Ah, April Fools’, the one day of the year where the internet is bound in stupid, and companies around the world look to exploit the day with their PR stunts. Admittedly, some are humourous, but more often than not, they’re cringey, expected, and low-key kinda lame.

But now, the Grand Daddy of pranks, Google, has made clear that they won’t be participating in the month’s festivities because of the global threat of the coronavirus.

This comes from an email found by Business Insider, and states that Google will “take the year off from that tradition out of respect for all those fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Our highest goal right now is to be helpful to people, so let’s save the jokes for next April, which will undoubtedly be a whole lot brighter than this one.”

“We’ve already stopped any centralized April Fool’s efforts but realize there may be smaller projects within teams that we don’t know about,” the email from Google’s head of marketing Lorraine Twohill continues.

“Please suss out those efforts and make sure your teams pause on any jokes they may have planned — internally or externally.”

This can be construed one of two ways: Either Google is really not going to do a joke this year, or this could be a ploy to make you think there’s not going to be a prank. Okay in all seriousness, they’re probably not going to in this current state of affairs worldwide. They’d be stupid to do it. It would probably come off as insensitive, or somehow misleading.

But that’s just Google. I’m sure there will still be some companies pulling off their ‘prank’ for the year, which I think will be met with plenty criticism. And if someone pulls a ‘joke’ related to COVID-19, they’re going to be blasted so hard.

So keep in mind brands across the world, best to keep the jokes for next year. You know, when we’re not facing a global health crisis?