No founder or establishing record is documented for National Fun Day. It circulates on online holiday calendars as a generic April 1 observance, and its placement shares the date with April Fools' Day and that tradition's spirit of lightheartedness. No source documents who first named the day or why April 1 was chosen.
CHAPTER 01
From pranks to the psychology of play
The modern idea that fun is worth studying came from a dark place. In 1966, psychiatrist Stuart Brown was assigned to investigate the University of Texas Tower shooting, in which Charles Whitman shot 46 people. Brown found a thread he did not expect: severe deprivation of childhood play.
He kept pulling that thread. In a pilot study, Brown interviewed 26 convicted Texas murderers and found most shared two traits, abusive families and an absence of play. Over the next five decades he built play histories of more than 6,000 people and argued that play shapes whether someone grows into a happy, well-adjusted adult.
