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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Entertainment

~9 min read · Ch. 1 of 8
8 sections

  • Entertainment dedicated the Colosseum in AD 80 with a hundred days of games, packing fifty thousand spectators into a single arena to enjoy blood sport dressed in the trappings of stage shows. The same impulse sent the Lumiere brothers' cameramen across the world to film everything that might interest the public. The same impulse made a wet towel land full force in a struggling singer's face, putting an abrupt end to his act in a crowded house. Entertainment is activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but more often it is something developed over thousands of years to engage an audience. So how did storytelling around a fire become a global industry that records and sells pleasure? Why is fun only part of the answer? And what turns a private recreation into entertainment at all? The thread that runs through every form is one element most people overlook: the audience.

  • A play, an opera, a television show, a film: the people watching may take an entirely passive role, simply present to receive what unfolds before them. That passivity is one half of a relationship. The other half belongs to games, where the participant and the audience can trade places, and the person playing a turn becomes the spectator of the next. This swapping is what separates entertainment from solitary leisure. The audience is the key aspect that transforms a private recreation into entertainment. Without someone to hold, there is nothing to hold mutually. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word to Latin and French roots, including inter, meaning among, and tenir, meaning to hold. Together they suggest to hold mutually or to hold intertwined, to keep occupied the attention, thoughts, or time of a person. The dictionary cites a usage from 1490 by William Caxton. So the word itself describes a transaction between two parties. In the court at the Palace of Versailles, thousands of courtiers, men and women alike, acted as both performers and spectators in daily rituals that reinforced the status hierarchy. The same person could entertain and be entertained within a single occasion.

  • Schadenfreude is the word for being entertained by another person's pain or the idea of their unhappiness, and it sits uneasily beside the common assumption that entertainment means fun and laughter. Psychologists describe the function of media entertainment as the attainment of gratification, with no other measurable benefit usually expected, except perhaps the final score in a sporting event. That sets it apart from education, which develops understanding, and from marketing, which encourages people to buy. Edutainment and infotainment are the neologisms for what happens when those purposes blur together. Some education-entertainment is a serious attempt to combine the best of both. An entertainment can go further still and produce genuine insight. It can take up universal questions: what does it mean to be human, what is the right thing to do, how do I know what I know. Shakespeare's Hamlet articulates such concerns in poetry, and the film The Matrix explores the nature of knowledge. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy began as a radio comedy and grew so popular it became a novel, a film, a television series, a stage show, a comic, an audiobook, an LP record, an adventure game, and an online game. Its themes reach into the meaning of life, the ethics of entertainment, artificial intelligence, multiple worlds, God, and philosophical method. One idea, retold in every available form, points to a habit that runs through all entertainment: the endless capacity for remix.

  • Imperial and royal courts gave professional entertainers their training grounds and their support, using palaces, castles, and forts in different ways across cultures. In the Maya city states, spectacles often took place in large plazas in front of palaces, with crowds gathering nearby or in designated places from which they could watch at a distance. Court entertainment also crossed cultures. The durbar was introduced to India by the Mughals and passed onto the British Empire, which then followed Indian tradition: the institutions, titles, customs, and ceremonies for installing a Maharaja or Nawab were all inherited from the Emperors of Delhi. Korea's court entertainment dance was originally performed in the palace for entertainment at court banquets. These spectacles did more than amuse. They demonstrated wealth and power and dramatised the differences between ordinary families and that of the ruler. The Hong Kong handover ceremony in 1997 used a banquet, a parade, fireworks, a festival performance, and an art spectacle to highlight a change in political power. Court forms often migrated outward to commoners. Korea's masked dance-dramas originated alongside village shaman rituals and eventually became largely an entertainment form for commoners. The same drift carried former courtly jousting into children's games. Royal occasions opened the spectacle to everyone. At Queen Elizabeth I's Accession Day celebrations in 1595, tournaments and jousting were performed before the assembled court and before thousands of Londoners, with entry at the Tiltyard in Whitehall set at 12d.

  • A hanging was a carnival that diverted not merely the unemployed but the unemployable, with good bourgeois or curious aristocrats watching from a carriage or a rented room. During earlier centuries in Europe, watching or taking part in the punishment of criminals and social outcasts was an accepted and popular form of entertainment. Public humiliation offered local amusement. Even capital punishment, hanging and beheading offered to the public as a warning, was regarded partly as entertainment, while stoning and drawing and quartering afforded a greater spectacle because they lasted longer. This appetite did not last forever. Public punishment as entertainment persisted until the 19th century, by which point the awesome event of a public hanging aroused the loathing of writers and philosophers. Both Dickens and Thackeray wrote about a hanging in Newgate Prison in 1840 and taught an even wider public that executions are obscene entertainments. Animals supplied another kind of brutal spectacle. Hunting wild animals was introduced into the Roman Empire from Carthage and became a popular public entertainment, supporting an international trade in wild beasts. Gladiatorial games combined sport, punishment, and entertainment all at once. Some of these forms outlived the cruelty and survive as illegal acts. Blood sports such as bear-baiting, dog fighting, and cockfighting have become illegal because of the cruelty involved, leaving fox hunting and bullfighting to be argued over as sport, entertainment, or cultural tradition.

  • Scheherazade saves her own life by telling stories, a tale from the Persian professional storytelling tradition about a woman who survives by holding her listener's attention. The composers Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel, and Szymanowski each turned that story into an orchestral work, the director Pasolini made a film adaptation, and there is an innovative video game based on the tale. Storytelling is the ancient craft of communicating events and experiences using words, images, sounds, and gestures, and it has influenced almost all other forms. It is not only entertainment, it is also thinking through human conflicts and contradictions. Stories remain a common way of entertaining a group on a journey. Chaucer used pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales in the 14th century, and Wu Cheng'en did the same in Journey to the West in the 16th century. Even now, stories are told to passengers in cars and aeroplanes, spoken aloud or delivered by technology. The oldest tales prove the hardest to exhaust. Epic narratives, poems, sagas, and allegories include the Hindu Ramayana and Mahabharata, Homer's Odyssey and Iliad, the first Arabic novel Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, the Persian epic Shahnameh, the Sagas of Icelanders, and the celebrated Tale of the Genji. Foundation stories run deeper still: the Dreamtime myths of the Aboriginal Australians, the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Hawaiian stories of the origin of the world. These too become books, films, music, and games, a process that increases their longevity.

  • Senet is one of the oldest known board games, played in Ancient Egypt and enjoyed by the pharaoh Tutankhamun. Games are played for entertainment, sometimes purely for recreation and sometimes for achievement or reward, and they may be played alone, in teams, or online. Board games like Go, Monopoly, and backgammon need a board and markers; card games like whist, poker, and Bridge need only a deck. Video games, played with a controller to create results on a screen, multiplied enormously in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. Reading has been a source of entertainment for a very long time, valued for its capacity to distract from everyday worries. Once literacy had arrived in strength, there was no return to the oral prerogative. As fonts were standardised and texts grew clearer, reading ceased being a painful process of decipherment and became an act of pure pleasure. By the 16th century in Europe, reading for entertainment was well established. The same persistence runs through magic. Stage magic relies on deception, psychological manipulation, sleight of hand, and other trickery to give an audience the illusion that a performer can achieve the impossible. Audiences amazed at the stunt and escape acts of Harry Houdini regarded him as a magician. Fantasy magicians reach back to Merlin in the Arthurian legends, written about since the 5th and 6th centuries. In the 21st century, the young wizard Harry Potter became a global phenomenon when the book series sold about 450 million copies as at June 2011, making it the best-selling book series in history.

  • Technological developments in the 20th century, especially in mass media, meant entertainment could be produced independently of its audience, packaged, and sold on a commercial basis. Sometimes called show business, the industry grew so sophisticated that its economics became a separate area of academic study. From the 1930s to the 1950s, movies and radio were the only mass entertainment. The film industry now spans Hollywood and Bollywood, the cinema of the United Kingdom, and the cinemas of France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and others. Pathe launched and distributed newsreels in 1908, and by World War I films were meeting an enormous need for mass entertainment. The Americans first contrived a way of producing an illusion of motion through successive images, but the French were able to transform a scientific principle into a commercially lucrative spectacle. Computer-generated imagery in the 21st century made it possible to do spectacle on a scale never dreamed of by Cecil B. DeMille. Crowds are the industry's reward and its hazard. From earliest times, crowds at an entertainment have carried dangers, especially when combined with intoxicants. The consequences of excess have caused injury and death, as at the Altamont Free Concert. Investigations after The Station nightclub fire showed that lessons learned from earlier events such as the Cocoanut Grove fire do not necessarily result in lasting effective change. The same crowds that filled the Colosseum still need someone watching the doors, which is why the tourism industry now treats safety and security at entertainment venues as an important management task.

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Common questions

What is the definition of entertainment?

Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but it is more commonly one of the activities or events developed over thousands of years to engage an audience.

Why is the audience important in entertainment?

The audience is the key aspect that transforms a private recreation or leisure activity into entertainment. The audience may have a passive role, as when watching a play or film, or an active role, as in games where participant and audience roles can interchange.

Where does the word entertainment come from?

The Oxford English Dictionary gives Latin and French origins for entertain, including inter, meaning among, and tenir, meaning to hold, giving the sense to hold mutually or to hold intertwined. It cites a usage from 1490 by William Caxton.

How is entertainment different from education and marketing?

Psychologists say the function of media entertainment is the attainment of gratification, with no other measurable benefit usually expected. Education is designed to develop understanding, and marketing aims to encourage people to buy products, though the distinctions blur in edutainment and infotainment.

What forms of entertainment are now illegal because of cruelty?

Blood sports such as bear-baiting, dog fighting, and cockfighting have become illegal because of the cruelty involved. Public punishment as entertainment, including public hangings, lasted until the 19th century before writers and philosophers condemned it.

How did entertainment become an industry?

Technological developments in the 20th century, especially in mass media, meant entertainment could be produced independently of the audience, packaged, and sold on a commercial basis. Sometimes called show business, the industry became so sophisticated that its economics became a separate area of academic study.

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All sources

171 references cited across the entry

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  142. 142bookShopping as an Entertainment ExperienceMark Howard Moss — Lexington Books — 2007
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  171. 172bookConvergence culture: where old and new media collideHenry Jenkins — New York University Press — 2006