In an act of Theatre blogger suicide I will now be publicly disagreeing with George Hunka and risk the wrath of this masterful mind and quick witted wordsmith. George says today that:
To say that every theatrical production must have an element of “fun” or spass, and then to drag Shakespeare and Brecht and Beckett and Bernhard and others down to our own professional purposes, in support of our own need to be distracted . . . , is to befoul their work, disavow their pain.
Simply because “fun” is a tool used by corporatist structures to gain and maintain power does not mean that there is anything inherently wrong with it. Fun, I would argue, is in fact a fundamentally necessary quality in art. Pretension without relief just gets boring. And I suspect that Mr. Hunka would agree with this as he has quite the sense of humor both at the bar and through his well wrought characters.
Perhaps the problem comes down to what we mean by fun. George, it seems, is struggling against mindless commercial entertainment. The kind of fluff that does nothing more than causes small green rectangular pieces of paper to change hands quickly. But there is another kind of fun, a powerful and transformative type of play that could get lost were one to simply disregard the whole and focus only on the void. That fun is the kind that acts in counterpoint to tragedy and suffering. A kind of divine play. This is the morbid humor of the gatekeeper in MacBeth or the pathetic antics of Vladamir and Estragon. This kind of desperate humor is necessary in the midst of a world filled with so much suffering.
Brecht was a brilliant comedian. The playfulness he brings to his texts serve to play up the tragic point he is making. Kurt Weill truly is the ideal composer for his texts as he too can make tragedy a rollicking good time. Much like the Wilson/Burroughes/Waits collaboration The Black Rider where the sadness come out through the punctuation of play.
The work of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is a perfect example of this important and necessary kind of fun. His films are serious entertainment. They make you think and question. But the also entertain. They are fun. They are filled with humor and play, not as an accident or an aside, but as a fundamental aspect of their dramatic makeup.
Children are filled with play and wonder at the world. The newness of everything excites them to extremes. As we grow older we become accustomed to the world and forget about its wondrous possibility. We forget to laugh, sometimes going days without laughter. We forget to play, taking everything so seriously. And we forget to have fun.
We forget this fundamental and necessary aspect of the soul. In forgetting this, we forget our Selves. We leave parts of our Self behind and forget who we are and where we come from. Fun, play, these things remind us. They remind us that the world is an absurd place filled with humor. They remind us that the world is to be enjoyed. They remind us that even in the worst of circumstance we can laugh.
Thanks for your response, Lucas, with which I don’t agree; I know that in saying we should be childlike you’re not saying we should be childish, but given the mad, dire rush from adulthood and a mature consideration of death that this culture seems to be making, I don’t know that this is a risk we should be running. And, in re your third paragraph above, the opposition of “fun” with “pretension without relief” is a false comparison — they’re not opposites, as you seem to imply — that only serves an ideology of entertainment.
But I’m sure others will have their say.
All best,
George
I’m pretending to be my son here, who’s obviously logged into his LiveJournal on my computer.
Me, I think Lucas has a point. And so does George. Am I fence-sitting? No…But I will call on Oscar Wilde, one of my favourite writers, who claimed that life is far too important to take seriously. Play and pleasure can be antidotes – I would say are necessary antidotes – to crassness. I would say that what you’re complaining about, George, is aneasthetisation, not play, which is after all the main means by which human beings learn.
Alison
Except that I think the “childishness” and lack of maturity you see is due to a repression of healthy expressions of play. Like sexual pathologies that develop when healthy sexual exploration is denied, so too has fun and play become degraded. Humiliation of prisoners in military compounds goes for recreational play these days and that is sick.
So too is our cultural unwillingness to embrace the value of our mortality. Yet because of that it is incumbent upon us to find and explore healthy modes of play. Through these healthy acts of fun we do not need to resort to such destructive and unhealthy ones as we see too often permeating this culture.
Rather than deny the impulse towards play further, we should embrace it so that it does not corrupt and mutate and become something hateful and sick.
I don’t know if it’s true that repression of healthy expressions of play is what’s going on here. We’ve got a few generations now that are under the impression that everything should be fun. Learning is now supposed to be fun; we should have fun at work; and on the weekends, you’d better believe we’d better have fun. And all of this is tied to sociological conceptions of the role of “play” in our various roles, as pupil, as worker, as friend, as husband or lover. Really, as they humiliate prisoners in military compounds, these individuals are just following the path laid out by the parents and the culture that have insisted there be fun in everything. Aren’t these soldiers just discovering the role of play and fun in guarding these prisoners?
Or is there something, at bottom, to this validation of play and fun that leads to a trivialization of experience, and to cruelty itself?
In terms of the conception of tragedy and theatre, the question is just as central. The seventeenth-century conception of Elizabethan tragedy was as different from that of ancient Greece as Godot is from Macbeth; and then, what is one to say about the role of fun and play in plays like Not I, or Footfalls? Or Kane’s work? The role of comedy (to use a different word than “fun”) within tragedy has changed radically over two millenia, even over the past few generations. It could be argued that other media, as vehicles for comedy and amusement and entertainment and fun and their rapid dispersal over large numbers of spectators, have rendered the means of production of essential tragedy an even more fundamental (can one say “minimal”?) need.
All best,
George
I appreciate that, but I think you are circumventing the issue of repression of healthy modes of fun. The answer, perhaps, lies in a word of your own choosing, “amusement.” An amusement I read as a kind of diversion. Something that keeps one away from the more central and fundamental issues of Being. Play(I’ll use this word rather than fun for the time being) on the other hand is an engagement. Play is an exploratory activity to find out more about a situation or place or person.
What the dominant culture provides the masses(myself included) is amusement. It diverts our attention away from our Self and our circumstances and like a mass opiate causes us to lose connection and concern for the real visceral world around us.
Play on the other hand gives to us a mode of engagement with the world of a different order than the soul deadening interactions we must suffer through in daily life.
By opting for amusement rather than play we are repressing necessary and fundamental aspects of the human condition. “Fun,” the more I think on it, encapsulates both amusement and play. Perhaps therein lies the trouble. The active has become mistaken for the passive. We would rather be fed than go hunting. But in that situation it feels counterproductive to opt for starvation.
Work needn’t be soul-deadening, though far too much of it is. But it may not be for lack of play.
All best, and I’ll wait for others to chime in,
George
Interesting Freudian moment there George. I never said ‘Work.’