Laughter played a good part of growing up. Although I craved comedy because of the attention it brought me – the kind of fame you can only capture within your own home – we did share many moments of genuine uncontrollable laughter outside of my childhood comedy routines. My brother and I shared a similar sense of appreciation for the silly and absurd. Some of that was typical kid stuff, such as laughing to tears over the word guacamole. Surprisingly, that word got us a lot of mileage. Of course, I also forced my brother to participate in my sketch group with my cousins, a role he did not particularly appreciate. One of our biggest fights in our sibling history came when I insisted he cake ketchup on his face for a bloody shaving commercial parody. It was only several year later did I realize that his screaming refusal was a sign he wasn’t 100% into the bit. Good times.

My parents also enjoy laughing, since they happen to be human. Sometimes, the best fun came when they didn’t want to laugh, because they preferred to be the serious, responsible adults, until they couldn’t hold it any more. They would break, the way we saw Tim Conway and Harvey Korman break. At those moments, they became our own personal comedy veterans.

My parents still have fun in them all these years later, even after 56 years of marriage, so here are some #CrainStreet tweets surrounding the theme of fun!

BE NICE

My mom always insisted we “be nice” when out in public with her friends and family. The last thing she needed was an embarrassing moment of a child putting real emotion on display for all to see – or worse – for one of her children to reveal any sort of drama that she worked so hard to keep inside the home. I can’t blame her. It’s no one’s business what problems we have, or how we struggle in our familial relationships!

Who am I kidding?! I’ve put plenty of my own personal drama on display in the form of blog entries, web series, and every other script I write. I’ve also showed no restraint in reporting on what my parents say in private. However, I would like to give a few examples of nice moments with my family, if only to remind myself that as much as I make fun of my family, I do happen to like them.

THE OPPOSITE OF #BLESSED

We cannot celebrate fun without acknowledging those moments I consider FINO – which of course means Fun In Name Only. Oh, is that not a thing? Well, I think it’s time to make it a thing. After all, everyone experiences those nights where all members of the family seem perfectly happy and cheerful, savoring their joy, while you contemplate all the possible ways you could have been matched with these people, aside from their unlikely explanation that you’re related.

For example, did aliens place you with this family for a celestial experiment? Did you breathe in brain-eating nanobots that installed a false memory of the last few decades of your life, in place of your actual years of living in the forest, raised by bears and snakes? Are you lying in a secret CIA hospital watching some virtual reality experience programmed for a new form of torture? Or… are you experiencing CIA virtual reality torture BECAUSE you are an alien with nanobots for brains?

Regardless of how I managed to find myself in these moments, here are tweets for those times when the term fun was merely used as sarcasm.

JOKES

My family loves a good joke. They also love a bad joke. They also-also love a good joke, told poorly. Pretty much, they appreciate their own personal sense of humors. Sometimes they match my sense of humor, and sometimes they don’t. Here are some tweets about their joke-telling, including my actual favorite joke from my brother.

SINGING

My parents love musicals almost as much as they love expressing their feelings through food. They sing. They dance. They don’t care if they’re in tune. They are simply having a blast. It’s quite adorable!