Too Much Fun: Shakespeare’s Entertainment Unconscious

My title, including the word “fun,” is willfully ahistorical in relation to Shakespeare, since Shakespeare never uses the word and since it is not even recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary until the late seventeenth century. But its significance and even its own history are pertinent here, for I intend to find in this concept, perhaps perversely attended to, what I term the “entertainment unconscious” of Shakespeare’s plays. This terrain registers the tectonic shift produced by the Elizabethan-Jacobean commercial theater and London’s entertainment industry, constituting what might be considered, moreover, as the entertainment revolution of the early modern era.

“Play” is certainly a more academically respectable concept than “fun,” especially since it can trace an intellectual heritage that includes such prominent figures as Johan Huizinga and Mikhail Bakhtin. Whether we privilege Huizinga’s universalizing move in Homo Ludens to consider play as part or even the foundation of human nature, or the more historicized view by Bakhtin in The World of Rabelais of a localized social process of “carnival” that serves to “uncrown” sovereignty, authority, and hierarchy, play’s elasticity as a concept renders it a broad, research-generating paradigm across philosophy, literature, sociology, political theory, and history.

“Fun,” by contrast, appears impossibly amorphous, untheorizable, and simple. An affect as well as an activity, the concept—if it is a “concept”—is at the same time stigmatized by readily tipping its hat in the direction of commercial culture and leisure. “Fun” is even more elastic as a reference than as a concept. It has become our perennial value term: an individual’s judgment about what is “fun” is a common response from the earliest years of life onward, a chief marker of consumerist choice, adjusting every field and discipline, from journalism and politics to education. For all these reasons, and despite or because of its ubiquity, it would seem the shabbiest of candidate terms available for identifying cultural change and historical social formations, in the way that Raymond Williams famously did with other terms in his Keywords. Instead, it might loosely stand in for entertainment culture or the “culture industry” which was the Frankfurt School’s famous object of attack, for which Adorno and company are too often caricatured as basically anti-fun, although his rhetoric may often make the charge stick: “Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practiced on happiness” (Adorno and Horkheimer 39). Being against fun, if we could identify where this occurs, would perhaps be an even more fundamental prejudice than the “anti-theatrical prejudice” whose history Jonas Barish brilliantly catalogued.

As if itself making similar theoretical talking points by illustration, a recent newspaper cartoon strip, cryptically titled “Fun Is Bad” (Griffith), is worthy of analysis for use in a present consideration of early modern, Shakespearean fun. Created by the cartoonist of “Zippy the Pinhead,” Bill Griffith, the strip calls comic attention both to the word and to its popular usage, in the exemplary postmodern fashion of this cartoonist. The visuals to this cartoon, not reproduced here, hardly help explicate the virtually incoherent exchange of two characters (the “pinhead” Zippy and his wife, Zerbina), the three frames of which follow here:

“FUN IS BAD”

Zippy the Pinhead, by Bill Griffith

Kansas City Star, Preview, Thursday, June 2, 2011, p. 39.

Zerbina:

“Zippy, are we a FUN COUPLE? Because I really want us to be a FUN COUPLE … I want us to have a FUN COUPLE persona.”

Zippy:

“We ARE a FUN COUPLE, Zerbina! I mean, is there a more FUNNER couple than us??”

Zerbina:

“I don’t know, Zippy. BOWLING without actually RELEASING th’ ball may not be considered a FUN COUPLE THING to do …”

Zippy:

“You want me to RELEASE th’ ball? … Because, I WILL if you want it!”

Zippy:

“… Oh, Zerbs … Let’s put aside this silly ARGUMENT … What do you say we TEAR UP th’ environment in this hot-wired DUNE BUGGY?”

Zerbina:

“You’re RIGHT! Let’s ditch FUN and go for LIFE-THREATENING!!”

While the spoof on the trendiness...