Fake news from a real town
The brothers of area parents have been hard at work recently drafting the topics and honing skills for this year’s battles around the Thanksgiving table.
We recently caught up with several uncles who shared their techniques for ruining family dinners in record speed:
“What you’ve gotta do is home in on really uncomfortable personal topics,” said area uncle Phil Nerves. “I usually do some research on social media, find out what the in-laws are up to. If I find, say, Jennifer was selling the queen-size and buying two twins or even better an extra futon, I know I’ve struck gold. Then there’s the tried-and-true topics, like ‘So Krissy, when are you going to get married again?’ That one’s guaranteed to raise the room temperature.”
Other uncles have different techniques, “I always gravitate right to politics,” said local Don Spiracy, “Straight from the most innocuous comments. Actually it’s kinda a specialty of mine to turn literally anything into a political fight.”
When pressed for examples, Don was ready. “Last year, my nephew Kyle asked for a glass of water and I asked if he supported ICE with that. Or one time we were passing side dishes around the table to the left and I accused them of a hidden agenda. That segued perfectly into habeas corpus and we argued for three hours after that.”
Bob Kward usually takes a more nuanced approach. “I’m a fan of the big open-ended silences and ambiguous yet cutting remarks. I like to sigh and do this little thing with my head that could be a shake, could just be an innocuous twitch. Really keeps everyone on edge. Another thing that makes people really uncomfortable is repeating what they say, just slowly enough to be possibly condescending. Twist the pitch up, like this? At the end? Make everything sound like a question? Drives everybody nuts?”
Area in-laws agreed that the techniques were extremely effective. Krissy Jackson said, “Thanksgiving? More like thanks for giving Uncle Phil an excuse to remind me why I got divorced in the first place.”