Where is my laugh?

I realized last night that I no longer know how to laugh hard.

Before I get to the laughing, I need to describe a game for context and just in case you want to play it. 

We were at a dinner party and after dinner we played a game called 'Nouns'.  Each person thinks of two nouns and writes each noun on a separate note.  The notes are folded and placed in a bowl.  The group is divided into two teams.  We had two teams of six.  We had 24 nouns in the bowl. 

The first team to go selects a member to be an 'actor' .  The actor picks a word out of the bowl and tries to get their teammates to say the word on the note.  Once someone on the team yells out the word, the actor drops the note on the floor and picks a new word out of the bowl and continues.  The team has one minute to get as many words as possible.  Once the one minute is up, it's the other team's turn.  The other team selects an actor and tries to get as many words as they can in the one minute time limit.  The bowl goes back and forth between the teams, actors are rotated, until all the words in the bowl have been completed.  The teams count their notes.  All the notes are then put back in the bowl.  That is one round.  The group proceeds to the next round.  There are three rounds total.  The winner is the team with the most total points at the end of round three. 

Each round has the same concept but the rules change:

Round 1:  The actor can use any words (except the word itself) or hand motions to describe the noun. 
Round 2:  The actor can use a single word only (not the word itself) and can not use hand motions or pointing. 
Round 3:  The actor can use no words, only hand motions (i.e. charades).

Since you recyle the words each round, everyone knows which words they are dealing with for the 2nd and 3rd rounds.  This adds a bit of memory to the game and makes it possible to move quickly through the words. 

One final rule that contibutes to the story: an actor can skip any word.  They can pick a word, read it and then decide to place it back in the bowl and choose another note.  This usually leads to the more difficult words being left in the bowl towards the end of the round.

Next time, I will show how this game exposed that I have forgotten how to laugh hard.