Look Alike Day
<p>Some time in the 1980s, a television reporter named Jack Etzel was wandering downtown Pittsburgh with his cameraman, Rick Minutello, hunting for a light news feature to fill out the evening bulletin. Nothing was biting. Then Minutello spotted a man walking towards them who looked uncannily like Humphrey Bogart, cigarette and all. The pair spent the next couple of hours stopping strangers to ask who they thought they resembled, and by the end of the afternoon Etzel had his story. To make sure he could rely on the same gimmick in years to come, he rang the people who compiled Chase’s Calendar of Events and had Look Alike Day entered into the books. That casual bit of newsroom improvisation is why 20 April is now set aside for dressing, acting and styling yourself as someone you admire, imitate for laughs, or could pass for in a crowd.</p>
<h2 id="where-the-day-comes-from">Where the day comes from</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The origin is unusually well documented for a novelty observance, precisely because Etzel told the story himself for years afterwards. Most of these calendar entries appear from nowhere and spread by repetition, with no founder anyone can name; the same fog surrounds gentle observances such as <a href="/specialdate/look-for-an-evergreen-day/">Look for an Evergreen Day</a>. Look Alike Day is the rare exception: a working journalist needed filler, a doppelganger obliged, and a national observance was born out of a slow news day. The choice of 20 April carries no deeper meaning. It was simply the date that suited the calendar people, which is fitting for a day whose whole appeal is its lack of solemnity.</p>
<p>What Etzel tapped into, though, is far older than his deadline. The pleasure of becoming someone else runs through carnival, masquerade and the Roman festival of Saturnalia, when masters and slaves swapped roles and identities blurred for a few riotous days. Theatre is built on it. The body double, the tribute act and the impersonator all trade on the same fascination, and Etzel’s stroke of genius was to hand that pleasure to ordinary people for a single day in spring.</p>
<h2 id="the-history-of-the-human-double">The history of the human double</h2>
<p>Long before novelty calendars, the resemblance between unrelated people unsettled and delighted in equal measure. European folklore is full of the doppelganger, the ghostly twin whose appearance was often read as an omen. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley reportedly claimed to have met his own double shortly before he drowned off the Italian coast in 1822, and Abraham Lincoln is said to have seen a strange second reflection of his own face in a mirror in 1860, which his wife Mary took as a dark sign. The double has always carried a faint shiver alongside the comedy.</p>
<p>Politics turned the look-alike into a tool. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery used an actor, Clifton James, to impersonate him in 1944, parading the decoy around Gibraltar and North Africa to mislead German intelligence in the weeks before the Normandy landings. The operation, codenamed Copperhead, depended entirely on James’s resemblance to the famous general, and the deception was judged a success in helping to confuse the enemy about where the blow would fall. Saddam Hussein was widely reported to have employed multiple body doubles to confuse potential assassins, and rumours of presidential and royal doubles have shadowed powerful figures from Stalin’s Soviet Union onward, precisely because a convincing stand-in is such an obvious form of insurance.</p>
<p>On the lighter side, the look-alike became a fixture of entertainment. Charlie Chaplin reportedly entered a Chaplin look-alike contest and, by the most often-repeated telling, failed to win, beaten at the job of being himself. Whether the story is strictly true hardly matters; its endurance shows how irresistible the idea of the imperfect double has always been. From the music-hall impressionist to the modern circuit of professional tribute performers who make a steady living from a borrowed face and a studied voice, the act of resembling someone famous has long been a trade as much as a parlour game. Elvis Presley alone is thought to sustain thousands of professional and amateur impersonators, an entire small economy built on a single recognisable silhouette.</p>
<h2 id="why-it-has-staying-power">Why it has staying power</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>A reporter’s filler should have been forgotten in a season, yet the day endures because it answers something real. Recognising a face is one of the oldest things the human brain does well; infants lock onto faces within days of birth, and the brain devotes a dedicated region, the fusiform face area, to telling one set of features from another. When that finely tuned machinery is briefly fooled, the result is a small jolt of pleasure and surprise. Look Alike Day manufactures that jolt on purpose.</p>
<p>There is a gentler argument too. Choosing who to imitate is a quiet act of admiration, and stepping into another person’s look, even for an afternoon, nudges you towards seeing the world from their angle. It is hard to take yourself too seriously while wearing a borrowed wig and a painted moustache, and that loosening is part of the point. Psychologists have long noted the effect that costume has on behaviour, the way a uniform or a mask can change not only how others treat us but how we carry ourselves; to dress as someone bolder or grander than ourselves is to borrow, briefly, a little of their bearing. The day trades on something genuinely odd about identity, which is how much of it lives on the surface, in the clothes and gestures other people read before we have said a word.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-marked">How it is marked</h2>
<p>Celebration is informal by design. Offices and classrooms turn it into a friendly contest, voting on the most convincing or most absurd transformation. People dress as a film star, a musician or a colleague, fussing over the signature jacket, the trademark hairstyle, the catchphrase delivered at exactly the right moment. The real payoff now happens online, where the fun lies in the side-by-side photograph: the impersonation beside the original, inviting everyone to judge the likeness. Apps that match a selfie to a celebrity face tend to see a spike of use around the date, gamifying the very thing Etzel did by eye on a Pittsburgh pavement. It slots neatly among the small American food-and-fun observances that pepper the calendar, sitting not far from indulgent dates like <a href="/specialdate/us-national-spumoni-day/">National Spumoni Day</a>, the sort of low-stakes occasion built for sharing a photograph rather than holding a ceremony.</p>
<h2 id="variations-on-the-theme">Variations on the theme</h2>
<p>The idea travels well because it borrows from traditions that already exist everywhere. In Britain and across the cosplay world, fancy dress provides a ready vocabulary for the day. Japan’s elaborate cosplay culture, with its conventions and craftsmanship, is the look-alike impulse pursued to a high art. Competitive look-alike contests have a long pedigree of their own, from Elvis tribute gatherings to the Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest held each July in Key West, Florida, where dozens of bearded, sweater-clad entrants compete to most resemble the author. Each is a local flavour of the same human game.</p>
<h2 id="symbols-and-what-they-mean">Symbols and what they mean</h2>
<p>The props are simple and they all point the same way. The wig, the borrowed coat, the dark glasses and the carefully copied outfit stand in for the larger idea of trying on another identity. None of it needs to be perfect; the spirit of the day lives in the attempt, in the wink between you and whoever recognises who you are meant to be. The mirror is the day’s quiet symbol too, the place where likeness is checked and where, in folklore, the double first appears.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>National Look Alike Day was created by Pittsburgh TV reporter Jack Etzel in the 1980s, purely so he would have a reliable light story to fall back on, and he got it entered into Chase’s Calendar of Events.</li>
<li>Charlie Chaplin is widely reported to have entered a Chaplin look-alike contest and failed to win first prize, beaten at impersonating himself.</li>
<li>During the Second World War, the actor Clifton James impersonated Field Marshal Montgomery in 1944 to deceive German intelligence about Allied plans before D-Day.</li>
<li>The brain has a dedicated patch of tissue, the fusiform face area, devoted to recognising faces, which is why a convincing double produces such a distinct double-take.</li>
<li>Key West, Florida, hosts an annual Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest each July, drawing crowds of white-bearded contestants to a single bar.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>There is something quietly democratic in the way this day came about. No committee, no cause, no founding charter, just a man on a deadline and a stranger who happened to look like a film star. It suggests that the things we end up celebrating are not always the ones designed to be celebrated, and that a borrowed face can tell us as much about ourselves as our own. To spend an afternoon being someone else is, in the end, a roundabout way of noticing how much of a person we read in a glance, and how little it takes to be, for a moment, mistaken for somebody we have only ever watched from a distance.</p>
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