Abstract
As a consequence of their size and fragility, small groups depend on cohesion. Central to group continuation are occasions of collective hedonic satisfaction that encourage attachment. These times are popularly labeled fun. While groupness can be the cause of fun, we emphasize the effects of fun, as understood by participants. Shared enjoyment, located in temporal and spatial affordances, creates conditions for communal identification. Such moments serve as commitment devices, building affiliation, modeling positive relations, and moderating interpersonal tension. Further, they encourage retrospective narration, providing an appealing past, an assumed future, and a sense of groupness. The rhetoric of fun supports interactional smoothness in the face of potential ruptures. Building on the authors’ field observations and other ethnographies, we argue that both the experience and recall of fun bolster group stability. We conclude by suggesting that additional research must address the role of power and boundary building in the fun moment.
Within the Chicago office of the National Weather Service, a gendered joking tradition developed between the higher level male forecasters and female staffers with less authority, a theme that continued for over a year. The men gleefully plotted to conduct “experiments” on the tiny fish that two female employees kept in desk aquariums. Many forecasters participated in the joking, focused on imagined and exotic “research” on Odie, Joan’s fish, to which Joan, the office administrator, responds jocularly, despite the asymmetric power relations. Randy and Stan tease Joan, threatening to blast her fish into space, bury the fish, and staple a banner onto the fish’s tail. Joan comments: “You guys are putting a lot of thought into it,” to which Randy laughs, remarking, “We’re scientists.” Joan responds, “It’s a good thing that we all get along” (see Fine 2007:80)
Odie’s peril poses a sociological puzzle: How, given potential strains among members of an ongoing group, does fun establish and maintain commitment? What creates cohesion among group members not merely because they are forced together for instrumental purposes but because they see their group as a desirable arena of action? Once interaction orders are established and groups are formed and develop an affective culture, how do they become treasured for their own sake when solidified through social relations? Building on Bales (1950), Harrington and Fine (2000:321) suggest that “groups exist not only to get things done, but also to maintain themselves as social units.” Whether such desires for social continuation are conscious and whether participants articulate these desires, 1 the provisioning of fun is one means through which groups are strengthened. That fun is embedded within many forms of social relations, including business, leisure, and political groups, adds tensile strength to what might otherwise be fragile connections. 2
Fun is a process that is both spontaneous and structured, and the simultaneous relevance of both allows for sociological analysis. We ask first, how does fun as a form of action promote—or undermine—a commitment to sociability and satisfying interaction? And second, how do accounts of fun, central to the retrospective culture of groups, shape affiliation through recall of a shared past?
The classic description of informal hedonic occasions (fun) is that of Donald Roy (1959–1960) examining the interaction of four men (notably, Roy himself) who worked as machine operators in a garment factory. Observing these workers performing routinized labor, Roy describes a set of engagement rituals throughout the workday, including famously “Banana Time,” in which workers share a banana by engaging in play-like antics in teasing each other about who has the right to consume the fruit. By selecting a daily time for their morning break, the workers constitute repeated teasing as committing themselves to each other and to their routine tasks. As Walker and Guest (1952:68) quote a factory worker, “If it weren’t for the talking and fooling, you’d go nuts.” Roy demonstrates how collectively carving out group times generates commitment, an emergent by-product of having fun. 3
Building on the centrality of group culture (Fine 1979), we address how collective pleasure shapes group engagements, pointing to fun as cementing allegiance and referencing past enjoyment to justify ongoing participation, even in situations in which the actors, resisting authority, might constitute a ludic counterpublic. What appears trivial serves as the foundation for collective life and the possibility of social critique (Beckman 2014). Moments of fun can make instrumental conflicts small because they make communal commitments large.
The Weather Service, Odie’s home, is an outpost of government bureaucracy. However, a warm and sometimes wild joking culture defined the office to its workers. What may appear odd, trivial, and disturbing to an outsider can justify social interaction. Local routines revealed a distinctive and satisfying style (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003) in which joking about forecasters’ uncertain role as scientists is central to ongoing interaction, overcoming disagreements about prediction models and labor practices (Fine 2007). Employees repeatedly claimed to value their workplace relations and often referred to a deep culture as characterizing the office and in their discourse about cultural engagement (Benzecry and Collins 2014) recognized that fun helps to create a community (Fincham 2007). This embedded cultural tradition, despite its status asymmetry, permitted staff to humanize what might otherwise be a controlling workplace, constituting it as a group of friends, erasing, for the moment, the implications of power even while ostensibly joking about it. In workplaces and elsewhere, fun can constitute a form of resistance, breaking boundaries that have been set by authorities in coalescing groups behind their private pleasures.
In its robust if often unappreciated fashion, fun contributes to the formation, stability, and reproduction of the interaction order (Goffman 1983). Fun facilitates cohesion by allowing participants to feel that their social engagements are rewarding in themselves. In this, we treat fun as collective pleasure. While participants are knowledgeable about their own experiences (Martin 2011), for fun to be defined as a collective event, group members need to recognize that they share awareness. By adopting a group-centered approach, we emphasize that collective action creates a shared emotional register and a commitment mechanism. As a result, fun is not a form of individual action but an interpretation of a group project. The mutual entrainment that is necessary to generate fun lays the groundwork for the interpersonal smoothness that is so central in interaction orders (Goffman 1974).
In examining the creation of commitment, we do not argue that fun—and hedonic pleasure generally—is the only means by which groups generate social traction and a sense of we-relations (Tuomela 2007). A claim that all is fun is doomed to inadequacy. Groups have a toolkit of emotive strategies. Value coherence, recognition of similar experiences and taste, expression of superordinate goals, or recognition of discrimination also produce cohesion, but fun can be distinguished in that its presence grows out of a desire for hedonic pleasure, linked to collective effervescence. However, some communities of intense solidarity, such as the radical political cell or the monastery, may commit themselves to presentation of gravity and faith, rejecting collective enjoyment because of what they perceive as higher, transformative goals that transcend personal satisfactions (Orsini 2011; Sbardella 2013). In practice, most groups, even those that emphasize the seriousness of their goals, typically permit moments of levity to leaven the burdens of discipline.
Are We Having Fun Yet?
But What Is Fun?
The theorist’s grief is that concepts that simultaneously belong to folk and analytic discourses slither away when operationalized. Fun, a cluster concept (Sartori 1969), is recognized in practice. It belongs to a set of concepts that are simultaneously emotionally fulfilling, freely chosen, and emergent from situations (Lyng 1990, 2004), even when the settings to which they belong (e.g., workplaces) are compulsory. The fun cluster includes the related—but not identical—concepts of humor, play, teasing, adventure, and games. An element of unscripted spontaneity contributes to the fun moment. Even if the participants intend to have fun, they cannot fully predict the direction that this performance will take. While fun may produce disorder in the moment, that disorder helps solidify the group.
We define fun as a collaborative and unscripted sequence of action that produces—and is perceived as producing—joint hedonic satisfaction. 4 The label hedonic suggests an internal state, but we emphasize that it is the collective recognition that gives fun its sociological power. Fun, seemingly a “pure form” of expressive action, is a salient example of sociality. Fun produces a “euphoric state of sociability” (Podilchak 1985:688). Central to the definition is that fun is not “hedonistic, self-gratifying activity” (Stebbins 1982:257; see also Peterson 2006) but instead is social, not personal; fun is more than a psychic state (Fincham 2016). Individuals engaging in fun develop reciprocal positive affect and feel that their engagement is a necessary condition in creating and maintaining social ties (Podilchak 1985, 1991). As a result, fun is a form of action that is meaningful both for participants, who recognize its satisfactions and are aware of their own hedonic responses (Martin 2011), and scholars, for whom fun mediates free action and constraint (Bateson 1972; Gonos 1977). However, as we discuss later, this does not suggest that fun inevitably promotes social comity. The boundaries of fun are as important as the alliances that fun creates. Taunts and hostile joking may produce affiliation for those in the fun circle while making clear who does not belong. Sometimes this hostility is shared within the group, as in private gossip, and sometimes it is public, as in group bullying.
Fun is not to be defined in the substance of acts but in how it activates social relations. As a result, our approach recognizes that social actors operating in tandem coproduce experience. We distinguish between fun and pleasure. While fun typically involves pleasure (positive feeling) for those involved, it extends beyond mere satisfaction, comforting embodiment, or agreeable affect. It is a collective project, embedded in ongoing social relations, that is memorable and capable of being related subsequently. Through fun, group members cement themselves to a shared, ongoing, self-referential endeavor (Goffman 1961). While fun and pleasure can sometimes be used synonymously, they have an important sociological distinction. Pleasure is personal, an experience of individual actors, while fun is social. However, there is an additional feature of fun, and this is the idea of spontaneity. While actors may plan to have fun and while fun is part of group allegiance, hedonic pleasure can never be tightly scripted but develops through a local context (Fincham 2016; Kidder 2006). As David Snow and Dana Moss (2014) emphasize, the unplanned emergence of action is triggered by certain forms of social relations. In the case of fun, these may involve preexisting trust, a shared interactional history, or a desire to build social ties. This spontaneity often does not destroy the relations and the trust as the impulsive action is typically roped back into the solidified group culture. However, while fun supports the stability and reproduction of groups, it can also lead to a recognition of division and contribute to group dissolution, forcing a rethinking of the status quo (Beckman 2014).
Fun creates allegiance both through its emotional engagement and then through its subsequent narrative possibilities as retellings provide satisfaction and memory of the satisfactions that colleagues have shared (Collins 2008; Jackson-Jacobs 2004). Fun has an emotional tail. In this, the memory of fun, collectively reinterpreted, allows the emotional experience in the original fun to be reexperienced, sometimes in a lower register, a fun residue, but also as an altered experience that can at times intensify the original emotion, as when the memory grows larger than the event itself (Fincham 2016). As such, fun links voluntary action and emotional entrainment (Collins 2004; Kidder 2006), becoming a form of affective recall that can solidify social relations.
The iconic text on the organization of fun is Erving Goffman’s (1961) essay, “Fun in Games.” Fun, for Goffman, is integral to many social encounters while recognizing that fun is fragile. Examining leisure activities, Goffman (1961:17) suggests, Games can be fun to play, and fun alone is the approved reason for playing them. In contrast to his treatment of “serious” activity, the individual claims a right to complain about a game that does not pay its way in immediate pleasure and, whether the game is pleasurable or not, to plead a slight excuse, such as an indisposition of mood, for not participating.
In other words, the encounter designated as fun permits escape. Fun derives from and then justifies joint action. In addition to giving pleasure, fun elicits involvement (Starbuck and Webster 1991). True, Goffman recognizes, people commit to voluntary actions that are not fulfilling because of external pressure, but constrained fun is a failed encounter.
Fun contributes to the development of an interaction order, a system by which conventions can be transformed into behavioral rules that are naturalized within a local setting. As Goffman (1983:5) writes, “The workings of the interaction order can easily be viewed as the consequences of systems of enabling conventions, in the sense of the ground rules for a game.” In this way, past fun is the shared experience against which new fun is judged. Although focusing on games need not imply that the activity has the hedonic character associated with fun (Long 1958; Ortner 2006), many games permit the “playful” and “flexible” manipulation of rules in creating collective satisfaction.
As Goffman emphasized that voluntary social systems can be understood through the dynamics of play, other scholars argued that fun can also be found in instrumental and constraining environments, such as workplaces (Bradney 1957; Duncan, Smeltzer, and Leap 1990; Romero and Cruthirds 2006; Warren and Fineman 1997). For these writers, fun is not merely pleasurable action but action that produces social cohesion, in contrast to alienating forces of routine and coercion (Baarts 2009; Collinson 1988; Taylor and Bain 2003; Vaught and Smith 1980). We see this when jocular insults are shared outside of the supervisor’s vision, allowing resistance to generate the legitimacy of affiliation that resistance supposedly questions (Burawoy 1979; Ó Riain 2000).
Theorizing Fun
Despite the absence of extensive research on fun—a consequence of what developmental psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith (1970) describes as the “triviality barrier”—“positive psychologists” have presented theories of hedonic satisfaction (Gilbert 2006; Peterson 2006; Seligman 2002). Indeed, according to the historian Johan Huizinga (1955), we can even describe our species as homo ludens: humans as players, treating the creation of affect as the basis of community. Yet, psychologists treat the hedonic as primarily embedded within the self, not within groups.
Sociologists have yet to develop parallel themes (Truzzi 1974), perhaps because of the disciplinary focus on inequalities and social problems. However, despite a desire for gravitas, sociological theorists have at times recognized the significance of expressive and emotive culture: including humor, play, and fun (Davis 1993; Fincham 2016; Fine and DeSoucey 2005; Henricks 2006; Wettergren 2009). 5 We need an expanded sociology that addresses activities that people treasure (Benzecry and Collins 2014). In this, a sociological genealogy of the analysis of fun builds on contributions of Durkheim, Mead, and Simmel in their emphasis on how emotion contributes to collective coordination. While each theorist emphasizes different elements of the emotion-commitment nexus, the linkage of affective experience and social relations is central (Collins 2004).
One of Emile Durkheim’s signal contributions is the recognition of the centrality of joint affect. Just as Gustave Le Bon (1896) emphasized the role of shared emotion (typically negative or conflictual emotion) in crowd behavior, Durkheim understood that joint affect (“collective effervescence”) could create powerful feelings of commitment. In his analysis of religious life, Durkheim (1915:247) argued for the salience of high-energy shared and focused action, creating collective consciousness, writing, When [tribesmen] once come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting [gathering] which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impressions; each re-echoes the others, and is re-echoed by the others. The initial impulse thus proceeds, growing as it goes, as an avalanche grows in its advance.
Effervescence refers to an intensely felt affiliation and emotional energy, ranging from the angry to the sublime, and includes sacred experience, demonstrations, massacres, and other forms of passionate emotion, including group fun, cultural exposure, and crowd joys (Ehrenreich 2007; Lofland 1982). Fun is only one form of this intensity. Emotional energy, whether sacred, aggressive, or joyous, is a basis for communitas that, as experienced and as recalled, builds cohesion (Collins 2004; Summers-Effler 2010).
Implicit in the Durkheimian emphasis on collective effervescence is that shared pleasure (and all effervescence) organizes group life. Beyond affective intensity, the experience denotes belonging and as such provides for interpersonal coordination. The recognition of commitments in play and games is equally central to a Meadian approach to fun, an emphasis on which Goffman relies. Emotional satisfactions, from a pragmatic perspective, derive from the coordination of lines of action, dependent on the presence of others. Ongoing interaction derives from actors identifying each other’s intentions and playing collaboratively, building on the satisfactions of teamwork (Corte 2013; Faulkner and Becker 2009; Fine 1987). Focusing on the social coordination of games, Mead (1934:154) writes, The illustration used was of a person playing baseball. Each one of his own acts is determined by his assumption of the others who are playing the game. What he does is controlled by his being everyone else on that team, at least in so far as those attitudes affect his own particular response.
Commitment to the game derives from realizing shared goals, perspectives, and satisfactions.
The Durkheimian and Meadian traditions suggest a dialectic of solidarity within social relations, made explicit in the writings of Georg Simmel. For Simmel (1984; see Tavory 2009), fun resides in the form of sociable relations. For example, flirtation is typically fun for the participants who choose to continue the engagement. These interactions create a space in which the intersection of delight and desire contributes to hedonic satisfaction. On the dyadic level, we find a bubbling collective emotion and a desire to collaborate in the play. Of course, flirtations can be desired by one party and rejected by the other, but when the parties have mutual desires, they share commitment to the fun of communication, fun that depends on coordination of emotional play along with the possibility of a shared future. As Simmel (1984:150) writes, having and not having must be linked in order to be satisfying: There is a sense in which flirtation lends a positive concreteness to not-having, making it tangible for the first time by means of the playful, suggestive illusion of having, just as, conversely, flirtation intensifies the attraction of having to the most extreme degree by means of the threatening illusion of not-having.
The focus on turn-taking in flirtation is consistent with Mead’s emphasis on reciprocity and matching perspectives within play. Following Bateson (1972), whose writing integrates the themes of Durkheim, Mead, and Simmel, play is a social relationship that depends on an emerging consensus over the overt and implicit framing of an act. Fun occurs because the parties share an answer to Goffman’s (1974) frame analytic question: What is happening here? Fun develops when participants treat a breach in social expectations as constituting an opportunity for shared understanding and the satisfactions that come with having produced an alternative frame. While not every resolution of a breach will be labeled fun, when satisfaction is linked to positive emotional energy in producing a novel and joint alternative frame, fun results.
Farrell’s (2001:54) analysis of collaborative circles speaks of group sociability as constituting “a form of playful interaction in which the participants set aside status differences and instrumental goals, and just talk for the sheer enjoyment of it.” According to Farrell, fun “breaks out” from routine while challenging but never rupturing the ties on which the group depends. The upended expectations are resolved, solidifying group allegiance. Referring to the interactions among the French Impressionists, Farrell writes of interpersonal humor, suggesting that “part of the fun was pricking the ego of your opponent, but with humor and goodwill so as not to provoke his anger. . . . The exchanges were open, loud, and merciless, but generally remained within limits that allowed most members to maintain their dignity and self-esteem” (p. 54). In this sense, fun is a form of sociability based on the control of the unexpected, generating emotion, coordination, and ultimately, additional commitment. As Parker and Hackett (2012) note in analyzing the group basis of scientific collaboration, trust and emotional satisfaction generate productivity. Even when boundaries are drawn, fun operates within the context of a framing process constituted through signals that must be unpacked, relied on, and accepted, at least by those who are integrated within the fun moment.
These three approaches to group pleasure—the Durkheimian, Meadian, and Simmelian—justify a fundamentally sociological approach to fun within the interaction order. The first recognizes the importance of affective energy as a generator of cohesion, the second emphasizes the coordination of lines of action with a common focus, and the third asserts that positively valenced sociality contributes to creating commitment. Taken together, they argue that groups utilize fun for solidification, functioning, and continuation. (Fun may also draw boundaries, even while being a form of affiliation for those who share a hedonic perspective.) Utilizing a meso-analysis, we set aside fun as either individual or mass emotion. Every group has its own local culture that depends on social relations, future orientations, and past experiences (Fine 1979; Hart 2001). Fun as improvisation challenges expectations (Goffman’s 1974 primary framework), reveals interactional flexibility, and bolsters group persistence.
To see the working of fun as a group process, we begin by examining structural affordances, including those that depend on obdurate temporal and spatial resources, and how fun mediates them. We then analyze how fun creates commitment mechanisms in local cultural systems. We next argue that the narration of occasions of fun promotes the stability of group life. Finally, in suggesting further directions, we point to the role of fun in establishing divisions, creating exclusion, and exercising power. We draw on six ethnographic cases: mushroom collectors, government meteorologists, urban skateboarders, professional athletes involved in BMX-freestyle cycling, zoo volunteers, and violence-prone young white males. Each constitutes a group in which shared hedonic satisfaction—fun—commits participants to an interaction order. Brief descriptions of these research sites are included in the appendix.
Structural Affordances
While fun need not occur within the strictures and boundaries of groups, it often thrives in those settings. Because of how they organize time and space, groups permit the weaving together of interaction. These times and places promote the development of shared affective energy. This recognition provides a commitment to continued sociability that encourages the recognition and use of a group past.
“Free” behaviors are often found in the penumbra of constraint (Hood 1988; Taylor and Bain 2003; Warren and Fineman 1997). While affordance is often linked to voluntary action in contrast to the limiting features of technology (Bloomfield, Latham, and Vurdubakis 2010; Hutchby 2001), we apply this concept to social constraints. That a meteorological office or the backstage at a zoological park provides time and space for moments of fun suggests that along with instrumental requirements, groups may sponsor informal expression. Groups often provide openings for fun in their interactional structures, leaving time and space available for collective pleasure. 6
Time
At some times, fun is treated as proper; at others, it is problematic. Fun is outlawed in the face of intense temporal concentration, as when dangerous weather is near, when an animal is ill, or when a skateboarder has been injured. These moments demand active response, not reframing. Yet, accounts of scientific and artistic work document that absent the need for immediate action, fun supports discovery, affiliation, and collaboration by shaping and reframing the taken for granted (Csikszentmihalyi 1996; Farrell 2001; Parker and Hackett 2012). When not pressured by insistent demands, concentration allows groups to discover new responses to old problems, leading to a powerful sense of group worth.
However, fun is also found at times that lack focused concentration. Fun lightens routine labor. What is crucial in both instances is the absence of immediacy. Observations of work demonstrate that in industrial, repetitive, and dull jobs, individuals are motivated to engage in rituals of fun, creating a laboring self grounded in sociality (Baarts 2009; Burawoy 1979; Nickerson 1974). Certain times privilege instrumental focus, whereas at other times, labeled free time, break, or recess, fun is permitted or even encouraged (Parker and Hackett 2012).
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The ability of a group to coordinate their activities (Gibson 2005; Zerubavel 1979) allows for shared action and affective interaction (Tavory and Eliasoph 2013). After tight deadlines, workers may socialize, recognizing that the intensification of time can generate opportunities for fun (Ó Riain 2000), or groups may set aside “times” for fun apart from routine demands. As a result, a group that meets regularly may establish “after hours” fun times, such as nights and weekends (Melbin 1987). Grazian’s (2008) ethnography of adolescent clubbing reveals that collegians who are students by day may be wild at night and see this temporal organization as central to their lifestyle. A similar temporal organization is evident in the case of young men searching for the thrill of a fight: James, a friend from high school, had “heard about a party” from “some girls” he knew that lived near the university campus in Tucson. . . . By 9 or 10 pm a hundred or more people, many of them complete strangers to each other, arrive at the house of someone they don’t know, not quite sure what the party will be like, but hoping for excitement and action. . . . TJ [said] that he and Rick soon started to hope for trouble. . . . “And—I’m not sure at what point—Brian said he wanted to get into a fight. . . . And Rick was like, ‘Yeah, I kinda want to get into a fight too.’ . . . So I was like, ‘Yeah I want to get into a fight too.’” (Jackson-Jacobs 2004:233–34)
What is inappropriate during daylight becomes legitimate at night. Similarly, weekend activities are treated differently from weekdays (Zerubavel 1985). The group of urban skateboarders, for example, considered naming their skatepark Saturdays to symbolize when it was likely to be used. Group culture is temporal culture (Zerubavel 1979).
Space
As important as time is in allowing group fun, place is equally salient. As performance, fun requires a stage. Despite obdurate physical structures, groups shape spaces for interaction. The control of a shared environment confirms the gathering’s groupness. For instance, skateboarders colonize spaces built for other purposes (Borden 2001), and they draw boundaries to indicate their control. Consider the case of a group of Stockholm men building an unauthorized skatepark who are confronted by kick-bikers, whom the skateboarders resent, wishing to use the same space. Cementing a kick-bike into concrete both serves as a warning and a moment of fun for the builders: While walking towards the skatepark I notice a kick-bike cemented into the structure where a new quarter pipe is being built. Part of the bike, specifically its front wheel and a piece of its lower metal frame, sticks out and will remain visible even when the job is completed, clearly by design. . . . I ask Henke about the bike. He responds, “This morning the bike was there; someone must have left it yesterday,” implying that bikers must have been there when the skaters were not around. He explains, “Kids hide in the bushes down there, so the first thing they see now is the scooter. . . . It is a warning.” Then, he starts smiling. The cemented bike is an ongoing topic of communal conversation. Months later, Jocke and I spot a young kick-bicker approaching the park. Jocke firmly explains: “You can’t ride here. You have taken over the other skateparks and that is why we built this place. Come back with a skateboard if you want to ride here.” Later I ask Jocke where is his favorite place to skate: “I like this place because it is DIY ’cuz I feel like I can kick out people, ’cuz I helped build here, and if they say they have built here, then they can skate, and if they don’t, then fuck off.” (Field notes)
These men remake public space not only with the goal of having fun when the construction is complete but recognizing that through their ongoing and improvised construction, they are establishing ownership of the space.
Places encourage performances not only through their physical layout but also through the significance of ownership and creating an emotional connection (Kidder 2012), restricting access of outsiders, evident in surfing localism (Daskalos 2007), gang territory (Venkatesh 2008), scientific groups meeting privately (Parker and Hackett 2012), or friends asserting rights to café tables (Farrell 2001). Government meteorologists met in a forecaster’s garage, conducting “mad scientist experiments” using a microwave oven and reporting these experiments in excited narratives when they returned to the office (Fine 2007). Taverns and other third places of sociality also provide bounded domains of pleasure, privileging fun (Oldenburg 1989) and separating the spaces of fun from those of “ordinary life” (Huizinga 1955). Many bars are designed to facilitate the drinking culture of friends. Gathering around a table, ordering drinks, amplifies pleasure by permitting comic performances. Likewise, rowdy parties provide spaces in which fights can occur (Jackson-Jacobs 2004). Punk rock fans believe that the arenas that concert promoters provide are “their” spaces, suggesting that “this is where we have fun” (Collins 2008:278; Williams 2011:10). In this, they manage the spaces in which fun is to be had. They complain when desired behavior, like stage-diving, is prevented. What is crucial is that the group can make the space their own, limiting intrusions by outsiders, providing novel experiences available only to members.
Groups search for magnet places that support group interaction (Corte 2013; Farrell 2001; Oberlin and Gieryn 2015). Some locations are fun generators, while others discourage spontaneous actions or do not fit group purposes. The library and the park have different affective contours, as do the factory and the church. Since fun frequently involves rapid movement and loud, spontaneous talk, locations where these behaviors are tightly controlled or are targets of surveillance are often fun-free.
In contrast, spaces in which social control is light and noise is permitted are sites of fun. For instance, BMXers self-regulated “their” park because the spaces are separate from onlookers (Corte 2013). Likewise, scientists who meet periodically in remote and isolated settings—what they call “island time”—for “brief but intense periods of collaboration” (Parker and Hackett 2012:21) and mushroomers who hold forays in isolated woods permit private fun in public areas: Jerry and Dave played a memorable prank on Beth and Molly at a foray held in a wooded grove in a local state park. Beth and Molly were busily identifying mushrooms at a picnic table, and Jerry and Dave asked two new members to deliver a white Clitocybe whose cap they had painted with purple food coloring. Attendees were sworn to secrecy. Not suspecting, Beth and Molly fruitlessly attempted to identify the mushroom for about a half an hour, as everyone stood around watching, making “helpful” suggestions. Eventually Jerry and Dave remarked that the mushroom looked “strange.” As it dawned on Beth and Molly that they were victims, Jerry and Dave admitted their deception. The Purple Clitocybe incident, fully recorded on slides shown at club events, justified holding the foray at the same location annually because of the amount of “fun.” (See Fine 1998, p. 143)
As workplaces in which cursing is expected and treated as routine are obscenity factories, fun factories exist as well, of which parks, private spaces, and taverns are examples. Not only time but also the availability of space makes fun possible (Fine 1989). As Goffman (1983:4) emphasizes, rejecting a “rampant situationalism,” “Factories, airports, hospitals, and public thoroughfares are behavioral settings that sustain an interaction order characteristically extending in space and time beyond any single social situation occurring in them.” Each place establishes interactional meanings. By setting expectations for action—even if the action is unscripted—times and places can encourage or impede group fun (O’Connor 2008).
Collaborative Commitment
As we have argued, fun reveals itself through interaction. In shared engagement, participants feel their common affect and treat themselves as belonging together while recognizing the importance of sociability. The Purple Clitocybe incident is a case in point. The interaction is at first a prank, creating temporary targets, but the goal is a recognition of the value of sociability, and as a result, it is crucial that the targets become publicly reincorporated into the group: A few weeks later Brian shows slides of Dave painting the Clitocybe purple, commenting: “Would you buy a used microscope from this man?” When Brian shows a slide of Beth and Molly looking at the mushroom, he notes, “The plot thickens. It’s to their credit that they didn’t put any label on it. It fooled them for a while.” Confirming their reading, Molly adds, “It was fun.” (See Fine 1998, p. 144)
These moments of incorporation demonstrate how fun builds collective intimacy. To make this happen, groups require individuals who embrace the socio-emotional responsibility of encouraging group satisfaction and others who agree to this reading (Bales 1950).
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Having specific individuals who fulfill different informal roles is key. Fun is their desire and their product. Members of collaborative circles often announce how much they appreciate each other’s presence (Farrell 2001). The shared focus of the group and the consensual resolution of the tension of teasing—ostensibly a breach of shared effervescence—mark community. Clifford Geertz (1973:416) writes of Bali, “to be teased is to be accepted,” but he might have added that acceptance also depends on the willingness to be teased. A tradition of singing amusing ditties by zookeepers serves much the same purpose, proclaiming that they love their jobs and their co-workers. Volunteers are willing to behave oddly (“weird”) for the amused delight of colleagues: As Christina [a zookeeper] explained to me, “We’re a very joking group. Not the most P.C. of all-time. But it’s just constantly having that joke and making fun of something, not taking everything so seriously. You’ve got to just kind of let things go.” [Asked to describe their humor, Christina laughs,] “Honestly, everybody has a really weird sense of humor. . . . Lots of poop jokes. But also, our team is kind of weird because we like to sing a lot. So a lot of times we just jokingly take whatever we’re doing and put it to the words of some song.” “Give me an example?” “Heather got—here we go with poop jokes again—a bunch of fecal loops. They’re little loops that you use to get fecal samples from an animal. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of [Prince’s] song ‘U Got the Look’? . . . ‘She’s got the loop! She’s got the loop!’ Yeah, and it’ll go on.” (Grazian 2015:100)
Hedonic interaction, including group joking (Billig 2005; Mulkay 1988), is a robust indicator of communal satisfaction, motivating public expressions of pleasure and delineating social boundaries. As a result, the recognition of shared engagement increases fun for each participant. Without this collective belief in a shared emotional register, fun can easily be spoiled. Fortunately, tightknit groups typically have common understandings of what constitutes satisfaction. For instance, in observing Goth gatherings, Hodkinson (2002:91) notes the pleasure that groups have in getting “Gothed-up” while preparing for concerts, even arriving late because they were “having so much fun getting ready.” This is not because getting Gothed-up is pleasurable in itself, but it is when done with others.
What constitutes fun is not merely personal (although personal preferences are involved) but emerges from linking lines of action (Blumer 1969) in light of communal standards of taste (Gronow 1997; Wohl 2015). This recognizes that fun can depend on a target’s reaction, as in the case of the Purple Clitocybe. In such circumstances, the target must either embrace the role, creating a satisfying response, or if not, exit the scene. A group with only some participants having fun, especially at the expense of others, is profoundly unstable. Such a group has created a boundary, separating insiders and outsiders. When effective, interaction scenes constitute communities of pleasure. Where close relations are found, fun is generally encouraged, and when fun is shared, relations deepen.
Strangers struggle to have fun; fun more readily is experienced by friends and acquaintances.
9
Those with recognizably similar interests and backgrounds have advantages in the rapid creation of fun. Acquaintanceship produces openness to coordination (Sternberg 1998) as well as a zone of interpretive tolerance. This acceptance produces trust, allowing spontaneity and a willingness to take interactional risks because of the social safety net. The coordination of interaction depends on flexible and improvised responses (Katz 1994; Wohl and Fine 2015). “Escalating reciprocity” and “instrumental intimacy” characterize tightknit communities (Farrell 2001), evident when government meteorologists focus on fish as well as clouds. What might otherwise be defined as harassment is transformed into a series of interactional dares, exemplifying and defining community. The teasing must be publicly embraced (Seckman and Couch 1989) to be considered appropriate: Joan explains the story of her fish that she keeps on her desk, “They [the forecasters] would threaten my fish. I would have to get out my bat and my stick. . . . We laugh and joke and have a lot of fun.” Later Randy and Don joke with Joan about Heather’s fish in a way that is reminiscent of Simmelian flirtation. Randy playfully remarks that her fish doesn’t look well, and that they should attach electrodes to the fish’s tank and give him electrical shocks. Joan laughs that Heather will hit them if they hurt her fish. (Field notes)
Of course, not all moves are accepted; some are strongly resisted or considered harassment. However, in the realm of sociability, a presumption of acquiescence exists. This acquiescence reflects the desire of participants to embrace group desires, even if when separated from pressures to conform, they might choose other options. But more than in most domains, sociability requires accepting the priorities and preferences of those who set interaction styles (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003). In this sense, even though the interaction is ostensibly among equals, hierarchical relations and friendship ties direct what is likely (Sherif et al. 1961). As in accounts of jam sessions (Becker 1963; Cameron 1974; Faulkner and Becker 2009) or improvisational theater (Sawyer 2006), participants are motivated to honor the desires of others, but they often look to those whom they consider to be leaders to direct performances. Fun as shared affect reproduces itself using idiocultural scripts such as the amused banter about Joan’s fish.
The socially situated performance of fun is evident in a sociological model of the flow experience. Flow is often conceived as being located in the individual (Csikszentmihalyi 1996), but it depends on social relations. While flow is defined as an intensive and satisfying performance that lies “beyond boredom and anxiety,” this excessively privileges the individual. Our concern is not with the individual but with the group: the creation of group flow (Sawyer 2003), collaborative moments (Farrell 2001; Parker and Corte forthcoming), and mutual entrainment (Collins 2004). Following Sawyer (2003:44), group flow is “a state of heightened collective consciousness, sharpened attention and total immersion in the task at hand that occurs when groups perform at peak levels and which allows them to feel as if they are able to anticipate what their fellow performers will do before they do it.” This intimacy creates the predicate for instrumental engagement on other matters (Farrell 2001).
Interpreted from the meso-level, fun is often fast and impromptu, distinct from slower and planned pleasures. The form of the occasion may be culturally recognized—as in drinking games or Karaoke—but interactional choices cannot be predicted in advance. An unreflective passion characterizes flow. This mirrors Bourdieu’s (1990) “feel for the game,” action that becomes more pleasurable with experience. In Meadian terms, the performance of fun invokes the “we” rather than the “us”—the agency of a linked community (Mead 1934); “us” will be subsequently evident in the recounting of fun. Consider the remarks of a skateboarder about the importance of communal presence in the creation of fun: “[Sessioning] . . . is that unpredictable aspect of the skateboard experience that occurs whenever the varied personages that comprise the contemporary vanguard assemble together. The action is always faster, always more furious, and limits are always pushed harder than ever before” (Borden 2001:123).
In practice, occasions of fun—partying, fighting, demonstrating, joking, competing, or playing—are engagements of the social. They involve the co-presence of two or more participants, as when friends dance en masse to electronic dance music, engage in slam dancing, or participate in mosh pits (Collins 2008; Malbon 1999). As described by Hancock and Lorr (2013:336), Just as punks put their bodies on the line, literally and symbolically, whether at a show or a political protest, the act of stage diving and of catching the divers reflects the collective investment necessary to sustain the very practice itself. This apparently individual reckless and chaotic practice is regulated through a meaningful collective structure of interaction and orientation.
The experience of fun depends not only on personal experience but crucially on its social context. Emotional bonds build social integration (Csikszentmihalyi 1975). In competitive social worlds, contests may escalate in complexity and risk until participants are operating at what they consider their highest level. While these might seem like circumstances in which individuals experience flow states or recklessness, such experiences are only possible through the presence of others and through intimate knowledge of each other’s expertise and skills (Corte 2013). In both skateboarding and Freestyle BMX informal games, the initial rider does not begin with a trick that is too complex, difficult, or dangerous. That spoils the fun before participation of others had begun. Instead, riders select moves that are progressively more difficult, attending closely to unfolding action, revealing knowledge of competition etiquette and familiarity with others’ capabilities. As a result, competitive rituals produce fun through mutual attention, particularly when competitors are closely matched and push themselves to the limits of their competencies. But competition is not merely internal to the group. Occasions of fun are used to mark the group as a distinct community, as in the case of the skateboarders and kick-bikers. Such rituals include competitive games, such as chess (Fine 2015) or pigeon racing (Jerolmack 2013); sports (Brooks 2009; Chambliss 1989); or competitive activities involving heightened danger and risk—what Goffman (1967) refers to as “action”—including BMX biking (Corte 2013), muscle car racing (Best 2005), or drinking contests (Grazian 2008). Although lacking predetermined scripts, fun depends on an understanding that emerges from standing relationships that are facilitated by shared cultural capital.
Shared Narrative
Fun, a form of emotional entrainment, is not composed of simple acts but is situated within a self-referential group culture, a nexus of interaction. Repeated jokes and stories, along with nicknames and memories, mark solidarity and membership (Fine and DeSoucey 2005). Shared responses create a commitment to sociability. Occasions become meaningful, grounded in the memory of actors and based on reciprocal expectations, not only through affective energy as performed but also through repeated references in talk. Experiences may be memorable, but they become cultural through discourse (Ferguson 2014). Notable occurrences have what Goffman (1981) terms a referential afterlife.
Recall of fun through talk is evident in most social circles. Groups routinely refer to the good times that they have shared, and in this, they create embedded histories of the events that define them and the actions that connect them. Narratives, linked to times and places, provide recall of moments of fun, fostering collective identity. As a result, group members connect using shared pasts, even after periods of absence, maintaining relations by conversing. Narratives are both about fun and are fun themselves. The stories can be brought out and retold, like a family album.
This is evident in the Arizona brawl in which the young men search for a story, and when they find it, elaborate the account. As Jackson-Jacobs (2004:231) remarks, speaking of what he terms “narrative gratification,” recounting a storied self is thrilling, “a self that will become publicly and enduringly admired, immortalized in epic fight stories told for years to come. . . . Narrative consequences are often the raison d’etre of risk.” Narrative is central to memory (Martin 1982) and the recognition of community, as examinations of narrative in the public sphere reveal (Polletta 2006). Jackson-Jacobs (2004:238–41) continues: After a group brawl the participants on each side almost invariably regroup as soon as possible to talk excitedly about what has just happened. . . . They thrill at what the fight has revealed: that individually and collectively they have acted with courage, daring, and loyalty; and that these characteristics of the self and the group will be public and enduring. . . . How was everyone reacting, I asked TJ, “We basically talked about the fight for the next 36 hours.”
The same occurred in an unpublished examination of Oahu big-wave surfing by the second author. Surfers recount surviving a huge and dangerous “rogue” wave (up to 80 feet in the telling): The same people if we see each other, we go back to talking about that day. It is almost like we are stoked to have experienced that. When we see each other, we always talk about it. A lot of them became better friends because we were out there and what happened to us.
In these cases, particular members with their memory or performative skills can become designated narrators; stories can be a mark of respect. The ability to witness, record, and narrate becomes crucial to the continuation of the group as well as the strengthening of the bonds among its members.
However, it is not simply a narrative focus at one moment. To have effects, fun requires a diachronic component. Stories are repeatedly referenced, and community members, perhaps not present for the events, learn the appropriate response to the narrative. The account of Joan’s fish keeps evolving as the meteorologists strive to top each other with more exotic plots but each referring to previous fish incidents: Randy announces laughingly to me, “We had a fish incident. A bad one.” Randy and Don, working the midnight shift, wired several batteries together so that it looked like a bomb. They put the package on Heather’s aquarium, leaving a “ransom note” that they would kill the fish if they didn’t receive $1,000. Randy admits that he wanted to see the reaction of Heather and Joan. Joan says that she was thinking of bringing in Monopoly money. Stan joked, “I heard a loud scream.” Randy adds, “It just looked so much like a bomb.” (Field notes)
“Fish incidents” become a recognized category of stories for these colleagues, reminding them of their group commitment. They may be the first accounts that members exchange when meeting and are central to group bonding.
The themes of fun—the pranks of gatherings, the gender politics of offices, the clashes between rivals—are available through retellings. In this sense, fun represents both the “we” who act and the “us” who relate the cohesion evidenced by the narratives. While fun reflects the desires of social actors, it connects to themes that validate the meaningfulness of the group. References to dirty work (Hughes 1951) also constitutes a group as a community. In the zoo backstage, workers cope with moments that they and others might find disgusting or depressing without mutual support: As Krista would go on to explain, keepers also filled their workdays with “lots of singing and dancing, lots of inside jokes, and lots of just being loud and crazy” to help them take their minds off some of the more unpleasant aspects of zoo work and animal care: “We deal with a lot of death and things that are morbid. . . . When animals get sick there’s lots of blood and vomit and poop and stuff involved, so it makes our conversations open to anything. . . . We have to kind of balance that by just being fun and crazy.” . . . Heather agrees, “A lot of times, if you don’t poke fun at it, you’re just going to sit there and cry all day.” (Grazian 2015:100–01)
These performances transform individually traumatic events to a set of stories or jokes that allow community ties to override work difficulties. While fun arises from social relations, to treat fun as merely the detritus of interaction is to miss the point that events are renewable, recyclable, and reusable. 10 Narrative validates a desire to recall places and times of fun. As a result, this form of talk provides local history for communal consumption. Put differently, shared activities such as collecting mushrooms, skating, or riding BMX bikes, each producing “fun,” are possible because they depend on the group recalling the contours of fun. Being grounded in cultural convention and societal belief, fun transcends the spontaneity of an interaction order while originating in local social relations. Events gain meaning through a shared idioculture and stylistic preferences that solidify experience (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003; Fine 1979). The significance of fun is not only what is happening at the moment but what is happening at the moment as embedded in the narratives that participants share.
Future Directions: Fun as Boundary
Before concluding, we note a component of fun at which we have only hinted. We have emphasized the “sunny side” of fun, addressing how fun builds group affiliation. But sociology recognizes that cohesion often generates exclusion. While affiliation is important, it ignores the “dark side” of fun. Fun can draw boundaries. The bonding of hedonic pleasure can create divisions and expresses power relations. This recognition must not be excised and is part of a subsequent analysis where we examine the exclusionary potential of hedonic bonding, what we speak of as the underside of fun.
This approach situates fun within intersecting relational fields (Crossley 2010; Desmond 2014), not only in micro-communities. Here we find the sexism implicit in some teasing, perhaps in the threats to Joan’s fish that are arguably not socially desirable. Fun is not equated with virtue. 11 Playful moments establish boundaries while they build communion. Troubling fun is evident in the hostility between skateboarders and kick-bikers, the rituals of group bullying in middle schools (Evans and Eder 1993), and the gaiety at Ku Klux Klan cross burnings, where racial dislike becomes the basis for communal engagement (Blee 1992). Further, when a potential “fun”-maker is not considered part of the group, the same inducements that are accepted by others can be rejected and may magnify exclusion. In such instances, invitations to fun may produce cohesion from their very rejection, illuminating unpassable boundaries.
Ultimately in examining both commitment and exclusion, we must ask who has fun in the “fun moment.” As a mode of power, fun functions in some cases to exert control over others; in other instances, fun reclaims power from the outside, embedding it in the group, but both see fun as a strategy in an informal but contentious micro-politics. We find ludic publics embedded in the status quo and in ludic counterpublics whose fun challenges and subverts external systems of control (Beckman 2014; Shepard and Smithsimon 2011; Sombatpoonsiri 2015). Whatever the specific relationship between fun and hierarchy in any given circumstance, hedonic pleasure is embedded in systems of power both internal to the group and linked to a larger social order.
Fun in Practice
Not only is fun fully sociological as enacted, but equally significantly, fun as a concept broadens our understanding of the position of groups within the interaction order. Fun incorporates present engagement, future expectations, and retrospective alignment. The personal and hedonic choices of individuals emerge in a social context. Collective affect with its building cohesion produces coordination within an interaction order and a belief in the likelihood of pleasurable sociability. This, then, produces commitment to the group.
We begin with how fun fits into structural affordances, opportunities provided by the availability of time and space. Because of when and where it is present and is absent, fun permits us to recognize the constraints and opportunities through which institutions affect action. To create fun, actors make the environment a meaningful space. Following Goffman, fun is not mere interactional flotsam but depends on the emotional and physical environments in which action occurs while simultaneously these environments permit this engagement. Groups readily engage in pleasure under the right circumstances and with sufficient control. Unlike domains of action directed by authorities, fun cannot be forced (Fincham 2016), even if at times it is encouraged or engineered. Forcing fun hinders the flexibility that is taken as one of its defining quality (Kidder 2006). Fun is an outcome of collective action, reflecting collaborative commitment. While fun can stabilize or disrupt the group as an interactive system and a form of affiliation, it opens the content of group activity, alternatively a conservative force or a motor of change. As a form of emotional energy, fun encourages individuals to take risks and question the conventional social order, imagining and enacting new repertoires (Beckman 2014; Parker and Hackett 2012; Wettergren 2009). Fun can support established gender roles or justify a reconsideration of authority. It can be hierarchical or subversive. As a result, fun should not be considered a content-laden activity, but rather it is the label of activity that can be interpreted in multiple ways, building affiliation while leaving open the content of that action.
Finally, the memory of fun is found within a narrative of community. Although demographic markers, ascribed characteristics, and physical boundaries have consequences, groups depend on the memories of participants to justify ongoing involvement. Stories provide a basis of affiliation. Fun in action is powerful, but so is fun in recall. The reality that individuals have acted together and recall that acting means that fun reverberates. Fun is prepared for, performed, and remembered. Each bolsters the continuing activity of a group. This is true both for leisure and work. Withdrawal is the primary threat for the former and alienation for the latter as both must generate allegiance to the group.
Fun is the precipitate of expressive social relations, enticing because it cannot be enforced or fully scripted. Members are relatively free to act spontaneously without fear of repercussions. In practice, individuals may reject what others define as fun, but if they choose to participate, they must willingly accept the situational definition, and if no competing claims impinge, fun is embraced. Fun in interaction demonstrates that sociability provides opportunities for interpretation as it unfolds and as it is remembered. This approach argues that theorizing fun is valuable not just in itself but because such an understanding recognizes how local communities create the affective conditions for their own existence. Fun is one means by which local organization forms, exists, and persists despite the buffeting of individual rivalries, conflicts, and other contingencies. This recognition of how fun provides for micro-stability finds order in the wild.
Footnotes
Appendix
Acknowledgements
We thank Michael Farrell, Priscilla Ferguson, David Grazian, Jukka Gronow, Black Hawk Hancock, Kevin Loughran, John Parker, Robert Stebbins, Iddo Tavory, Logan Williams, Hannah Wohl, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments in the preparation of this article. Versions of this article have been presented at Michigan State University, University of California San Diego, University of Virginia, Sciences Po–Paris, the European Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and the International Sociological Association Forum. Corte is grateful for the financial support by the ERC, grant 263699-CEV.