My definition of fun distinctively asserts that fun is perceived by those experiencing or observing it as having low stakes. As I will now argue, foregrounding low stakes helps understanding of how fun supports relief from normative pressures, collective engagement, experimentation with new forms and processes and critical engagement with what counts as serious. These considerations illuminate in turn fun’s capacity to serve reproductive queer futurity’s hopes for the generation of better worlds. So, while I argue that little is perceived as riding on the outcome of any given instance of fun, I don’t suggest that fun itself is inconsequential. Rather, I use the consideration of low stakes to describe how people can engage in a carefree way in a type of activity that does, in fact, matter greatly. 

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   Fun, as it is widely understood today, is possible only when nothing is perceived to be at stake beside its participants’ enjoyment. To the extent that it is fun, an activity is undertaken for its own sake and its participants are unconscious or heedless of outcomes consequential to their wider lives. I emphasise perception here because the stakes of the activity might in fact be higher than supposed but the experience or observation of fun remains possible only so long as those stakes are not understood in ways that compromise perceptions of enjoyment and absorption. If I say ‘I am having fun’, it implies that I perceive the activity in which I am engaged to have low stakes. Yet an onlooker’s view might differ: I might be playing on train tracks, unaware of a nearby live rail or oncoming locomotive. If I say ‘they are having fun’, it implies that I perceive the activity in which they are engaged to have low stakes. Yet the participants’ view might differ: they might be not waving but drowning. Being conscious of high stakes, with significant consequence to one’s wider life, precludes or short-circuits fun. In Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home, for instance, the family home cannot be a site of fun because Bechdel’s father’s jealous investment in the integrity of its décor rules out any ‘elasticity, a margin of error’ necessary for carefree childhood activity; the funeral home he manages unexpectedly affords more opportunities for playful experiment and discovery.

 

   A shifting understanding of stakes can kill fun. Goffman notes how the literal stakes of gambling can grow so high that a player must suddenly take the game ‘too seriously’ for it to remain fun. A UK gambling awareness campaign frames such moments as thresholds between pleasurable activity and addictive compulsion, advising ‘when the fun stops, stop’. 55 Fun can also end when participants have divergent understandings of the stakes of an activity, as Sianne Ngai observes of the ‘unfun fun’ to which Jim Carrey’s hypercompetitive character subjects Matthew Broderick’s in The Cable Guy: the former takes the supposedly larky activity of faux-medieval jousting so seriously it becomes a genuine ordeal for the latter.

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   Once something really matters, then, it is no longer legible as fun. This association with low stakes reflects and reinforces the framing of fun in the age of capital as essentially not-work. Nothing, in this now-prevalent understanding, is at stake in the having of fun other than the replenishment of the human resources of economic growth; conceptualised as labour’s shadow, fun can sustain no substantive or constructive value in and of itself. Dominant discourses recognise the meaningful agency of fun only by way of disciplining rogue applications of this mode of not-work to sites of properly productive labour such as the workplace or school, where, as Fincham notes, the policing of fun rises in proportion to expectations of accountable achievement. This structural context also helps account for the typical absurdity of officially mandated attempts to instrumentalise fun in the workplace. Moves to amalgamate work and not-work generate a kind of cognitive dissonance hinging on the perceived stakes of the situation: to ask employees to ‘have fun’ with an assignment only makes sense if there are no consequences to how well it is executed on employers’ terms. 

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   This construction allows for – or perhaps necessitates – the categorical trivialisation of fun. One educational study quotes a participant’s articulation of the widely held belief that something ‘done for fun is something that is not meant to be taken seriously – in other words something that is not real, genuine or sincere’. To locate something aesthetically as ‘fun’ is to offer faint praise, with connotations, according to Blythe and Hassenzahl, of the ‘gaudy, and fleeting’ or associations, according to Ngai, with the belittled category of zaniness. In academic contexts, publications across a range of disciplines deploy the word ‘fun’ in their titles without defining or engaging with it in their arguments. The effect of such superficial usage is to reproduce rather than interrogate the construction of fun as trivial, rendering it a kind of rhetorical window dressing rather than a subject of investigation in its own right. Those who do study fun frequently feel the need to justify it in the face of what Fine and Corte, borrowing a phrase from Brian Sutton-Smith, describe as the ‘triviality barrier’ to academic credibility. In 1961, Goffman suggested the need to ‘justify itself’ had precluded sociological pursuit of ‘an analytical view of fun’; years later, Fincham observed, it was still considered an ‘inferior’ and ‘peripheral’ subject of research. In computer studies, Blythe and Hassenzahl have noted fun’s ‘connotations of frivolity and triviality’ and Goriunova the requirement for ‘qualification or defence’ of its academic engagement. According to normative understandings, then, fun seems not to matter much to those who experience, observe or critically acknowledge it. 

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   The combination of the perception of low stakes at an experiential level and trivialisation at a structural level does, however, enable fun to operate with certain practical advantages in relation to its application to reproductive queer futurity. The fleeting and contingent temporality of fun – the understanding, experience and expectation of a given instance of fun as short-term, spatiotemporally bounded activity with minimal impact on the rest of one’s life – makes it well suited to experimentation with the homemade cultivation and expression of distinctive non-normative sensibilities. Within wider contexts of hegemonic oppression, fun can offer moments of relief that glimmer, however contingently, with hope and enable the enactment, however partial, of better ways of being.

 

   The low stakes of fun (what’s the worst that could happen? who cares if this falls flat?) can incentivise individual expression and engagement, the formation of like-minded collectives, and experimentation with forms and processes from which homemade mutant hope machines might emerge. This understanding is reflected, for instance, in the name of Low Stakes, a London performance collective whose founders – Duckie collaborators Edythe Woolley, Jack Ellis and Malik Nashad Sharpe – ‘invite failure’ and embrace ‘happy accidents [and] fortuitous fuck-ups’. Meanwhile, the structural trivialisation of fun means activities conducted under its auspices will likely go unnoticed and unchallenged provided they don’t directly challenge normative authority. I return here to Casa Susanna, the transvestite or TV resort, that aimed, according to Susanna herself, to enable ‘the healthy expression [...] of TV fun’ on the basis that ‘having a ball’ with ‘[n]o guilt, no shame, no fear’ constituted ‘a form of magic’ by materialising a joyful, fulfilling yet transgressive way of life. One regular guest associated the resort with ‘just having a good time in our party clothes’. But that ‘just’ downplays the significance of what was, as the critic Sophie Hackett notes, ‘serious play, a visual journey to discover [...] which self suits best’. Activities that might seem and indeed feel like inconsequential recreation can, then, function as forms of relief from and resistance to normative expectations and enable the rehearsal and enactment of utopian forms. 

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   The sense that fun might afford welcome opportunities for social cohesion and low-stakes experimentation has received some mainstream cultural recognition in recent years, often with connections to the participatory performance event as an effective holding form for fun. The ongoing Fun Palaces project, originally conceived in 1961 by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price as a street-level forum for constructive and sociable enjoyment and exploration of arts and science, has been realised annually since 2014 at multiple sites across the UK under co-directors Stella Duffy and Sarah-Jane Rawlings. In 2016, the British Library mounted ‘There Will Be Fun’, an exhibition of its Victorian music-hall holdings with accompanying education and performances produced by longterm Duckie collaborator Christopher Green. There is also a growing market for leisure activities that offer adults experiences of fun and play normally associated with childhood, such as bouncy castles, ballpits and playgrounds. Such projects beckon fun into respectable view, celebrating its capacity for pleasurable engagement and discovery, and asserting the need for spaces of relaxation given the increasing incursion of work into all aspects of life. They resist the categorical trivialisation of fun, sometimes in the face of institutional scepticism (Green reports that the British Library initially thought the word too ‘one-dimensional’ and ‘superficial’) but stop short of articulating arguments for the capacity of fun to effect substantive structural change.

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   Fun can, however, be radical and consideration of low stakes and trivialisation suggests how. Angela Carter articulated a common assumption when she characterised fun as ‘pleasure that does not involve the conscience or, furthermore, the intellect [...] fun is per se harmless’.I want to trouble this. To perceive the stakes of a given situation to be high or low is to set boundaries about what is or isn’t to be taken seriously. This in itself is a serious business whether or not it involves conscious deliberation. To declare something ‘just a bit of fun’ is to make a claim about what warrants serious consideration, to adjudge both what is at stake and how much it matters. 

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   Such questions consequentially delineate civic fault-lines and fun throws these lines into relief. For example, in September 2017, a themed bar called Alcotraz opened in east London. Patrons paid £30 to dress in orange jumpsuits, receive an inmate number and play at avoiding surveillance while sitting in barred cells drinking bespoke cocktails. Alcotraz was promoted as ‘hugely fun’ but discussion among viewers of Time Out London’s online coverage revealed disagreement about this. One commenter suggested that people ‘who’ve never set foot inside a prison think this bar is “fun” and those of us who have worked in this environment think it’s tasteless and cruel’. From this perspective, the civic stakes of incarceration are too high for its jovial imitation to constitute fun: to trivialise it through such forms is to mobilise the power of fun regressively. This position implies that fun is civically consequential and its forms bear ethical and critical consideration. Another commenter retorted: ‘If you don't like it, then don’t visit it. Simple as. It’s all meant for a bit of fun, although fun seems to have bypassed you.’ From this perspective, fun is categorically trivial, and therefore incapable of being a site of civic agency; this position asserts that to designate a form or process a site of fun is sufficient in itself to remove it from ethical or critical consideration. This is, then, an argument about whether fun matters or whether it is trivial; whether fun is to be taken seriously. I argue that fun matters, among other reasons, precisely because it opens up a discursive space that reveals as contingent and arguable the question of what is to be taken seriously. 

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   So from one perspective, if something is fun, it can’t matter; from another, if something matters, it can’t be fun. But things are messier than that. The performance practice of David Hoyle helpfully illuminates the tensions and nuances around fun and seriousness. Hoyle is celebrated for shows, often at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern (RVT), that combine charismatic showmanship and dazzling comic timing with radical political invective and sometimes uncomfortable interactions with guests and audience members. To his considerable following (including myself), Hoyle’s shows are outstandingly stimulating, absorbing and enjoyable, key aspects of fun. Yet Gavin Butt incisively identifies Hoyle as occupying an unsettling position that throws into doubt all manner of value judgments. Hoyle’s ambivalence enables a criticality that Butt locates as ‘queerly serious by dint of its playful sincerity’, sidestepping ‘the false choice of either serious high-mindedness or trivializing lowness’ to probe the tensions, contradictions and hypocrisies of hegemonic normativity, gay subculture and Hoyle’s own psyche. At Hoyle’s shows, the stakes of everything, from incest to international relations to interpersonal civility, are up for grabs. One thing that Hoyle does take seriously, Butt suggests, is the investigation of such questions through ‘lay interactions between people in unguarded, open, and sometimes honest moments of exchange’.

 

   In this sense, Hoyle takes fun seriously, as a mechanism of queer discursive investigation and of hopeful agency. Hoyle is, as Butt suggests, at once serious and not serious when he tells his audience ‘[w]e can create the utopia we all want to live in’: he does not anticipate its creation there and then but he sincerely believes that questioning values and enabling supportive, open exchange can materialise better worlds. Hoyle is also, I believe, sincere when he tells his audience they are all equally valid, equally justified and equally beautiful. His performance practice can, then, be framed as a homemade mutant hope machine fuelled by fun, a set of forms and processes that have emerged from the expression of Hoyle’s distinctive sensibility, adapted to various economic, material and cultural contexts, operated relatively autonomously and routinely generated hope by cultivating aspects of community and support for like-minded outsiders. 

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   Fun matters, then, because it enables consideration of what qualifies, civically speaking, as high stakes and what as low. More than this, it matters because it enables forms of agency capable of dynamically mobilising these contingent and varying sets of values and beginning to make worlds out of them. Sidestepping the relatively recent construction of fun as passive, consumerist not-work and returning to the sense of fun as disruptive agency enables consideration of the many different forms fun can take and the many different worlds whose generation it can enable. 

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This essay is an excerpt from chapter about Queer Fun in Ben's PHD thesis, which can be found in full (along with other hope-machine stuff) at Duckie.co.uk/drduckie