FUN!

What Entertainment Tells Us About Living a Good Life

Alan McKee

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137491787
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137491794
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Combining media effects with aesthetic approaches this book offers the first substantial, systematic and coherent account of fun and its importance. But what exactly is fun and what purposes does it serve? Fun is a vital element of entertainment, and entertainment is the most important form of culture in modern Western democracies. It demonstrates that fun is at the heart of entertainment's effects – entertainment both offers its consumers fun and provides them with the intellectual materials to think about the nature of fun.

More than this, the book argues that entertainment shows us that fun – pleasure without purpose – is at the heart of living a good life. Illustrated with detailed examples from entertainment – from the Urban Dictionary to The Simpsons, to the Culture novels of Iain M Banks – this book is intelligent, original, and even (dare we say it) fun.

© The Author(s) 2016

Alan McKeeFUN!Palgrave Entertainment Industrieshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49179-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Alan McKee¹

(1)

University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Abstract

Fun is a central element of entertainment but there exists little research into what fun is or what purposes it serves for consumers. In this chapter McKee demonstrates that neither the media effects nor the aesthetic research traditions have engaged with the importance of fun. He posits that entertainment both offers its consumers fun and provides them with the intellectual resources to think about the nature and functions of fun.

Keywords

FunEntertainmentConsumersMedia effectsAesthetics

End Abstract

The Effects of Entertainment

This is a book about the effects of the media on consumers—and the importance of fun in that relationship.

Although that’s not entirely accurate. Rather, this is a book about the effects of entertainment on consumers. It’s common to talk about ‘media effects’ (Sparks 2010)—but that’s a slightly misleading approach to understanding how culture works. Not all media have the same effects: Does an instruction manual for Ikea have the same effects on its consumers as a film by Andy Warhol? Does either of those have the same effects as an episode of Real Housewives of Atlanta? At the same time it’s not immediately clear that the effects of mediated culture are necessarily different from those of unmediated culture: Does watching Katy Perry perform live necessarily have a different effect from watching a video of Katy Perry performing live? And so, this is a book about entertainment and its effects. Not all media is entertainment, and not all entertainment is mediated.

And because the focus of this book is the effects of entertainment, fun plays an important role. As you’ll see when you read on, I bring together two quite distinct traditions of academic thought in this book—a media studies concern with the effects of culture and an aesthetic interest in the ways in which culture can improve its consumers—in order to make two distinct but related points. The first point is that we have fun consuming entertainment; the second point is that entertainment provides us with materials to think about the importance of fun. And so, if we want to understand the effects that entertainment has on its consumers, a focus on fun should be an important part of our thinking.

Before I go any further, it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room—because I know what you’re thinking. Academic books about media effects are pretty standard. But an academic book about fun? Isn’t that like a Catholic priest writing a book on how to raise healthy children—just wrong on so many levels? Academic writing is rarely fun, but I would argue that to write about fun is a risk that has to be taken if we want academic research to have validity in describing the world of cultural consumption, because fun is a serious topic. As I will argue in this book, fun is a central organising principle for entertainment, and entertainment is the most important category of culture in twenty-first-century Western cultures. If we don’t understand the importance of fun, then we don’t understand the world in which we live. And hopefully this book, if not fully fun, will at least be readable. The writing may not reach the heights of Dean Koontz or Agatha Christie, but it should at least be clear and—hopefully—engaging. I don’t get to decide whether that’s true or not—only the readers have that power. Be honest in your online comments. Consumer feedback is central to the processes that make entertainment work. And it’s the reason why entertainment is so concerned with fun.

The animated sitcom Futurama tells us a story that illustrates the importance of fun for entertainment. It’s the early thirty-first century and the crew of interstellar delivery ship Planet Express are visiting a futuristic Oktoberfest (Vebber and Sandoval 2012). But—as with all good science fiction—this isn’t the Oktoberfest that we twenty-first-century humans know and love. It has evolved to become ‘the world’s most sophisticated exhibition of German food, drink, and culture’. So when Phillip J. Fry—a twentieth-century idiot who has travelled to the future—ends up getting drunk and standing on the table to perform the chicken dance, the assembled company of connoisseurs are appalled. ‘Oktoberfest is a classy celebration of how far humans have evolved. You need to be on your best behaviour’, chides his friend Leela. Fry is appalled: ‘Man, all the fun has been taken out of this once-noble barf-a-palooza.’

But Futurama doesn’t leave us there. Yes, the show acknowledges, barfing can be fun—but there’s much more to be said about this important and slippery concept (fun, that is—not barfing). As a good example of mainstream commercial entertainment culture, the show is here to make an argument for the importance of fun. When a group of frozen Neanderthals from the nearby Neander Valley is awoken and attacks the humans (don’t ask), fighting proves futile—the proto-humans are perfectly capable of fighting back. In the end, Fry has a cunning plan to save the day. He uses fun—distracting the proto-humans from their attack with drinking, sex, and partying—to save the human race. As Leela says at the end of the episode, ‘I have to admit, your version is more fun’. Futurama gives us twenty minutes of fun, and uses those twenty minutes to argue for the importance of fun. And this is true more generally. Entertainment both shows and tells—it gives us fun, and at the same time, it explores the role of fun in our lives. This duality runs through this book, as I consider the proposition that maybe the most important effects that entertainment has on its audiences are related to fun.

The History of Entertainment Effects

The question of how culture affects the people who consume it has concerned philosophers for a long time. Researchers in this area often mention Plato’s worries about the negative effects of fiction on consumers as an important starting point for this tradition of investigation, more than two thousand years ago. For example, ‘Poetry’—unlike philosophy, Plato tells us—‘has a terrible power to corrupt even the best characters’ (Plato 1974, p. 436). The artist who makes fiction ‘deals with a low element of the mind … he wakens and encourages and strengthens the lower elements of the mind to the detriment of reason’ (Plato 1974, p. 435). Indeed, in producing fiction, ‘the poet gratifies and indulges the instinctive desires of a part of us … with its hunger for tears’ (Plato 1974, p. 436). Unlike philosophy—says Plato—fiction doesn’t show ‘the highest part of us’—the part that ‘follow[s] reasoning’—but rather ‘[t]he other part of us’—which

we may, I think, call irrational and lazy and inclined to cowardice … And this recalcitrant element in us gives plenty of material for dramatic representation; but the reasonable element and its unvarying calm are difficult to represent, particularly by the motley audience gathered in a theatre, to whose experience it is quite foreign. (Plato 1974, p. 435)

Fiction both represents and satisfies the worst part of human nature—the irrational and the emotional—rather than the part of the human character that is characterised by unemotional rationality. And it does so for the ‘motley’ audience—the masses—who really aren’t reasonable enough to enjoy a good documentary. Or so says Plato.

In the two and a half thousand years since Plato voiced his concerns about the negative effects of exposure to fictional media, the human race has continued to be fascinated by the question of how culture affects its consumers. In the modern era a number of standard approaches to this question have emerged. In this book I draw on two of these traditions: concerns about media effects and the exploration of the aesthetic impact of culture. In fact, as I suggest below, these traditions, different as they are, can be brought together as complementary approaches to the thinking of the effects of culture on its consumers.

The media effects model—as explained by the iconic textbook Communication, Media and Cultural Studies: the Key Concepts—is

[b]ased on social psychology and aspiring to scientific status … [and] sought to show causal links between media content and individual behaviour. It investigated the effects of sexual and violent content in popular film and television, comics or popular music on adolescents, women, and other, supposedly, vulnerable groups. (Hartley et al. 2002, p. 81)

Within the social sciences, the study of ‘media effects’ has been one of the most popular approaches to understanding how culture works. Media effects are ‘those things that occur as a result—either in part or in whole—from media influence’ (Potter 2013, p. 38). Social scientists worry that

media messages are so constant and so pervasive that we are continually being exposed to media information either directly from media exposures or indirectly by other people talking about media exposures. Therefore, we need to acknowledge that the media are continually exerting an influence on us. (Potter 2013, p. 38)

The history of this approach can be traced back to the 1920s and concerns about the effects of cinema on children: in that decade, ‘Going to the movies was a frequent event for most families—they were great fun’ (Shearon Lowery and Melvin DeFleur quoted in Sparks 2010, p. 46). As Sparks notes, with this much fun being had, people were bound to worry: ‘With movies as the primary source of public entertainment, researchers started to become interested in documenting the effects of movies towards the end of the 1920s’ (Sparks 2010, p. 46). And so from 1929 to 1932 the Payne Fund Studies became the first systematic attempt to prove that consuming entertainment is bad for you. The Payne Fund Studies were not interested in the possible positive effects of exposure to entertainment. Rather, they established a paradigm for ‘media effects’ research that explores sex, violence, and disrespect for authority as the most obvious effects from consuming entertainment:

[T]his emphasis on the impact of movies seems just as relevant today as it was in the late 1920s when the studies were done. Public discussion about the V-chip and the possible effects of violent video games is just a contemporary version of the same concerns that were voiced 70 years ago. (Sparks 2010, p. 48)

Theoretically a study of ‘media effects’ could focus on the positive effects of exposure to mass media; but as W. James Potter points out, while ‘the media [can] exert positive effects’,

when people in their everyday lives think about media effects, they typically limit their thinking to negative things that happen to other people after watching too much ‘bad’ content. (Potter 2013, p. 35)

It is also interesting that the vast majority of media effects research has focused on entertainment rather than art. Technically books are a medium, and so there’s no reason why a media effects approach shouldn’t study the possible negative effects of exposure to the texts of Shakespeare (All that fighting! All that underage sex!). But while there have been literally thousands of studies exploring the possible negative effects of exposure to action films, soap operas, or pornography, it is surprisingly difficult to find research on the negative effects of exposure to great literature, for example. In a way, the clue is in the name—of course exposure to ‘great literature’ wouldn’t have negative effects … would it? Although, if we’ve never actually tested for them, how would we know?

By contrast, when researchers are interested in understanding the effects of exposure to art, high culture, and great literature, they tend to use another approach: aesthetics. Aesthetics is also a long-standing intellectual tradition—although one that has been less commonly used for understanding the effects of entertainment. Key Concepts defines it in this way:

A term deriving from the philosophical analysis of art, aesthetics refers to insight, expressiveness and beauty in creativity … aesthetics provided a paradigm for talking about texts as art, and art as humanising civility, not mere decoration. (Hartley et al. 2002, p. 4)

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Entertainment and Fun
• 3. What Is Fun?
• 4. In Defence of Fun
• 5. Bad Fun
• 6. A World of Fun
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter