CULTURAL STUDIES
37
No laughing matter
What exactly is fun, and how much of it should we have?
A
n academic book on fun?” Alan
McKee muses in the introduction to
Fun! What entertainment tells us
about living a good life, “Isn’t that . . . just
wrong on so many levels?” Studies of a subject
aren’t usually required to take on its defining
features – as if books on anger were terse and
ALL IN CAPS, or studies of dreams plagued
the reader with unlikely visions – but the reasons for McKee’s passing self-consciousness
become increasingly clear as the book progresses. There is such a dearth of academic
enquiry into “fun” in Western culture that –
until now – the most sustained examinations
were to be found in the very movies, television
shows and books we find so entertaining.
(McKee points readers to an episode of Futurama which examines twenty- and thirty-first
century notions of fun in one fun, twentyminute episode.)
If, like McKee, you believe that fun is a
“central organizing principle for entertainment”, this may come as a surprise. Thus far,
most research into fun has focused not on fun
in its own right, but on its use as a tool in academic, workplace and marketing contexts.
This, McKee argues, is to contradict the very
nature of fun, which he defines (simply, but
sufficiently for the aims of this book) as
“pleasure without purpose”. He splits fun into
two strands: “solipsistic” (individual, potentially idiosyncratic pleasures, such as, to borrow McKee’s example, the hobby of
trainspotting) and the “consensual” or “main-
MARION RANKINE
Hoggart), McKee finds a radically different
idea of what makes a good life – one that
includes a healthy respect for fun.
Following Colin Lyas, McKee suggests
widening (and declassifying) the definition of
art to include all cultural production. The aesthetic concern with the good that art can do us
can be applied to entertainment, reversing the
traditional media effects concern to ask, what
positive effects can entertainment have on its
consumers?
McKee turns to television shows including
The Simpsons, House, Futurama and Scandal,
as well as the science fiction novels of Iain M.
Banks, to explore three questions in depth:
Alan McKee
FUN!
What entertainment tells us about living a good life
138pp. Palgrave Pivot. £45.
978 1 137 49178 7
stream” pleasures generally held to be fun in
Western culture: “physical pleasures, abandonment, and debauchery” (many of which
can be found in Trainspotting the movie).
There is a sustained and refreshing critique
of cultural snobbery running through this
book. Part of the reason fun has gone so long
unexplored, McKee argues, is that the intellectual framework for understanding it has been,
essentially, pitted against it. Indeed, the two
academic approaches McKee considers most
useful for his examination of fun in entertainment have both historically rejected fun. The
first, the media effects approach, has since its
earliest days been concerned with the detrimental effects of entertainment on consumers.
The second approach, aesthetics, considers
popular entertainment as “not art” and thus not
worthy of study.
Indeed, McKee identifies a “suspicion of
fun” among eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury writers which has been handed down,
almost if not quite intact, to the present day.
The “consensual” type of fun – and, by extension, any cultural form which employs or
1. What is good fun?
2. When should we have fun?
3. How much fun should we have?
In the process of providing fun for the consumer, these diverse entertainments address
many of the moral and ethical quandaries
surrounding fun, duty and the question of
Futurama, 2001
free will, ultimately arguing for the central
importance of fun.
celebrates it – has long been dismissed in phiMcKee’s analysis is sound and far-reachlosophy and cultural studies as “[getting] in the ing, written with intellectual rigour and a lightway of what . . . is really important in life” – ness of touch befitting its subject matter. He
that is to say, “self-reflection and awareness or acknowledges the limitations of his work, and
the development of citizenship or perhaps suggests further lines of enquiry for future
engagement with large-scale political issues”. researchers. One can only hope that they will
This consensus on what is important in life pick up where this book leaves off. “If we don’t
is a Western academic one, and inherently understand the importance of fun”, as McKee
middle-class. Looking instead to working- argues, “we don’t understand the world in
class philosophies (as documented by Richard which we live.”
TLS JANUARY 27 2017