Fun

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This article is about the term. For other uses, see Fun (disambiguation).


Children having fun during a snowball fight


Surfers enjoying their sport
Fun is the enjoyment of pleasure, particularly in leisure activities. Fun is an experience - short-term,
often unexpected, informal, not cerebral and generally purposeless. It is an enjoyable distraction,
diverting the mind and body from any serious task or contributing an extra dimension to it. Although
particularly associated with recreation and play, fun may be encountered during work, social
functions, and even seemingly mundane activities of daily living. It may often have little to no logical
basis, and opinions on whether or not an activity is fun may differ. A distinction between enjoyment
and fun is difficult but possible to articulate,
[1]
fun being a more spontaneous, playful, or active event.
There are psychological and physiological implications to the experience of fun.
Contents
[hide]
1 Etymology and usage
2 Activities
3 Psychology
4 Physiology
5 In popular culture
6 See also
7 References
8 Further reading
9 External links
Etymology and usage[edit]
The word is associated with sports, high merriment,
[2]
and amusement. Although its etymology is
uncertain, it may be derived from fonne (fool) and fonnen (the one fooling the other).
[3]
Its meaning in
1727 was "cheat, trick, hoax", a meaning still retained in the phrase "to make fun of".
[4]

The landlady was going to reply, but was prevented by the peace-making serjeant, sorely to the
displeasure of Partridge, who was a great lover of what is called fun, and a great promoter of those
harmless quarrels which tend rather to the production of comical than tragical incidents.
Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)
[5]

The way the word "fun" is used demonstrates its distinctive elusiveness. Expressions such as "Have
fun!" and "That was fun!" indicate that fun is pleasant, personal, and to some extent unpredictable.
Expressions such as "I was making fun of myself" convey the sense that fun is something that can
be amusing and not to be taken seriously. The adjective "funny" has two meanings which often need
to be clarified between a speaker and listener. One meaning is "amusing, jocular, droll" and the other
meaning is "odd, quirky, peculiar". These differences indicate the evanescent and experiential nature
of fun.
Fun's evanescence can be seen when an activity regarded as fun becomes goal-oriented. Many
physical activities and individual sports are regarded as fun until the participant seeks to win a
competition, at which point, much of the fun may disappear as the individual's focus tightens. Surfing
is an example. If you are a "mellow soul" (not in a competition or engaging in extreme sport) "once
you're riding waves, you're guaranteed to be having ... fun".
[6]

The pleasure of fun can be seen by the numerous efforts to harness its positive associations. For
example, there are many books on serious subjects, about skills such as music, mathematics and
languages, normally quite difficult to master, which have "fun" added to the title.
[7][8][9]

Activities[edit]
Many physical activities provide opportunities to play and have fun.
Opportunities for fun

Snowballing (Tallahassee 1899)

Children in a playground fountain
(Frankfurt 2006)

Adults playing (Chicago 2006)

Pillow Fight (Warsaw 2010)

Psychology[edit]


Employment poster about the importance of fun
According to Johan Huizinga, fun is "an absolutely primary category of life, familiar to everybody at a
glance right down to the animal level."
[10]
Psychological studies reveal both the importance of fun
and its effect on the perception of time, which is sometimes said to be shortened when one is having
fun.
[11][12]
As the adage says: "Time flies when you're having fun".
It has been suggested that games, toys, and activities perceived as fun are often challenging in
some way. When a person is challenged to think consciously, overcome challenge and learn
something new, they are more likely to enjoy a new experience and view it as fun. A change from
routine activities appears to be at the core of this perception, since people spend much of a typical
day engaged in activities that are routine and require limited conscious thinking. Routine information
is processed by the brain as a "chunked pattern": "We rarely look at the real world", according to
game designer Raph Koster, "we instead recognize something we have chunked, and leave it at
that. [...] One might argue that the essence of much of art is in forcing us to see things as they really
are rather than as we assume them to be".
[13]
Since it helps people to relax, fun is sometimes
regarded as a "social lubricant", important in adding "to one's pleasure in life" and helping to "act as
a buffer against stress".
[14]

For children, fun is strongly related to play and they have great capacity to extract the fun from it in a
spontaneous and inventive way. Play "involves the capacity to have fun - to be able to return, at
least for a little while, to never-never land and enjoy it."
[14]

Physiology[edit]
Some scientists have identified areas of the brain associated with the perception of novelty, which
are stimulated when faced with "unusual or surprising circumstances". Information is initially received
in the hippocampus, the site of long-term memory, where the brain attempts to match the new
information with recognizable patterns stored in long-term memory. When it is unable to do this, the
brain releases dopamine, a chemical which stimulates the amygdala, the site of emotion, and
creates a pleasurable feeling that is associated with the new memory.
[15]
In other words, fun is
created by stimulating the brain with novelty.
In popular culture[edit]


Are we having fun yet?
In the modern world, fun is sold as a consumer product in the form of games, novelties, television,
toys and other amusements. Marxistsociologists such as the Frankfurt School criticise mass-
manufactured fun as too calculated and empty to be fully satisfying. Bill Griffithsatirises
this dysphoria when his cartoon character Zippy the Pinhead asks mechanically, "Are we having fun
yet?".
[16]

See also[edit]
Entertainment
Epicurus
Happiness
Hedonism