Chapter 1: Entertainment and fun

The invention of entertainment

As Cooper points out, when Plato was writing about the effects of culture, the Greeks
didn’t actually have a thing called ‘art’:

It can seem amazing to us that that eminently artistic people, the Greeks, had no
term remotely equivalent to our ‘art’ … The nearest was techne, but this applied
not only to the arts but to many other crafts and skills, including those of
soldiering and horsemanship (Cooper, 1997, p. 9)

In fact, the modern distinction between art and entertainment as separate forms of
culture didn’t start to emerge in Western countries until the second part of the
eighteenth century. Before this time upper and lower class citizens shared common
cultural resources (Levine, 1988, p. 83). Shakespeare, for example, was presented as
popular entertainment, with songs and flying witches introduced. But from the late
eighteenth century onwards, cultural elites worked explicitly to separate their cultural
consumption from that of the masses and the binary of ‘art’ versus ‘entertainment’ was
introduced.

Before this time there of course existed forms of culture that included elements that we
would now recognise as entertaining – folk culture, for example (Storey, 2003). But the
idea of a separate form of culture whose purpose is primarily to provide entertainment,
and which is separate from those other parts of culture whose purpose is artistic or
educational, did not then exist in its modern form. Partly the rise of these new
categories in the latter part of the eighteenth and then in the nineteenth centuries was a
response to the industrialisation and urbanisation of previously peasant populations
(Cunningham, 2014, p. 7). The commercialisation of culture occurred ‘in those societies
that made the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This commercialisation
intensified in advanced industrial societies from the early twentieth century onwards’
(Hesmondhalgh & Pratt, 2005, p. 2). Ohmann argues that entertainment was a
‘phenomenon of the city’ (Ohmann, 1996, p. 20) – and in particular, a phenomenon of
the urban working class (see also Peiss, 1986). Whereas peasants in rural cultures rose
with the sun and worked until it set, the mechanisation of time in urban

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industrialisation created the possibility of a new category of experience – leisure time,
as distinct from working time - which could be filled with ‘diversions’ (Cunningham,
2014, p. 21). Despite this potential, early industrialisation in fact left no time for leisure
– workers were in factories for fourteen hours a day seven days a week. But campaigns
by unions and social reformers lead to a shorter working week and the leisure time for
working people began to open up (Kelly, 1996, pp. 152-153). Unlike the aristocrats – a
‘leisure class’ (Veblen, 2007 [1899]) who did not have to work at all - emerging classes
of industrialised workers had to balance both work and leisure time in their schedules.
These massive social and cultural changes created the conditions for the emergence of
entertainment industries as we now know them. Walter Kendrick, who traces the
emergence of a category he names ‘scary entertainment’ (gothic novels, which he argues
then evolved into horror films) in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
argues that for such entertainment to exist there must first be a reliable audience who
want to consume a certain kind of culture (Kendrick, 1991, p. 33): for example, a
‘market for fiction’ (Kendrick, 1991, p. 33). Richard Ohmann, in his history of the
emergence of popular magazines and newspapers, similarly suggests that
entertainment was mutually constituted alongside its audience:

In 1833, a compositor named Benjamin Day hit upon the idea of bringing out his
New York Sun at a penny …. These papers revolutionized the business and brought
together a new readership (Ohmann, 1996, p. 20)

Ohmann argues that entertainment ‘entrepreneurs’ like magazine publisher Frank

Munsey in the nineteenth century ‘hit upon a formula of elegant simplicity: identify a
large audience that is not hereditarily affluent or elite, but that is getting on well enough
and that has cultural aspirations, [and] give it what it wants’ (Ohmann, 1996, p. 25).
Ohmann also argues that this shared culture then helps to create a community, by giving
them something in common. The shared consumption of entertainment becomes a
common element of a group – an audience – who might not otherwise share a
background or everyday practices.

As well as audiences, new ways of thinking about and organizing culture had to emerge.
Kendrick argues that:

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 what we know as a genre comes fully into being when publishers (or movie
studios) can count on predictable demand for a more or less uniform product
(Kendrick, 1991, p. 77)

Writing of sensational theatre in the nineteenth century he notes that

the entertainment industry had entered a phase that we, late in the twentieth
century, can recognize. … it had become an industry, in the modern sense, for the
first time … the endlessly resourceful, grossly overworked minions of early
nineteenth century theatre … grabbed anything that would sell, copied it till it
stopped selling, then moved on. Many playwrights were incredibly prolific. George
Dibdin Pitt, for instance, is credited with producing some 140 dramas,
melodramas, farces, burlesques and pantomimes between 1831 and 1857
(Kendrick, 1991, p. 119)

All of these elements of entertainment as a cultural system emerge from the fact that
this is culture made for profit, and therefore culture designed to give large audiences
what they would want – at least, ‘till it stopped selling’. With the development of
audiences and genres in place, the industries that would produce and distribute
entertainment could grow.

At the same time – and, Levine suggests, not coincidentally – the educated classes in
society began the process of separating out their cultural consumption from that of the
masses. Prior to the nineteenth century, ‘Shakespeare was presented as part of the same
milieu inhabited by magicians, dancers, singers, acrobats, minstrels and comics. He
appeared on the same playbills and was advertised in the same spirit’ (Levine, 1988, p.
23). But during the course of the nineteenth century, cultural leaders undertook a
process of ‘sacralization’ (Levine, 1988, p. 132) – turning Shakespeare from a form of
culture for the masses to ‘a new literary religion’ (Richard Grant White, quoted in
Levine, 1988, p. 70), only suitable for the ‘exclusive’ audience, and not for the ‘great
popular masses’ (New York Herald, quoted in Levine, 1988, p. 66). Shakespeare was
made into art by making the plays difficult. In previous centuries, Shakespeare’s plays
could be presented in ways that were accessible, fun and pleasurable. When
Shakespeare was presented as entertainment, ‘Some of the alterations bordered on the
spectacular, such as the flying, singing witches in Macbeth’ (Levine, 1988, p. 42). One
impresario ‘devised a happy ending for [King Lear] … a love affair between Edgar and

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Cordelia and allowed Cordelia and Lear to live’ (Levine, 1988, p. 44). As Shakespeare’s
work was sacralised, though, the new clerics of culture insisted that:

It was necessary to confine Shakespeare to certain theatres catering to a discrete

clientele because he was simply too complex for untrained minds … A writer in
World’s Work [in 1903] began his analysis ‘Why Shakespeare Is Not Understood’
by asserting that ‘not one in ten thousand of us can really read common passages
of Shakspere [sic] intelligently’ … (quoted in Levine, 1988, p. 71)

So difficult was Shakespeare now seen as being that it was necessary to be trained to
understand his work:

In 1903 the University Society advertised its thirteen-volume New International

Shakespeare as ‘the only edition published that gives two full sets of Notes …
Explanatory Notes for the average reader, and Critical Notes for the critical
student or scholar’. Shakespeare … ‘shows the way – more clearly than any other
author – to the higher intellectual and moral life’ (Levine, 1988, p. 72)

And so, by the start of the twentieth century:

Shakespeare had been converted from a popular playwright whose dramas were
the property of those who flocked to see them, into a sacred author who had to be
protected from ignorant audiences (Levine, 1988, p. 72)

Of course, the ignorant audiences might still want to consume Shakespeare purely for
entertainment. But the new aesthetic systems made clear that this was the wrong way
to consume art. In 1882, critic A. A. Lipscomb announced that ‘to comprehend the
“special worth” of Shakespeare required “rigid mechanical training”, without which
“Shakespeare is not of much use”’ (Levine, 1988, p. 73). This is all very different from
the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when uneducated audiences could
enjoy an evening of acrobats, vulgar songs, and scenes from Shakespeare, performed for
their rowdy, fun-loving, pleasure.

Similar work was done to render symphonic music and opera suitable only for the most
educated class fraction. And so, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, two broad strands of culture were developed. On the one hand, art was to be
difficult, challenging, requiring education and reverence to consume properly. It should
only be accessible to ‘the better class, the most refined and intelligent of our citizens …

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the high minded, the pure and virtuous’ (Thomas Whitney Surette, quoted in Levine,
1988, p. 101). On the other hand, entertainment continued to be open to the common
masses. The process of ‘sacralization’ was a struggle to ‘establish aesthetic standards, to
separate true art from the purely vulgar’ (Levine, 1988, p. 128), and the upper from the
emerging middle classes.

It’s therefore not surprising that although, as I noted in the Introduction, we have
records of philosophers asking questions about the effects of culture as far back as the
Ancient Greeks, modern aesthetics – and the word itself – doesn’t emerge until the
eighteenth century. Cooper notes that

it is only in the modern period that philosophers have thought of the many
questions that can be raised about art, beauty, creativity, imagination, expression,
and much else, as constituting even a relatively unified set of issues (Cooper, 1997,
p. 9).

The term ‘aesthetics’ ‘was coined by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, in
the middle of the eighteenth century’ (Cooper, 1997, p. 1). And the modern tradition of
aesthetic philosophy is commonly traced back to the work of Kant, and particularly his
Critique of Judgement, first published in 1790 (Cooper, 1997, p. 2). The development of
aesthetics – a philosophy of art – was part of the process of inventing art itself as a
category.

‘Art’ and ‘entertainment’ survive as meaningful categories in twenty first century

Western cultures, describing distinct forms of culture. It is, of course, possible to argue
that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is art (Pateman, 2006) or that opera is entertainment
(Donohue, 2010) and the terms themselves are elastic enough that such uses are
meaningful. The binary has never been simple, and in the latter part of the twentieth
and the early twenty-first centuries it has been modified in a number of ways –
particularly with questions about cultural omnivorousness as a marker of cultural
capital (Warde, Wright, & Gayo-Cal, 2007) and the emergence of postmodern theories of
culture (Jameson, 1991) and art practices (Indiana, 2010). Nevertheless the distinction
between art and entertainment retains an important position in the production and
distribution of culture. Indeed, Scheff and Kotler (1996) argue that adherence to one or
other side of the low versus high culture paradigm determines both the fundamental
orientation and business performance of creative organisations. And in the everyday

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practice of culture the distinction is made as an ongoing practice. Take these examples,
pulled at random from recent newspaper reviews: ‘the deficiencies of Love Never Dies as
art are more than covered for by its value as sumptuous old-fashioned entertainment’
(Blake, 2012, p. 10); ‘These stories … might not qualify as art, but they sell. Very, very
well … Her books might not change lives or linger too long in the mind but they give
several hours of pleasurable escape’ (Morris, 2012, p. 30); ‘High literature it is not but …
the characters are clear-cut, the pace is demanding and the ideas are bold’
(Goldsworthy, 2012, p. 34). And in everyday discourse, cultural critics insist on a form
of traditional aesthetic value. Art should be challenging, for example (Brody, 2014): in
fact, as artist Anselm Kiefer puts it: ‘art is difficult, it’s not entertainment (quoted in
Needham, 2011). It should be ‘serious’ (Bradshaw, 2010). It should certainly not be
‘facile’ (ie, accessible) (Roper, 1978, p. 86).

The aesthetics of entertainment, however, value quite different qualities in culture.

Despite the mistaken claims of some philosophers - who suggest there have been radical
changes in entertainment, such has the rise of the society of the spectacle (Debord,
1977), or of postmodernism (Jameson, 1991), or an increase in the speed of culture –
the forms taken by entertainment have in fact remained remarkably stable over the last
two hundred years. From a study of entertainment history it is possible to identify a
number of characteristics in the aesthetics of entertainment over this period. Good
entertainment is vulgar. It has a story. Seriality is valued. Good entertainment has a
happy ending. It is interactive, fast, loud and spectacular. It provokes a strong emotional
response in the consumer. And - centrally for the project of this book – good
entertainment is fun. The rest of this chapter explores each of these characteristics, and
explains why I have focussed centrally on fun in the argument of this book.

These characteristics of successful entertainment tend usually to appear in academic

and critical writing about culture only as a lack – as a failure to be successful art. But in
fact, entertainment has a coherent, positive aesthetics in its own right. Entertainment is
not simply failed art: it works with its own value system. It is also important to
understand that an aesthetic system is not a computer program. As you read this
chapter you may have in mind a favourite entertainment product, and as you check it
against each of the characteristics described perhaps you will probably find that it does
not possess every one of them. This is quite correct. Specific instances of successful

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culture may not demonstrate every element of an aesthetic system equally. If it were
possible simply to program a computer with these characteristics and produce great
entertainment it would have been done long ago. But the production of good
entertainment is never mechanical. It is always creative, human and inspired.

Vulgarity

Entertainment is vulgar. This is true not just of ‘adult entertainment’, but across the
form. This is true in two senses. It is true firstly in the literal sense, as defined in the
OED – vulgar as meaning ‘of or pertaining to the common people’. But is also true in the
common sense of vulgar meaning ‘rude’ (which, interestingly, also literally means
‘lacking in knowledge or book learning’) and sexualized.

Entertainment has always been, since its emergence as a distinct form of culture, vulgar.
In American saloons in the 1870s and 1880s, ‘every program had its bawdy or “purple”
acts’ (Nasaw, 1993, p. 14). With the early spread of public phonographs (primitive
jukeboxes):

To the dismay of phonograph company executives, ‘unscrupulous’ exhibitors had

begun to record, collect and exchange recordings of … vulgar conversations and
simulated sexual encounters (Nasaw, 1993, p. 125)

The introduction of moving pictures has a similar trajectory. In the 1880s, the earliest
successes on the ‘Mutoscope’ – a moving picture machine ‘designed as a business
machine for travelling salesmen to exhibit their wares’ were the short films ‘How Girls
Go to Bed’ and ‘How Girls Undress’ (Nasaw, 1993, p. 133).

The vulgarity of entertainment has consistently offended (middle-class) moral

guardians of the day: the ‘social leaders’ (Nasaw, 1993, p. 106) and ‘genteel reformers’
(Peiss, 1986, p. 63). The English social reformer Henry Mayhew was appalled by what
he saw in a music hall in 1851, where 200 ‘juveniles’ were listening to a comic singer:

[at] the mere utterance of some filthy word at the end of each stanza … the lads
stamped their feet with delight, the girls screamed with enjoyment … ingenuity
had been exerted to its utmost lest an obscene thought should be passed by, and it
was absolute awful to behold the relish with which the young ones jumped to the
hideous meaning of the words (quoted in Bailey, 1998, p. 136)

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Marie Lloyd’s risqué songs of the 1890s appalled moralists. In:

‘I Asked Johnny Jones, So I Know Now!’ … dressed as a schoolgirl, Lloyd … nags her
parents for enlightenment on a number of curious incidents of a sexual nature that
defeat her immediate understanding including her father being accosted. ‘What’s
that for, eh?’, she demands in the tag-line, getting satisfaction only from her canny
schoolboy friend Johnny Jones … ‘so I know now’ … [T]he respectable musical
press … was distressed not only by the songs that continued to celebrate drink, but
by ‘objectionable songs … that advertise another trade’ (Bailey, 1998, p. 145)

And when reformers attended working classes dances early in the twentieth century,
they were appalled at the many kinds of vulgarity involved in this entertainment. In
1919 one reformer visited a dance:

About fifty young couples were dancing, among them boys and girls in age of 12 or
14 years. Most of them didn’t behaved [sic], they were using vile language,
smoking cigarettes and shimmying while dancing … It is a rendezvous for young
men and young girls, who come here purposely to pick each other up (quoted in
Peiss, 1986, p. 183)

Entertainment is, and has been throughout its history as a distinct cultural form, vulgar.
This is – according to the aesthetics of entertainment – a good and valuable thing.

Story

The term ‘story’ means a series of events in a cause and effect order linked by
characters driven by plausible psychologies. It is vital to the production of successful
entertainment. This is true not just for obvious media like newspapers, magazines, films
and television, but also for pop songs, popular dance and music events where the
imperative is to take audiences on a journey. Watching American Idol or America’s Next
Top Model it becomes clear that the highest accolade that can be given to a young
hopeful is that their performance ‘told a story’. In interviews with the creative staff
involved in entertainment theatre or television or film the refrain is always that
everything must ‘serve the story’ – from lighting to camerawork to costume design to
visual effects. ‘What are the secrets of great sound design?’. Christopher Boyes, sound
designer on Avatar says that number one is to ‘think like a storyteller. Understand the

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story’ (Boyes, 2010, p. 138). ‘What’s the secret of creating a believable vision of the
future?’. Alex McDowell, Production Designer of Minority Report, notes that the key is to
find a way ‘to immerse the audience in the story’ (McDowell, 2010, p. 139). ‘What’s the
secret of great SF design?’, Peter McKinstry, concept artist for Doctor Who, insists you
must:

Let the design tell the story and support the story, not distract from it. Look at the
first shot of Star Wars – you see a small battered spaceship being pursued by a
much vaster, much more aggressive looking ship. You get all the information you
need to understand the story within those first few frames (McKinstry, 2010, p.
118)

The key elements of story have not changed in entertainment. For example, the stories
of Arthur Conan Doyle, G K Chesterton, Agatha Christie, and John Buchan from the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries survive remarkably unchanged into the
twenty-first.

As I noted above, the aesthetics of entertainment have often appeared in academic

writing only as a lack. There is remarkably little respect in academic writing for the
ability to tell a good story, and little research which attempts to understand this skill.
Indeed, in academic writing you’re more likely to encounter modernist accounts that
actively reject story as an aesthetic feature (Sheehan, 2002). But in the aesthetics of
entertainment, story is a positive feature.

Seriality

In 1887 the first Sherlock Holmes story was published. By 1927, another 59 had been
released, all featuring the same characters, addressing similar situations, in similar
story structures. Seriality – using the same characters, situations and structures across
many texts – is a key aesthetic virtue of entertainment. Sometimes this is a single story,
serialized across a number of episodes, linked by ‘cliffhangers’ which demand that the
audience returns. The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck – first published in English in
1842 – is one contender for the first comic book series, recounting the comic
misadventures of a singularly unlucky – and unattractive – romantic suitor. The Perils of
Pauline presented audiences with twenty episodes of the heroine’s adventurous exploits

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in 1914. Sometimes entertainment presents a series of self-contained stories in the
same diegetic world - Britain’s Old Mother Riley films featured the drag act of comedian
Arthur Luncan in sixteen films in the 1930s and 1940s, sometimes making two a year
(Hoggart, 1998 [1957], p. 260). Across media, seriality has been a key setting for
entertainment for as long as it has existed as a distinct category, in story papers, radio
crime shows and soap operas. This presents entertainment with particular challenges –
to revisit the same settings while finding new angles, ideas and new stories to tell. But it
also offers specific advantages – to come to know characters in more detail and see how
they behave in a wider range of situations than in possible in any other form.

Happy endings

Happy endings have been a central part of entertainment throughout its history. In the
early kinescopes in the first decade of the twentieth century:

… the filmed melodramas had innocent heroes and dastardly villains, chases,
visual climaxes or sensation scenes (that could be advertised on the lithographed
posters out front) and usually a happy ending (Nasaw, 1993, p. 167)

Literally this is often the case; metaphorically almost always so. Linked to the
importance of story, entertainment values a satisfying resolution. It must feel as though
the story is completed – not necessarily that the initial status quo is returned, but that
all of the key questions that have been set up have been answered in a satisfactory way.
Entertainment rarely leaves key mysteries for the audience to work out – and
entertainment consumers like it this way. There may well be aspects of ambivalence
remaining, but the overall experience of the completion of an entertainment experience
will be of satisfaction at the completion of the story. Entertainment products do not just
stop. They are not built around abstract structures based on ideas. Even when the
ending is sad, the story takes place in a world where some positive values exist – hope,
friendship, joy, or love for example. The popular novels of the first half of the twentieth
century offered: ‘assurances of everything turning out well’ (Leavis, 1968 [1932], p.
193). Entertainment does not generally value nihilism or misanthropy.

Interactivity

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Entertainment demands interaction from its audiences. At the opera you must sit in
respectful silence; at the heavy metal concert you must scream and shout and wave
your head violently. In Lawrence Levine’s cultural history, this is the key distinction
between high culture and entertainment:

What was invented in the late nineteenth century were the rituals accompanying
the appreciation [of high culture]; what was invented was the illusion that the
aesthetic products of high culture were originally created to be appreciated in
precisely the manner late nineteenth-century Americans were taught to observe:
with reverent, disciplined seriousness (Levine, 1988, p. 229)

There is little reverence in the consumption of entertainment. When Shakespeare was

presented as entertainment in the early parts of the nineteenth century:

Stage companies presented Shakespeare’s plays, or scenes from them, along with
farces, minstrelsy, singing and so on. Little value was placed upon the integrity of
the artwork; scenes and areas might be repeated or omitted according to the
tastes of the producers or the demands of the audiences. The latter were insistent
and interventionist, cheering and booing, shouting down actors, joining in musical
performances … By the end of the [nineteenth] century sorting and segregation
marked off the arts from popular entertainment … Audiences at highbrow
performances became restrained; visitors to the new museums kept a reverent
silence and no longer spat on the floor or brought dogs and small children
(Ohmann, 1996, pp. 158-159)

The word ‘entertainment’ derives from the French entre (together) and tenir (to hold) -
holding together or supporting. Entertainment demands, by definition, a relation
between the producer and the consumer. While art can exist without ever being
consumed, this is not the case for entertainment. It only becomes entertainment when it
entertains an audience.

Fast and loud

Good entertainment is fast. Successful popular songs in the nineteenth century were
only a few minutes long, and an evening of music hall theatre would consist of a rapid
turnover of short acts. Indeed, the miscellany is a key entertainment form, from the

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magazines of the nineteenth century through an evening’s television viewing, and on to
the uses of YouTube. Popular magazines in the nineteenth century, like Ally Sloper’s Half
Holiday (1884):

offered the usual miscellany of bizarre news items, short stories, jokes and riddles,
light verse and correspondence, with a further leavening of smaller cartoons and
illustrations (Bailey, 1998, pp. 58-59)

Williams writes of Sunday papers in the mid-nineteenth century that:

their main emphasis was not political but a miscellany of material basically similar
in type to the older forms of popular literature: ballads, chapbooks, alamancs,
stories of murders and executions (see also Bailey, 1998, pp. 58-59; Williams,
1961, p. 198)

By the 1930s, the speed with which popular novels can be read is noted and
condemned: Q D Leavis decries the fact that popular readers read a book a day - ‘the
reading habit is now often a form of the drug habit’ (Leavis, 1968 [1932], p. 7). The
‘short attention span’ (or rather, ‘fast information processing ability’) has been a feature
of entertainment since the nineteenth century. Entertainment is fast.

It is also loud. The first rollercoaster was patented in 1885, and fairground rides
continue to promote screaming (Nasaw, 1993, p. 80). By 1902 motorbikes were
screaming around tracks for the entertainment of spectators. Nightclubs promote
complaints for the level of noise, as do rock concerts. Where silence and contemplation
may be valued in some aesthetic systems, being fast and loud is important for
entertainment.

Spectacular

Visual pleasure – often with an emphasis on the amazing or unusual - has been at the
heart of entertainment’s aesthetic system since its emergence. At the Buffalo Fair in
1901, in the show ‘Trip to the Moon’

a cast of midgets in uniforms, recorded sounds, projected images, elaborate stage

settings, lighting effects, and simulated motion in simulated vehicles to create the
illusion of space travel and a moon landing (Nasaw, 1993, p. 69)

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In 1910:

The producers of the Italian epic Homer’s Odyssey claimed that they had built and
peopled an entire ancient city to make their movie. Vitagraph boasted that it had
spent $50,000 to produce The Life of Moses, $10,000 alone on the ‘Miracle of the
Red Sea’ (Nasaw, 1993, p. 198)

Even written entertainment forms demand visual spectacle. Analysing the boys’ weekly
comics of the 1940s, George Orwell notes that:

On one [cover] a cowboy is clinging by his toes to the wing of an aeroplane in mid-
air and shooting down another aeroplane with his revolver. On another a Chinese
[sic] is swimming for his life down a sewer with a swarm of ravenous-looking rats
swimming after him. On another an engineer is lighting a stick of dynamite while a
steel robot feels for him with its claws. On another a man in airman’s costume is
fighting barehanded against a rat somewhat larger than a donkey. On another a
nearly naked man of terrific muscular development has just seized a lion by the
tail and flung it thirty yards over the wall of an arena, with the words ‘take back
your blooming lion!’ (Orwell, 1984 [1940], pp. 52, 53)

As part of the entertainment spectacle attractive men and women should show their
bodies for visual pleasure. In the late nineteenth century the London Hippodrome was
famous for its dancing girls (Seldes, 1962 [1957], p. 254), who took part in amazing
spectacles:

In those days it was a new theatre, a combination of vaudeville and circus,

elaborately decorated and quite sensational. The floor of the ring sank and flooded
with water and elaborate ballets were contrived. Row and row of pretty girls in
shining armour would march in and disappear completely under water (Chaplin,
1966, p. 45)

The entertainment consumer should see things that they have never seen before –
places they have never been, tricks they would have thought impossible, things blowing
up that they would never have thought could have blown up.

Emotion

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Good entertainment should promote an emotional reaction in the audience. Consuming
the story magazines like Munsey’s in the 1890s, the reader finds herself:

crying a little at the way Robert Atterbury selflessly breaks off from his fiancée
Claire, when he learns he has tuberculosis, delighting at the romantic high jinks
that take place in the train ‘On the Way North’, thinking it sad … that each of ‘The
Two Brothers’ sacrifices his own life so that the other might survive with the two
days’ water supply they have life on their desert island (Ohmann, 1996, p. 3)

A whole range of emotional reactions are suitable for entertainment. It need not be
simple pleasure. It can be, as in teenage slasher films, delighted shock. The most popular
songs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were the ‘sentimental songs’,
designed to do nothing more – nor less – than reduce their listeners to tears: songs like
‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’, ‘When Your Hair has Turned to Silver’ and ‘Bird
in a Gilded Cage’ (Hoggart, 1998 [1957], p. 116).

This is not to say that this is all that entertainment can do. Yes, it must create an
emotional reaction. But entertainment can also perform intellectual work. Buffy the
Vampire Slayer’s ‘Gingerbread’ dramatizes moral panics about childhood innocence.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels explore the cultural revolutions wrought by
modernity in Western cultures. But this is always supplementary work. The primary
purpose of entertainment must be to promote an emotional response from the
audience.

Adaptation is not a bad thing

Another sorely misunderstood entertainment virtue is adaptation – taking characters or

stories from one medium and transferring them to another. This is a long-standing
tradition in entertainment, easily traced back as long as the cultural form has existed.
Entertainment does not say that adaptation is better than original work – but
entertainment aesthetics have no fear of adaptation. There is no sense that an original
story is worth more than an adapted one. In 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin made its first move
from the novel to the stage. Ally Sloper was a Victorian comic strip character who first
appeared in 1867, and quickly became transmedia:

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 Ally Sloper’s image … appeared on a great range of commodities – buttons, pipes,
umbrellas, jars of pickles, boxes of matches, snuff boxes, doorstops. He was
impersonated on the music hall, in pantomime and circus, and was displayed in
fireworks at the Crystal Palace and seaside resorts. He replaced Guy Fawkes on
bonfire night and he and his wife were substituted for Punch and Judy in street
puppet shows (Bailey, 1998, p. 55)

Examples easily multiply from entertainment history. Raffles the gentleman thief first
appeared in his adventure stories in novels in 1899 before being adapted into a
Broadway play in 1903 and a film in 1917. The first film adaptation of Oliver Twist
appeared in 1909. Peter Pan first appeared as a character in a 1902 novel, then a 1904
stage play, which is then adapted back into a 1911 novel. Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze
first appeared in story magazines in 1933 before going on to appear in comic books, on
radio and in films.

At the emergence of each new entertainment medium, content was drawn from already-
existing entertainment properties. By 1907 kinescopes were popular, and

most of the dramas took their plots, as well as their costumes and conventions,
from the staged melodramas that had been the mainstays of the cheap repertoire
theatres in the 1890s (Nasaw, 1993, p. 166)

The economic logic of adaptation is impeccable – there is less risk in working with a
property which has already proven itself to be successful. But this should not mask the
operation of entertainment aesthetics – it works economically because entertainment
audiences like to transfer their experience across media and forms. If I have enjoyed
Superman as a comic strip, then I may also enjoy it as a television series (1950s). This
logic is not automatic – some audiences are precious about something they love being
messed about with. But entertainment aesthetics are not precious. They are not
interested in purity, or in keeping things preserved exactly as they are. Entertainment
evolves or it dies. New actors are cast, new stories are told, properties are relocated to
new times and new settings.

All of these characteristics of entertainment can be brought together under one wider
rubric. Entertainment is audience-centred commercial culture. It gives audiences what
they want. It is not driven by the desires of artists to express themselves – although it
may allow them to do so, if there is an audience keen for their work. It is not driven by

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the cultural values of the State, which decides that certain kinds of culture (although
there is no audience for them) are innately valuable and must be subsidized with tax
dollars. Entertainment is culture that is made with the express purpose of giving
audiences what they want. And what audiences want – mostly – is fun.

Fun

Fun is a key entertainment virtue, and the one that I am using as the central organising
principle for this book. Entertainment can be silly. It is not sombre. Among the central
lessons of producing entertainment is that at all costs an entertainment product must
avoid being ‘worthy’ – a cardinal sin of entertainment, as the genteel reformers of the
nineteenth century found in their attempts to change working class women’s culture.
The Girls Progressive Society in 1888 set up a club to try to reform working class young
women and draw them away from the dance clubs:

Initially they followed the advice of the New York Association of Working Girls’
Societies to ‘restrict any effort toward luxury or show’ in the club rooms, spending
available funds only for educational purposes. They made their rooms as homelike
as possible and initiated a variety of instructional classes. Then ‘during all the
month of January we waited for that tremendous influx of new members which we
had dreamed of’, but to their disappointment they failed to attract much notice
among working women. The club subsequently cancelled a number of classes and
instituted Wednesday night receptions, featuring music and refreshments, a
successful move that attracted the crowds they desired. By the mid 1890s, most
clubs had begun to subordinate didactic talks and classes to a whirlwind of social
activities … [it was an] accommodation to working women’s culture (Peiss, 1986,
p. 176)

I have chosen fun as the central focus of this book for two reasons. The first is that it
seems to me to be a key difference between the cultural systems that are named ‘art’
and ‘entertainment’. It is true that entertainment embraces seriality much more so than
does art, but it still appears occasionally in high culture – take a bow Henry IV Part 2.
Spectacle is at the heart of entertainment, but art films can also delight in sumptuous
visuals. But fun? If one term recurs in analysis of works of art it is ‘serious’ (Tanner,
1987, p. 264; Woodman, 2014), while the term ‘fun’ is at the heart of discussions of

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entertainment (Smith, 2014; Wonderland Fun Park, 2014). The terms are, if not exactly
opposites, certainly markers of very different ways of thinking about the effects of
culture. The move from ‘it’s all in good fun’ to ‘but seriously though’ marks a clear shift
in register. One can talk about ‘serious fun’ (Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007) – but the very
impact of that phrase is its apparently oxymoronic nature.

The second reason I’ve taken this approach is because I want to use an analysis of fun to
explore some wider philosophical questions. Aesthetics is a philosophy of art –but it is
also linked to wider philosophical questions about how to live a good life. Ethics (aka
moral philosophy) asks (among other questions) ‘What is a good life?’ (Swanton, 2005)
and aesthetics relies on judgements about living a good life in order to decide whether
the effects of exposure to particular forms of culture are desirable or not. Indeed,
Wittgenstein famously claimed that ‘ethics and aesthetics are one and the same’
(Eagleston, 2004, p. 595). When Plato argues that non-fiction is better than fiction
because it promotes the rational over the emotional, his argument is based on the
assumption that a good life privileges the rational over the emotional. As I noted in the
Introduction, Plato claims that the ‘highest part of us’ is that part which

follow[s] reasoning … The other part of us … we may, I think, call irrational and
lazy and inclined to cowardice … [the producer of fiction] wakens and encourages
and strengthens the lower elements of the mind to the detriment of reason … the
only poetry that should be allowed in a state is hymns to the gods and paeans in
praise of good men; once you go beyond that and admit the sweet lyric or epic
muse, pleasure and pain become your rulers instead of law and the rational
principles commonly accepted as best (Plato, 1974, pp. 435,437)

The focus on fun in this book allows us to explore the different positions that
entertainment takes on a whole range of philosophical questions, not just the narrowly
aesthetic. In fact, as I will argue in Chapter Three, entertainment shows us that a life
lived without fun is an incomplete life.

Mentioning a ‘good life’, and the philosophical tradition of ethics, brings me to two
concepts which have been important in the history of philosophy, and which might (on
the surface) appear to be near-synonyms for fun – ‘pleasure’ and ‘happiness’. There
exist long-standing and complex intellectual traditions exploring the meanings and
importance of both these terms – certainly much more so than exists about ‘fun’. But I

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will argue that neither of them – certainly in the way that they have been used by
philosophers and researchers – is quite the same as ‘fun’.

But in order to make these arguments we first have to work out exactly what ‘fun’ is.
And that turns out to be surprisingly difficult …

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