FUN!: What Entertainment Tells Us About Living a Good Life [Hardcover]

Combining media effects with aesthetic approaches this book offers the first substantial, systematic and coherent account of fun and its importance. But what exactly is fun and what purposes does it serve? Fun is a vital element of entertainment, and entertainment is the most important form of culture in modern Western democracies. It demonstrates that fun is at the heart of entertainment's effects  entertainment both offers its consumers fun and provides them with the intellectual materials to think about the nature of fun.

More than this, the book argues that entertainment shows us that fun  pleasure without purpose  is at the heart of living a good life. Illustrated with detailed examples from entertainment  from the Urban Dictionary to The Simpsons, to the Culture novels of Iain M Banks  this book is intelligent, original, and even (dare we say it) fun.

'Amazing weird and daring' Professor John Hartley, John Curtin Distinguished Professor, Curtin University, Australia ?

Alan McKee is an Associate Dean (Research and Development) at University of Technology Sydney, Australia. His most recent books are Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance (with Rebecca Sullivan, 2015) and Entertainment Industries: Entertainment as a Cultural System (edited with Christy Collis and Ben Hamley, 2012). ?

Fun is everywhere.

?Fun is a vital element of entertainment, and entertainment is the most important form of culture in modern Western democracies.

?But what exactly is fun, and what purposes does it serve? Combining media effects with aesthetic approaches this book offers the first substantial, systematic and coherent account of fun and its importance. It demonstrates that fun is at the heart of entertainment's effects  entertainment both offers its consumers fun and provides them with thelcÑ