent who spent a brief stint at Harvard University before dropping out. Reporter George Plimpton traced Finch’s story back to his early childhood in an orphanage in England and his adoption by an archaeologist who later died in a plane crash. A former roommate and a landlord reportedly told Plimpton that Finch played the French horn, slept on the floor and spoke multiple languages.

Mets pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre was reportedly awestruck by Finch’s “revolutionary pitching style.”

“I don’t understand the mechanics of it. Anyone who tries to throw the ball that way should fall flat on his back,” Stottlemyre was quoted saying. “But I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it a hundred times. It’s the most awesome thing that has ever happened in baseball.”

But Stottlemyre hadn’t actually seen anything. Sidd Finch wasn’t real. Sports Illustrated later revealed that Plimpton had invented the entire story as an elaborate April Fools’ prank. A photographer from the magazine had recruited a friend to pose as Finch to help seal the deal.

The artist who never existed

On April Fools’ Day 1998, David Bowie hosted a party at a Manhattan art studio to celebrate the launch of a new publishing house, British novelist William Boyd wrote in a 2011 essay in the Telegraph.

David Bowie and Julian Schnabel at the book party.

Photo by Steve Azzara/Corbis via Getty Images

The first publication was Boyd’s book “Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960.” It detailed the life of Tate, a mediocre artist who nonetheless became rich and famous. But when he realized just how middling his talents were, according to Boyd, the artist jumped off the Staten Island ferry and drowned.

Boyd described a “glittering” party where Bowie read excerpts from the book, and a journalist asked questions to egg on the crowd. Many attendees at the party chimed in, “warmly remembering aspects of his life, shows they had attended, reflecting on the sadness of his premature death,” Boyd wrote.

What those partygoers didn’t know was that the book wasn’t a biography. It was a novel. Tate was a figment of Boyd’s imagination, he said, designed “to prove how powerful and credible a pure fiction could be.” Boyd also wrote in the Telegraph that he wanted to make a statement about the artists who were selling their pieces for record prices, even though they were “not very good.”

Bowie came up with the idea to tell the fake artist’s story through a book and organized the April Fools’ launch party, Boyd wrote in an essay in the Guardian.

“[T]here’s absolutely no denying the fact that it was Bowie’s participation in the eventual hoax that gave it media heft,” Boyd said.

How many reporters does it take to write a romance novel?

This one didn’t take place on April Fools’ Day, but it still merits a spot among New York’s most iconic pranks.

The story starts in 1966, at a Long Island bar where reporters at Newsday often gathered after work, WNYC’s Studio 360 reported in 2017. As a group of journalists sipped their drinks and listened to piano music, columnist Mike McGrady decried the sad state of literature and the poorly written books that were making heaps of money. The reporters hatched a plan: They would write their own trashy erotic novel, each taking on one chapter, according to Studio 360.

Nine of the 25 authors on Naked Came the Stranger get together after they revealed they had perpetrated what may become the literary hoax of the century.

Bettmann / Getty Images

A team of 25 reporters and editors, including a Pulitzer Prize winner and the paper’s top editor, banded together to draft the novel, the New York Times reported. While the first draft was written quickly, the editing process faced interruptions as reporters traveled to Vietnam to cover the war and completed prestigious fellowships, according to the Times.

In 1969, “Naked Came the Stranger” was published under the pen name Penelope Ashe. The novel took place in King’s Neck, the “steaming suburban jungle within sight of Manhattan’s brightest lights,” according to a synopsis inside the book jacket. It followed 29-year-old marriage counselor Gillian Blake, who “hits King’s Neck like a small tornado,” prompting men and marriages to “fall at her feet.” The back of the book featured a photo of a woman posing coquettishly with her dog, along with a caption that described Ashe as “a demure Long Island housewife.”

The sister-in-law of the project’s mastermind pretended to be Ashe, appearing as her in the author photo and during media interviews, according to Studio 360. Within months, the book had sold more than 90,000 copies and reached number three on the New York Times bestseller list, the show reported.

The jig was up in the summer of 1969, when the Wall Street Journal broke the news that the book was a hoax.