“Watch out everyone. You’ve been drinking dihydrogen monoxide today.”

That was a joke one or more of your teachers in grade school probably made, or some variation, if you paid attention or showed up to science courses.

And, in case you didn’t know or were too lazy to look it up, dihydrogen monoxide is water.

Apparently, the fine folks of Lee County, Fla., who listen to Gator Country 101.9 didn’t take chemistry and don’t know how to use the Internet, as April 1, 2013, gave the country yet another example of scientific illiteracy and/or lack of desire to understand what you are being told.

The two disc jockeys hosting on April Fool’s Day pulled out the old water joke, again, on the most obvious day of the year to question when someone makes an announcement. They told listeners that dihydrogen monoxide was coming out of taps in the area.

Despite the obvious day of dates for pranks, listeners panicked and began calling neighbors and the water company and whatnot.

The Lee County Board of Supervisors went so far as to make a county-wide announcement that the water was fine in order to assuage the frightened populace.

Now, some people, officials of the area, are rumored to be describing this joke as a felony-level offense.

Just so everyone knows, the Australian government made a joke on April Fool’s Day in 1998 about the content of dihydrogen monoxide and “suggested” banning it. 

The dihydrogen monoxide joke has been on radios and TV and YouTube videos for years, and still, it gets people.

And still, the two DJs in question were indefinitely suspended for doing the kind of schtick almost every morning talkshow host in the world does.

Tony Renda, station manager for Gator Country 101.9, said, “It is one thing when radio stations change their format or other crazy things they do. But, you are messing with one of the big three: food, water or shelter. They just went too far; I just knew I didn’t like that.”

Give me a break.

For anyone out there thinking that joking about one of the “big three” is going too far, they have little comprehension of how comedy has operated during the past, oh, I don’t know, at least 8 p.m. on Oct. 30, 1938.

For another history lesson, 8 p.m. Oct. 30, 1938, was when one of the greatest pranks was broadcast. It was Orson Welles’ radio presentation of “The War of the Worlds” as a part of the “The Mercury Theater on the Air” drama series aired on the Columbia Broadcasting System.

Despite a disclaimer that it was a drama, people thought the radio show was offering real news accounts of Martians invading Earth.

The actual number of people duped is unknown, but the number of people pissed off about being duped definitely made waves.

And, yet again, people are outraged because they were caught lacking knowledge. For Welles’ broadcast in 1938, no Internet was available, and there were no commercial breaks to make more announcements.

Today, we have the Internet. Today, when something terrible and real happens, radio stations and news stations broadcast the information over and over.

But then, people are duped again and again by radical pictures photoshopped and distributed across the web. So maybe gullibility hasn’t diminished over the years.

Nevertheless, it is not a crime to make a play on words if they are telling the truth; yes, yes, I’m sure there are a couple exceptions.

Point being, people need to pay more attention.

If something strange occurs on a day where people across the world celebrate practical jokes, maybe it is a good day to ask yourself what is going on.

The folks that were fooled by the alternate name for water are lashing out because they were fooled. The DJs weren’t in the wrong for making a joke, and I’m betting it wasn’t the first time comedy was used on the station.

From the “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!” episode where they fooled activists into signing a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide to the Australian DJs involved in the Kate Middleton prank to Welles’ alien invasion broadcast and the others throughout history, the pranksters were not in the wrong for their comedy.

Sometimes, a joke is taken too far by entertainers. It is rare that a joke is taken too far, though.

The sad reality is that oodles of people only like practical jokes if they aren’t had by it, and when they are had by it, they overreact.

The water joke will happen again, and some people will most likely not get it. But maybe, just maybe, the joke will one day be relegated to only the ears of youthful students first learning chemistry.

UPDATE: The DJs are back on the air. “Although the VAST MAJORITY of our listeners got the joke, some didn’t. We needed to ensure that ALL of our listeners understood that there was no problem with the water,” Renda said in a message, adding that the station had to ensure that both the Lee County Utility and Lee County Health Department were both satisfied with the efforts, according to a newspress article. 

Gabriel Stoffa is a graduate student in political science from Ottumwa, Iowa.