Authors: John Beckman
Waterfront
taverns were the Puritans’ scourge. It was out of these taverns, where
Jack Tars and dockworkers and bare-shouldered women stomped to the jigs of African-American fiddlers, that the earliest tremors of the American Revolution first rattled New England’s top-down society. Radical politicians like
James Otis and
Samuel Adams (against the wishes of his snobbish cousin John) courted this salty counterculture and tapped their love of rebellious fun as a sensible way to bring down the British. To be sure, in the 1760s and 1770s, it wasn’t musket balls and cannonballs but
pranks,
mockery,
satire, and
snow
balls that set the tone for the early republic. Then as now, the Sons of Liberty—burning puppets, dressing as Mohawks, staging citywide practical jokes—hold
high honors in the national imagination. Their antics taught disgruntled subjects how to act like citizens.
In the laid-back
antebellum South, the land of mint juleps and hootenannies, public pleasure rarely caused much fuss. This aristocratically minded social system turned a kinder eye on fun. But even as members of the slave-owning élite, kicking back on their w
raparound porches, reveled in the songs and marvelous dances that emanated from the slave quarters—sometimes even
stepping down themselves to stamp a foot or give it a whirl—the vicious injustice that preserved their feudal lifestyles was shaping the practices of African-American fun. Intensely athletic, erotic dances struck a rough balance between old African styles and strictly enforced
Methodist prohibitions.
Jokes and folktales lampooned the master while teaching the people to maximize their pleasures. Even backbreaking work like cornshucking generated a repertoire of songs, games, celebrations, and jokes that asserted the slaves’ humanity and freedom. Such technologies of antebellum black fun, born of resistance and the thirst for liberty, laid the infrastructure for several of America’s most powerful rebel cultures: early
jazz,
rock ’n’ roll,
funk, rap, step, and so on. The will to rebel, combined with a hedonistic will to gather, made for a heady social cocktail that perennially has energized the national youth scene.
While young
Vera Sheppard, of strong Irish stock, crossed state borders in the back of a van, her arm on the shoulder of an older man, the “talking machine” grinding King Oliver rolls, she didn’t waste a single thought on her Puritan forebears, her revolutionary forefathers, her African-American benefactors. Of course she didn’t—she was caught up in the act. Nor should she have bothered to thank her antecedents on the nineteenth-century frontier. All the same, the
Wild West, with its love of the new and thirst for adventure and contempt for limits of any kind, was the great test kitchen for what Sheppard rightfully tossed off as “fun.” In the half century following the Revolutionary War, as cities grew fractious, overcrowded, and dirty, the Puritans’ lessons of separation and restraint came in handy when corralling a runaway U.S. population. These lessons inspired customs, codes, and laws for keeping the people, like horses, in paddocks:
taverns were shuttered, theaters
scrubbed up, and democracy-drunk Bowery b’hoys were eventually kept in check. At the same time, however, a rude and rugged class of argonauts chomped at the bit, bucked the saddle, and struck out for a land of fortune and danger where they could make their own civil society from scratch. Out West—from the rawest mining camps to San Francisco’s Barbary Coast—Aunt Sally’s starchy modes of “sivility” were ridiculed, razzed, perverted, eschewed, and supplanted with a basic love of fun. From famous
humorists like Mark Twain and Dan De Quille down to anonymous jokers in disreputable saloons, these foul-mouthed rogues and seeming reprobates were in fact the innovators of a pleasure-based society where drinking, gambling, dancing, and pranks worked much better than vigilantes and religion to keep, more or less, the general peace.
The Wild West hit the mainstream in the 1920s. Average citizens packed into speakeasies, calling themselves the “Wild Wets.” Reviving the memory of Thomas Morton at Merry Mount, folks flaunted a host of Puritan taboos in the face of the majority’s “Dry Crusade.” The spores and seeds of early black folk culture flourished, nationwide, in the so-called
Harlem Renaissance. All of it emboldened even good girls like Sheppard. She didn’t drink or smoke or gamble, but she didn’t mind bending a few blue laws to have a bit of fun.
THERE
’
S A REASON WHY
,
until now, we haven’t had a history of fun. The word itself is too easily conflated with its sorry impostors, “entertainment,” “recreation,” and “leisure.” Look up “fun” in the
American Heritage Dictionary,
and the first two definitions involve passive “amusement.” Only definition three touches the subject of this book: “playful, often noisy, activity.”
“Play” is not synonymous with “fun.” If “play” can be defined as sport or jest, “fun” is the pleasure one gets from this.
Johan Huizinga implies this key distinction in
Homo Ludens
(1938), his seminal book on play’s “
civilizing function.” He accepts “enjoyment” as a key incentive to play but then argues that play becomes serious, even disinterested, once the player gets caught up in the game. It is this bloodless sense of “play”—play that has been scoured of all messy pleasure—that Huizinga
elevates to civic behavior in which play is no longer play as we know it but a simulacrum he calls the “play-element”—a practice as germane to business and law as it would be to running a touchdown. Examining play’s rules, not its unmanageable spirit, Huizinga reasons that play “
creates order,
is
order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. Play demands order absolute and supreme.” He misses out on all the fun, however, when he exclaims that “
the
fun
of playing resists all analysis, all logical interpretation” and for this reason, “as a concept, it cannot be reduced to any other mental category.” As an idea, fun is fundamentally elusive. It is intractable, illogical, irreducible, but this is precisely why it is an element of “play” that remains worthy of close investigation. Huizinga adds “
in passing” that “it is precisely this fun-element that characterizes the essence of play,” but from here on out he treats “fun” (when at all) as play’s
least
serious feature, “
merely” fun, “
only for fun,” “
make believe,” and so on.
Huizinga dismisses “fun” from the start, but not before making the useful observation that “
no other modern language known to [him] has the exact equivalent of the English ‘fun.’ ” What is more, while “fun” is unique to the English language, it holds a special place in the
American
lexicon, where it is a word and concept that, for all its difficulty, has come to reflect our national values. Indeed, in late 2010,
New York Times
columnist
Anand Giridharadas employed a powerful database of America’s print history and determined that “achievement” and “fun” were the nation’s most bountiful words, the use of “fun” increasing eightfold from the 1810s to the 2000s. Giridharadas addresses what he calls the “
Fun Generation” and joins the loud chorus of American intellectuals who have long decried the value of fun, which he rightly says “
comes from doing and, often, switching off the brain.” He also draws a (rightful) contrast between elitist Old World pleasures and more “equitable” New World “fun” and rather seems to regret the contrast. (Couldn’t Americans just relax, like Italians? And couldn’t they be more reflective?) But this book contends that devalued American fun—“mere fun,” “unthinking fun,” the fun of what Giridharadas rejects as “doing, doing, doing”—has indeed had a “civilizing function,” often a very powerful one.
Unlike the pleasures of watching and eating that have come to characterize the United States (often justifiably) as a nation of dull consumers, fun is one pleasure that can’t be
felt
. Fun, like sex, must be
had
. Whether it’s bantering, shooting the rapids, or playing charades, fun requires investment, engagement. It also makes you take some risks. It demands you have a bit of courage. Freud’s famous “
pleasure principle” refers to relaxation, vegetation, numbing away every last volt of stimulus. You can curl up lazily in the folds of such pleasure, but not so with fun. As the desire for excitement, to stir up stimulus, fun goes far “beyond the pleasure principle.” To the extent that it runs a collision course, testing its velocity against total destruction, fun is closer to Freud’s “death drive”—the desire to die that swerves from death. Like
Charlie Chaplin in
Modern Times,
blindfolded, on roller skates, coasting backward, fun buzzes right up to the brink of destruction and glides away with a little thrill.
Fun is the active enjoyment of: stunts, pranks, hoaxes, jokes, mock trials, parties, troublemaking, dancing, protests, fights, and ad hoc games and gambling and sports. It’s the discourse-disrupting thrill of slang. It’s the joy of throwing your body into the mix, of raising your voice in the public sphere, and of putting your reputation at risk. In order to investigate such rowdy fun and to question how such “doing, doing, doing” has shaped American identity for the better, it is necessary to distinguish it from its impostor: the passive “fun” of entertainment.
Americans en masse confused “fun” with “entertainment” in the years right after the Civil War. In a sweeping campaign throughout the urban North, the amusement industry simulated the people’s fun and marketed it for widespread entertainment—in the forms of big-top
circuses,
theme parks, carnivals,
vaudeville, the
burlesque, and
Wild West shows. These shiny new products, whose avatars still abound from Disneyworld to Hollywood, from
Rock Band to
Wii, had the population suddenly standing in line and buying tickets to have their “fun.” All at once it was a passive pursuit: performers were divided from spectators, who were increasingly divided by class and made to follow new rules of etiquette. Risk and rebellion were confined to the stage, where audiences had
vicarious
fun. Rodeos brought the frontier to the cities. Carnivals simulated low-level participation.
Blackface
minstrelsy, one of the industry’s most popular features, twisted African-American culture into a cruel cartoon.
The best simulations of participatory fun were in
Coney Island’s
“Fun Pavilion,” where frightening rides like the “Insanitarium” automated thrills and spills. But fun’s active ingredient,
liberty,
was gone.
Also in the
aftermath of the Civil War, when the South was plunged into depression and chaos, average citizens of the industrializing North were going crazy for organized sports—not only for the expected
baseball and
football, but for croquet, lawn tennis, track and field, and many games that had been unheard-of even a decade before. Apart from the cyclists and rogue roller skaters who terrorized the sidewalks, such activity was easy to control—by parents, schools, associations, franchises, and, of course, commercial outfitters. Sports became big business. Sports also served to divide the public—by race, class, gender, and ability. Sports ranked citizens according to their talents and divided athletes from spectators in bleachers. In contrast to free-lance American fun, the marketing, organization, and regulation of sports strapped ankle weights onto the citizenry. It kept them from fending for themselves on sandlots, alleys, pickup courts, and scruffy patches of public grass.
The fun explored here originates with the people—playful, active, courageous people. When we turn over the keys to the Kool-Aid junkies, to the Barnums and Disneys who have branded “fun” since the
Gilded Age, we tend to forget who invented it. We fail to see it when it’s right under our noses, doing the good work of civil society. And we fail to see how powerful it can be. The Sons of Liberty weren’t just amusing themselves—they were hammering out the structure of a new republic. The slaves on Congo Square weren’t enjoying their “leisure”—they danced ring dances every Sunday to steal back some of their precious humanity. These would-be citizens weren’t just bored, looking to be entertained. Their thirst for pleasure meant life or death. They wanted to function as full members of society, and their attempts to do so were crazy fun.
MUCH OF THE BEST AMERICAN FUN
doesn’t
aim
to be political. Forty-niners pulled pranks to get a laugh. Journalists staged hoaxes to get their readers’ goat. Thousands swarmed into the Savoy Ballroom
to mix it up with all walks of life. The friction these wags created was harmless, but friction nonetheless, challenging the people to enjoy their differences through laughter, competition, and dance. Even this story’s least political funmakers are pranksters and dancers and rabble-rousers who ignited democratic feeling in the crowd and urged the people to fan its flames.
While most of the people’s fun isn’t meant to be political, at key points in history, like the
Merry Mount colony or the early Revolution, citizens have harnessed the power of fun in an effort to lift the larger community—as in the early nineteenth century, throughout the Northeast, when African Americans held
Election Day festivals that broadcast their desire to participate in society. But even when
American Fun
is telling the stories of apolitical funmakers—of dancers and jokers, of entrepreneurs and promoters—it never strays from its larger interest in the ongoing struggle for access to power, in the ongoing renovation of the public sphere: in a word, in
politics.
Like
Ralph Waldo Emerson scrawling “whim” on his lintel, thus giving playfulness religious import, so too have Americans long dignified fun with their other great national values—“progress,” “self-reliance,” and above all “democracy.”
As
James Madison established it in Federalist No. 10, one of the U.S. government’s founding documents, a “
pure democracy”—“a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer government in person”—can lead only to factionalism; it only indulges the body’s “common passions”; and it offers “nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.” Since pure democracy (for the Federalists) inevitably crumbled into mob rule or tyranny, the people’s power had to be contained within what Madison called a “republic”—“a government in which the scheme of representation takes place.” By Madison’s plan, not unlike a parliamentary monarchy, the people’s passion had to be triple-distilled and bottled in the shapes of judicious politicians. That is the government Americans got, and it has functioned pretty effectively ever since. But the people didn’t give up that easily. For the American people are a feisty body, just as Madison feared. Whether taking inspiration from the early revolutionaries
or simply trusting in their own “demos-kratia” (people power), historically Americans have unleashed their passions without ever needing to overthrow the government. They have lived peaceably enough under the roof of one republic, and in the best cases they have
enjoyed
each other’s bad behavior. More to the point, that enjoyment has made them more powerful citizens.