The New Hoax King: Penguins?

What is it about penguins that seems to invite all sorts of spoofs and hoaxes, and still remaining utterly endearing? As if the spotlight time with “Happy Feet” and “March of the Penguins” wasn’t enough, now the tuxedo chubbies are on a whole other attention spree — but how and where did the penguin spoof trend really begin?

We saw the rather hilarious penguin-driven BBC video player promo. But as original as the BBC can get (c’mon, “The Office” is all the funnier in its original Brit-accent-laden iteration), this particular commercial is eerily similar to an award-winning one for French film channel Canal+.

Alas, the French can’t claim credit for this particular brand of penguin humor, either. It turns out that in 1995, Discover Magazine pulled a rather believable penguin-centric April fools prank: the mag informed its readers of a newly discovered sort Antarctic of mole, the hotheaded naked ice borer, which lurks beneath the ice, slowly melting it and eating befuddled penguins as they sink. The magazine reportedly received more mail in response to that “article” than it ever had for anything else.

So there you have it — proof that every great cultural trend has its roots in science. Or, in this case, “science.”