American Fun Page 2
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 p
ower), 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.
Radical democracy can be fun only when the citizens cut loose and get involved. In order for a society to grow and thrive, its citizens must be willing to tussle. Even in our thickly mediated culture—where experience passes through screens big and small; where communication is texted and tweeted; where play plays out on keyboards and consoles, triangulated between players on a video screen, often from points across the globe; where sex is had on pornsites and webcams; indeed, where citizenship is exercised through donation checks and in the privacy of voting booths—even in this sprawling culture of distance, classic fun remains immediate: football, keggers, mosh pits, step; skateboarding, improv, political protest; hands-on, face-to-face, playful activities that require dexterity and a sense of goodwill to avoid the pitfalls of injury or shame.
In order for a society to enjoy its own power, to risk a few friendly collisions without descending into eye-gouging anarchy, it must have a radical sense of civility. Its citizens must be able to engage in rough play without losing sight of each other’s pleasure. At the funnest moments in American history, citizens have done this exceptionally well. They have reveled in the law’s gaps and shadows, all the while showing due respect for their neighbors’ rights and happiness. They have turned social conflict into joyous upheaval and have strengthened the nation in the face of adversity. And so do we see the full measure of this subject. Fun is risky and rebellious for a reason. Fun is frivolous and silly with a purpose. The state may try to keep people apart, as it did for decades following Plessy v. Ferguson. Big Business may try to market thrills and get between the people and their fun, as George C. Tilyou did with Coney Island, as Nintendo ingeniously does with Wii. But the drive to get down, get dirty, get real, remains stronger than the rolling Mississippi.
……………
THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FUN is in fact structured rather like the Mississippi. Its pure source water came bubbling up from a variety of early folk sources—from Merry Mount and the Revolution, from slave culture and the gold rush. These streams flowed strong during the Age of Jackson, when rowdy Americans embraced and practiced their heritage of pure folk fun—often to the horror of social reformers. Mixing and mingling in the antebellum decades, these streams combined into a national culture—of political fury, of black festivity, and of risky freedom on the wide frontier. This early American fun, born of much struggle, still flows strong in the national consciousness.
Like the Mississippi River on its southward journey, American fun’s river has been strengthened and muddied by major tributaries along the way—three to be exact. Each one flows from its own cultural era; each one contributes its own political tint. The first joined the mainstream in the Gilded Age, when the people’s rough and rebellious pleasures were simulated and packaged as commercial amusements; fun became spectacle and mechanized play, and the crowd was divided into actors and consumers. The second coursed in during the Jazz Age, when Sons of Liberty resistance became popular practice and the hothouse flowers of African-American folk culture inspired wide participation; disenfranchised groups—women and blacks and youth in general—made smart and creative and antic innovations to a newly energized public sphere. The third tributary flowed in the 1960s. Riding a rising tide of popular upheaval, blending an excitement for revolutionary-era rebellion with sex, drugs, rock, and pranks, a new generation of hedonistic rebels chose lacerating fun over apathy, consumerism, and violence.
These three tributaries—the commercial, playful, and radically political—keep flowing into our current Internet Age. They pour nutrients, pollutants, and sheer life-force into the great American gulf—which is to say, into the citizenry. They mix and mingle to make delightful hybrids—from commercially funded flash mobs to YouTube-fueled Rube Goldberg machines. They inspire the people to come together in marvelous ways, as in the blitzkrieg street theater of the Cacophony Society and Improv Everywhere. But so much contemporary American fun stays loyal to its heritage. To be sure, the latest innovations in popular entertainment—in 4-D movies, in millennial roller coasters, in the entire video game industry—are only perfections of the controlled participation that George C. Tilyou invented on Coney Island. By the same token, even the freshest pranks of the Occupy movement or of the ingenious pranksters, the Yes Men, hark back to the Yippies and the Diggers and, indeed, to the Sons of Liberty. In these you can taste the purest source water.
VERA SHEPPARD’S GRANDCHILDREN WERE the do-it-yourself teens of the 1970s and early 1980s. Fed up with gang violence and excluded from nightclubs, early hip-hop innovators jacked into streetlamps and reinvented pop culture on inner-city street corners. In a similar vein, hardcore punks, disgusted by Reagan-era New Traditionalism, founded a self-sufficient nation on the virtues of primitive rock ’n’ roll. B-boys and B-girls fought for turf in the “cypher” with feats of acrobatic style. Hardcore punks from L.A. to Boston thrashed, bulldozed, and stage-dove in the mosh pit, unleashing their aggressions against corporate America in colliding, kicking, often bloody fury. B-boys and B-girls joined together as Zulu Nation; their motto was “Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun.” The mosh pit had “anarchy” tattooed on its forehead. But as anarchic or criminal as it may have seemed—even to many of its young participants (not to mention the cops at the door)—the mosh pit perfected American democracy. Its raging conflict was totally consensual and held aloft by sacred rules.
In the history of American fun, B-boys and punks stand shoulder to shoulder with the earliest Patriots. For both generations freedom was more than an idea; it was a virtue to throw your whole body into. Patti Smith, a pioneer in New York’s punk scene, felt the same duty to save the people’s music that the Patriots felt to American liberty. Fearing it was “falling into fattened hands”—the hands of Capitol and EMI—she and her ragged CBGB crowd envisioned themselves “as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll.” As she remembers it, “We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.”
B-boys and punks, like revolutionary Patriots, exulted in their youth. Both generations strutted in primitive costumes that set their law-abiding elders’ teeth on edge. Both invented do-it-yourself technologies—for publication, gathering, food, and shelter—that sidestepped corporations and the king, respectively. The Patriots had the likes of Samuel Adams and James Otis, leaders who inspired the lowliest dockworkers to believe they could form a republic of rough and active citizens. B-boys and B-girls were lightning-tongued MCs who honored the earliest black folk traditions—vocal, musical, fiercely athletic. Punks had insanely high-energy rock bands who inflamed their minds with a fierce new ethics—against commercialism, against race prejudice, against all that phony yuppie bullshit.
In past decades there’s been a national explosion in bold, loud, political merriment. From anti–World Trade Organization rallies to gay pride parades to the range of ethnic holidays, identity groups from throughout the population have tapped into the nation’s heritage of fun for ways to come together, be seen, and be heard. More than ever, despite a runaway entertainment industry that would keep the people warming its seats, Americans are deliberate about having their fun. For some, it’s the civil way to rebel. For some—like the thousands at Burning Man or the Sturgis, South Dakota, Motorcycle Rally—rebellion is just the best reason to party.
But at a time when both the Boston Tea Party can be trademarked by drug companies and average citizens take on Wall Street, it is important to revisit the origins of rebellion. For even when the stakes were highest—for Patriot
s, for slaves, for forty-niners—the pioneers in American fun managed to keep the battle civil. Full of crazy punk-rock courage, they dove into the crowd with big bloody smiles and surfed the citizens’ dangerous passion.
1
* * *
The Forefather of American Fun
ON THE ELEVENTH DAY of the eleventh month in the year of 1620, forty-one men shuffled on the decks of a creaky cargo ship. They had been bobbing for weeks within Cape Cod’s fingertip; most of them had not yet stepped foot on land. Despite three months of animosity and sickness, they lined up to sign a binding social contract. The signers represented less than half of the ship’s passengers, and the majority were like-minded “Separatist” Pilgrims, but otherwise they were a pretty motley crew: merchants, preachers, a physician, a tailor, a soldier of fortune, an indentured servant, even a mutineer named Billington who would become the first hanged man on Plymouth Plantation. The document, of course, was the Mayflower Compact.
Some four hundred years later, many hold up this paper as the earliest vestige of American democracy. If you read it the right way, you can almost see it: the undersigned came together in a “civill body politick” and agreed to obey laws that would be “most meete & convenient for the generall good of the Colonie.” When you read it in its proper context, however, you see that it guarantees the authoritarian system that the Separatists had in mind for New England. The “generall good” was of course the Separatist good, anchored in devotion to Calvinist law. More to the point, those who trace America’s democratic tradition back to the makeshift Mayflower Compact—from framers of the Constitution to Pulitzer Prize–winning historians—prefer to see the people’s power refined within government, or legally bound on a dotted line. But America’s lifelong yen for democracy has much racier, messier origins.