Take a look at this amazing paragraph about Fun below, reading its first sentence slowly because it includes a surprisingly deep parenthetical.
“Fun — when your rulers would rather you not have it, and when the agents of social programming insist on stirring nonstop apprehension over the current crisis and the next one, the better to keep you submissive and in suspense — is elementally subversive. Fun is ideologically neutral, advancing and empowering no cause. Fun is self-serving and without ambition. It wishes only to be. It produces nothing for the collective and may represent a withdrawal from the collective, temporarily at least. Your fun belongs to you alone.”
Then maybe read it again, to get the full punch. How subversive Fun is. How its point is being pointless. How much “it’s all yours.”
This definition of Fun launches a recent essay by Walter Kim that has been making the rounds after it appeared in Bari Weiss’s substack earlier this month. In it, Kim explicitly tries to show “what Fun is,” while implicitly acknowledging just how much we need heaps more of it than we're getting today.
I say “Amen” to that.
Kim is an author of several books, but best known for the one called Up in the Air, which went on to become a 2009 movie with George Clooney and Anna Kendrick—both of them providing more than a little screen-time Fun when they collide over the Clooney-character’s obsessive travel schedule.
The Fun here was “inspired insanity”: taking someone’s bordering-on-sick attachment to productivity and lampooning it in ways that rang true for the audience. Kim and Clooney and Kendrick pulled it off pretty well, and Kim is back, digging into the juju of Fun that had animated it. By the way, juju is a spiritual belief system that incorporates objects and spells in West African religious practices, and Kim attempts to delve into the similarly-wired, pre-cognitive lobe that gives rise to Fun while showing just how evanescent it can be in the face of his analysis.
For example, we can kill the Fun by trying to hard to hold onto it. Instead as he tells us: “Fun is a child of accident and chaos, resistant to authority’s guiding hand.” Or when Kim notes that Fun is: “minor chaos enjoyed in [relative] safety and most genuine when it comes as a surprise, [like] when water from hidden nozzles hits your face or when the class hamster, that poor imprisoned creature, has finally had enough and flees its cage,” to the class’s Fun-loving delight (especially when it faces of the teacher’s shrieking or annoyed response).
We need More Fun as much as we do because it's subversively Counter to all the efforts that have aimed at Controlling “everything that we’ve been dealing with” over the past several years: control of our deadly germs, control of our deadly gun violence, control of our deadly political protests. Fun is like an explosion of mirth in the face of these fruitless efforts. A Bronx cheer. Here’s Kim again:
“We live in a rule-bound era of high vigilance. It’s a time of emergency measures and vast decrees, of curbs on expression, behavior, and even movement. They are portrayed as serving the common good and some people obey them in this spirit, others so they can be seen obeying them. Fun, with its little anarchies, is suspect. It’s regarded as selfish, wasteful, perhaps unsanitary.”
For example, my since-departed father-in-law Joe was very controlling about his immediate environment. His TV remote was in “just the right place” next to his glasses and his water glass on the end table by his place on the coach that nobody else ever sat in. Sometimes he tried to control his children or his neighbors too (with this skeptical distain for whatever they were about), and once-in-awhile and to my great relief in response to these efforts, I’d move his glasses and make them face in the wrong direction when he wasn’t looking, leaving him to wonder (while I secretly watched) whether some gust of wind or supernatural force had moved them while they were outside the range of his supervision. Fun is a lot like that: “selfish, wasteful, perhaps unsanitary,” but as he restored his glasses to their proper direction, thrillingly delightful and essentially harmless too in its anarchic impulse against the prevailing order.
Because there seem to have been several parentheticals in this newsletter already, here’s one more before we get on any further with today’s theme. It was Bari Weiss’s pay-to-subscribe blog on Substack (which you can visit without cost) that carried Kim’s essay as well as her enthusiasm about his writing in general. While you're there, you might also be interested in Weiss’s loudly and famously quitting her post as an opinion editor at the New York Times a few years back because she thought the newspaper was failing to provide balanced perspectives on its Opinion Page and regularly punished her when she tried to push back against her co-workers’ political certainties. Her resignation letter, which you can also find by following the link above, hardly minces words when it notes:
“the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.”
In other words and among many other things, it means that even today the New York Times Opinion Page (and newsletter/blog/opinion writers in general) are rarely as much Fun as they need to be.
An image from Keith Haring’s “Story of Red and Blue.”
July, it seems to me, is a perfect time to contemplate Having Fun.
It was undoubtedly that spirit that caused me to say “Keith Haring” when Emily was in town with her Joe last week and asked me what I’d like to do to celebrate Father’s Day. Artist Keith Haring is almost a local boy—growing up as part of a traditional family in conservative Kutztown just north of Philadelphia—so local museums here celebrate his work from time to time, and as luck would have it, the Michener Museum in nearby Doylestown was presenting “Keith Haring: A Radiant Legacy.”
The curators could have called it “Legacy of Fun” because Haring almost never abandoned his commitment to childlike abandon in the graffiti-esque “artworks” that he drew on subway walls or in playgrounds and that were always aimed at audiences of fellow Fun-lovers throughout his too-short career.
In that spirit, the remaining images above and below are from a series of lithographs that he created for the children of his German art dealer and were given their own room in the broader museum exhibition. They help to chronicle the exploits of the colors Red and Blue as they morph to form different characters and objects in a delightfully rambling story. The Museum introduced his Red and Blue "drawings" this way:
“Much like Haring’s paintings, the images do not follow a linear narrative. Instead, they seem to tell the story of Haring’s creative process itself. Improvised abstract shapes in red and blue are transformed into fanciful figures by an overlay of the artist’s characteristic black lines. Skillfully and humorously, an oval reforms into a mouse perched atop a wary man’s head, a comma becomes the outstretched neck of a peacock, a line converts into the lanky body of a man picking sunflowers….Above all, these twenty works embody Haring’s singular skills, demonstrating his endless imagination, dynamic draftsmanship, and unfailing penchant for play through the most economical of means.”
While he created them for children, they unlocked a shallowly-buried sense of play in me and maybe in others too who hadn't realized until that very moment that they could all use a little more Fun.
Fun is subversive and childlike, but this unlocking mechanism also points to its subliminal, just under the surface quality. Fun sneaks up on you like a hidden motivation waiting to express itself in a kind of release. To Kim, it’s being over-taken by “a feeling of antic stimulation, the opposite of seriousness.” Sometimes it makes you scream out the Fun that you’re having, “a laughing sort of scream” like when your funny bone has been tickled and you just can't help vocalizing how that feels. Luckily you never have to explain what you "said." You simply get to enjoy whatever has given rise to this surprising sensation for as long as you can.
As for its origins, Fun seems to come out of nowhere after we've loosened our boundaries enough to let, say, "the unexpectedly ridiculous" over-take our more somber selves. It has an ephemeral quality, like smoke or a scent on a breeze, but once you “catch” it, you can follow it until it peters out, its half-life effects lingering for hours or even a day the way that effervescence animates water for a time.
Outside of personal tragedies and crises in my life, I know that I’ve never needed Fun more than I seem to be needing it right now. Escaping the drag of a world that often feels unhinged and taking as much joy as we can from a state of being that only exists for itself allows us to return to the rest of living and working somewhat more balanced and refreshed.
Maybe that end state can be visualized in the way that Keith Haring concluded his parable of the Red and the Blue. After they've had their Fun, there’s a change in the story, when something different, that's full of possibilities that weren’t there before, emerges. Who knows what an egg that's conceived by Fun might hatch.
Thanks for reading and reaching out! I'll see you all again next Sunday.
It’s always good to hear from you. Just hit “Reply.”
