Fun or Phun?

In 1973, the year of W.H. Auden’s death, his literary executor Edward Mendelson edited an excellent selection of the poet’s prose, Forewords and Afterwords. In one of the pieces, devoted to Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Auden writes:

“Yet, for all its harrowing descriptions of squalor, crime, injustice and suffering, the final impression of Mayhew’s great book is not depressing. From his many transcripts of conversations it is clear that Mayhew was that rare creature, a natural democrat; his first thought, that is to say, was never `This is an unfortunate wretch whom it is my duty, if possible, to help’ but always `This is a fellow human being whom it is fun to talk to.’ The reader’s final impression of the London poor is not of their misery but of their self-respect, courage and gaiety in conditions under which it seems incredible that such virtues could survive.”

As literary criticism and psychology, Auden’s conclusions are astute. He quietly diagnoses condescension masking as charity and compassion; endorses the generous stance of a Whitman-like “natural democrat”; and compresses his endorsement of Mayhew into a single unexpected word: “fun.” Serious criticism seldom bothers with so unsophisticated and American-sounding a word. Samuel Johnson defined fun as “sport; high merriment; frolicksome delight,” but dismissed it as “a low cant word.” At least from the 16th century, fun often implied a hoax or practical joke. Shakespeare used it six times. In Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 2, Sir Toby Belch says:

“Go, write it in a martial hand; be curst and brief;
it is no matter how witty, so it be eloquent and fun
of invention: taunt him with the licence of ink.”

And in The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1, Ariel tells Prospero:

“I told you, sir, they were red-hot with drinking;
So fun of valour that they smote the air
For breathing in their faces…”

For the Elizabethans, “fun” came with an edge of cocky exuberance. Today, it still connotes unguarded pleasure, enjoyment that is childlike in its unconcern with consequence, often unaccompanied by lesson or purpose. In literature, Raymond Chandler is fun, Ernest Hemingway is not; Philip Larkin is fun, Robert Lowell is not; Samuel Beckett is fun, Eugene O’Neill is not. Fun is hardly the ultimate critical criterion, but it’s not to be snobbily dismissed. If his books did not reliably render fun, would we still read P.G. Wodehouse? Robert Frost is credited with saying, “All the fun is in how you say a thing.”

A disturbing recent shift in meaning is reflected in the formalization of fun, mandated fun, a fun industry. In this sense (should we spell it “phun”?), karaoke is fun. So are most parties and all clowns, Twister and Disneyland, the epicenter of fun. Last year, I took my middle son to a birthday party at a Chuck E. Cheese, surely an anchor store in the Shopping Mall of Phun. During a momentary, unexpected break in the over-amplified music (a sure sign of phun), I heard another father earnestly say, “I love my Prozac. I’ve never felt so organized.” If phun is near, despair can’t be far away.