Rand Paul used to be better at pranks.

Paul tweeted several times on Thursday, March 31, about a “yuge” endorsement he was going to make on Friday. Here is the announcement: 

Hahaha, get it? This presidential election is so crazy, right? It’s bananas! 

Roughly one in every 2,500 April Fools’ jokes is good (GQ’s George Quarterly bit is the only one I’ve seen today that’s not terrible), and this is not one of the good ones, though it’s also not the worst. (It’s really not good though.) 

Rand Paul used to be better at doing pranks, sort of. When he was at Baylor University, he belonged to the NoZe Brotherhood, a frat-y group of outsiders devoted to satirizing and scandalizing their classmates at the strict, Baptist school. They put out a newspaper, The Rope, which was sort of a third-rate The Onion (or first-rate Daily Currant), that featured articles making fun of Bible-thumpers. In one, an old man admits that he wrote the Bible as a lark, saying, “I guess it’s time I cleared this up. I don’t know what all the fuss is about; I mean I’m no Tolkien.” The jokes aren’t much better, but at least they had a target. 

More famously, Paul and a friend kidnapped a woman and forced her to bow down in a creek and worship their god, “Aqua Buddha.” The woman wasn’t hurt, but she was clearly affected by the incident. “They never hurt me, they never did anything wrong, but the whole thing was kind of sadistic,” she said 30 years later. “They were messing with my mind. It was some kind of joke.” So Rand Paul has gotten worse at pranks, but maybe it’s a good thing he’s gotten less ambitious.