Fun

“ It's all very well—but you, and I, and most of us who are healthy in mind and blithe of spirit, love to give rein to our fun and fancy, and to mingle fun with our fancy and fancy with our fun.
The little Fairy-people are the favourite children of Fancy, and were born into this serious world ages and ages ago to help brighten it, and make it more graceful and dainty and prettily romantic than it was. ”

“ In an age of parodies and practical jokes, the more absurd any one could be, the more silly or witty stories he could tell, the more assured was his success in the joyous, frivolous circle, full of fun and laughter. ”

“ "It'll be just lovely for you to play—it'll be so hard. And there's so much more fun when it is hard! ”

“ Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense,—Love and Freindship is all that, but what is this note which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world. ”

“ You hear that boy laughing?—You think he's all fun;
But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all! ”

“ We have so far dwelt on those elements of comedy which seem plainly derivable from simple forms of fun, as seen in child’s play and the laughter of primitive folk. There remains what is in some ways the most interesting feature, the comic presentation of character in action and speech. ”

“ I like the bubbling play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men, when, glass in hand, they shut the grey world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse. ”

“ But all the fun's in how you say a thing." ”

“ The value of comedy as chief ministress to our laughter may be seen by a mere glance at its many resources. It seems able to present to the eye and ear all varieties of the amusing. As a show, it carries on the fun of children’s make-believe play. It can set before us the most grotesque aberrations of dress, carriage and manners. In its human figures, again, it presents to us in forms of its own choosing the full variety of laughable traits of mind and of character. Lastly, it can exhibit in its plots the whole gamut of teasing and practical joke which amuses ordinary men in real life. ”

“ The awful delight which vents itself at once in a laugh and in a shriek and a flight is certainly of a mixed feeling-tone. The laughter is the note of a triumphant spirit, and yet of one in which, in the moment of triumph, the nascent fear leaves its trace.
In these laughing games we have clearly an element of {201} make-believe. A firm persuasion, low down in consciousness, of the harmlessness of the coming bump and of the human bear in the blackness keeps the little girl’s heart steady and turns the adventure into fun. ”

“ But what is the fun? To each of those amiable people it no doubt is involved in the music of the hounds, in the company, in the cross-country ride, in the excitements and hazards and humours of the run. ”

“ It combines spicy dialog, fascinating drills, clever burlesque, entrancing songs and cunning antics. Children impersonate the dolls and do the most amusing stunts. Unequaled as a surprising fun maker. ”

“ When you think of some piece of fun, pause a moment, to make sure that it isn't mischief. There's quite enough innocent fun in the world to keep you busy all day, and every day."
"I 'spect there is; and truly, Grandma, after this, when I want to cut up jinks, I'll wait until I can think it out, whether they're good jinks or bad jinks! ”

“ There was the Fun Club. Fun is like cant, and like humour,—a word which is untranslatable. Fun is to farce what pepper is to salt. To get into a house and break a valuable mirror, slash the family portraits, poison the dog, put the cat in the aviary, is called "having a bit of fun." To give bad news which is untrue, whereby people put on mourning by mistake, is fun. It was fun to cut a square hole in the Holbein at Hampton Court. A member of the Fun Club would have deemed it a grand achievement to have broken the arm of the Venus of Milo. ”

“ That is the greatest fun, because I do not know any better than the children what is going to happen, whether the green pigmy or the blue will win in the battle in the water lily, or whether the little boy with scarlet shoes will be eaten by the giant, or whether he will make friends with him and be asked to stop to tea. We can make the stories do just what we want, be happy if we are happy, or full of scrapes if we are feeling naughty. ”

“ That fun is literally intoxicating, At a wine-party of young men, for example, all things will go on smoothly for hours. Conversation is going forward pleasantly, or speeches heard with decorum. A pleasant exhilaration is to be observed, but nothing more. Then there will arise, by chance, some one, who, we will say, shall sing a capital new comic song, calling on the company to join in the chorus. At the close of that song you shall wonder what has happened to everybody. Why does your right-hand neighbor throw his arm across your shoulder and call you old boy? ”

“ As the people go out, the spirit of fun will have so thoroughly taken possession of them that it will be a wonder if there are no buttons or similar treasures offered as the price of admission, or rather of escape ”

“ Many of the plays of adolescence, on the other hand, certainly represent the identical occupations of our far-removed ancestors, and the play of adult life when fulfilling most perfectly the conditions of play, expresses itself in these elementary forms: hunting, fishing, sailing, swimming, mountain-climbing, and the like.
Why should there be fun in connection with play? We are accustomed to associate pleasure, partly at least, with the discharge of the highest function of which the individual is then capable. I believe that upon this ground the fun of play can be explained. ”

“ Maybe we'll have more fun this summer but this particular fun is over. I want it to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally--that's why I gave this party. ”

“ To one who has cultivated the requisite observation and taste in the fellowship of one or two congenial friends, the following of the tortuous movements of the laughable in all domains of human industry and of human indolence is one of the crowning felicities of life: the fun is always old in its essence, wherefore we respond so quickly ”

“ As many more are singing inharmoniously different songs; the fun is getting fast and furious, perhaps a little too fast and furious, when a readjournment to the ball-room is proposed, and readily acceded to, one hoary-headed old flirt remarking to me as he went by, that he was going to look for his sweetheart. ”

“ Just play your jokes on each other, if you must amuse yourselves. We have our own way of extracting fun out of an outing. Well, come along, boys. And, Andy, thank you for helping get Jerry out of that hole. ”

“ The full experience of the joys of the comic, like other full emotional experiences, implies that the vents are clear, that the nervous swirl started at the centres at the moment when we greet the coming of fun with gladness can find its customary outflow along the familiar channels. Not only so, but as suggested above, this large expansion of the area of nervous commotion throughout the bodily system gives added life and a more distinctive character to the enjoyment of fun. ”

“ In this department of contemplative amusement we see once more the limitations introduced by differences of temperament and mental attitude, as well as of experience and knowledge. Nowhere, perhaps, is the habitual inclination of the balance between seriousness and love of fun in a man more clearly indicated than in his readiness to tolerate and enjoy word-play and the entertaining side of nonsense generally. One to whom words and serious points of view are sacred things, will barely suffer any form of this recreation. ”

“ The fact, noted above, {185} that children only laugh in response to tickling when they are in a pleasurable state of mind seems to confirm the hypothesis that the love of fun, which is at the bottom of tickling and makes it perhaps the earliest clear instance of mirthful play with its element of make-believe, first emerged gradually out of a more general feeling of gladness. ”

“ This is just as foolish as it sounds, but it makes a great deal of fun for all. Choose some person for “It.” He must leave the room, and when he comes in again, must do his best to make the others laugh. They, on their part, try their best not to, for the first who laughs becomes “It.” ”

“ The masses will laugh when the comedian on the stage hits his friend with a club; [Pg 202] that sort of fun-making satisfies adults who have children's brains and such brain-constructed people will also laugh at jokes which ride on ridicule. ”

“ Fun is a good thing, but only when it spoils nothing better. ”

“ Ella Wheeler Wilcox voiced a great truth when she wrote “Laugh, and the world laughs with you.” Men are so fond of laughing that they will endure nine wormy chestnuts, badly served, if the tenth effort produces the genuine thing. Much of the best fun comes by accident ”

“ There are regions of civilisation where, so far as literary expression gives us the key, laughter seems to remain at, or at most only a little above, the level of the child’s simple merriment. This appears to be true of certain portions of the East, where a considerable love of fun coexists with a predominant gravity of mind without interpenetration, almost without contact.268 Among certain races of Southern Europe, too, which have produced a rich literature of amusement, the blending of the serious and the playful, which is of the essence of humour seems to be but very imperfectly reached. ”

“ In their work, then, as in their play, men and women are more and more coming to share with each other as comrades, and really the fun of life seems in no wise diminished as a consequence. ”

“ Whatever of humorous description may be found in the succeeding chapters, is that which grows legitimately out of certain features of the theme; for there has been no overstrained effort to make fun where none naturally existed. ”

“ "perhaps she would say I was old, and I just want always to be a little boy and to have fun." ”

“ A child that has come to regard a figure in a picture book or an odd sound made by the nurse as funny will laugh whenever this recurs or is spoken of, provided that the mood of the moment is favourable. This is a noteworthy illustration of the way in which the action of the novel and unexpected—which, as we all allow, has a large rôle in the excitation of laughter—may be replaced by that of an antagonistic force, namely, habit, which itself appears to secure the hilarious response. ”

“ The same is true of a good deal of the laughter of play: it is only when play represents something funny, or when the play-illusion is interrupted by a moment’s critical glance at the poverty of the doll or other plaything, that it gives rise to a proper enjoyment of the laughable; and a like remark holds good of the laughter which springs out of a relief of tension and a sudden transition from grave to gay. In the laughter of educated men and women we see an intellectual element, the perception of a laughable quality in an object, and the justification of the action by a reference to this. ”

“ Further, it seems desirable to study the utterances of the spirit of fun through the whole gamut of its expression. The gros rire, the cacophonous guffaw, must not be regarded as too vulgar to be admitted here. The attempts in the past to build up a theory of the ludicrous have commonly failed through a fastidious and highly artificial restriction of the laughable attribute to the field of wit and refined humour which the cultivated man is in the habit of enjoying. ”

“ Proctor.—"The stage is a source of amusement—I may say, of great amusement. It drives away the vapours, raises our spirits, and gives an agreeable variety to life. I willingly overlook what is objectionable in expression and action, for the sake of the high gratification which a good comedy yields; and so do others. To be candid, we think less about our virtue than our enjoyment. We must have some sort of excitement to help us to endure the cross purposes and the ups and downs of life." ”

“ Wherein lies this magic of laughter? For magic it is—a something that manufactures a state of felicity out of any condition. We've got to admit its charm; automatically and inevitably a laugh cheers us up. If we are bored—nothing to do—just laugh—that's something to do, for laughter is synonymous with action, and action dispels gloom, care, trouble, worry and all else of the same ilk. ”

“ Laugh and Play.
Laugh and play all the day: Don't you think with me When I say that's the way If you'd happy be?
Maid and lad, if we had Never time for song, Always sad, never glad, Days would seem so long!
Tear and sigh make the sky Dark and sad and grey; Never cry—only try Just to laugh and play.
Faces bright make sunlight All the merry day; Frowns they fright out of sight—
So we'll laugh and play. C.B.
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A HAPPY DAY.
[4]
Laugh and Play
"Come and have a game at soldiers, Dulcie." ”

“ The natural alliance of laughter with the play-mood has already been touched on.83 We may now go a step farther and say that these spurts of joyous consciousness which, in simple natures untrammelled by thought of appearances, express themselves in laughter are of the essence of Play. To be glad with the gaiety of laughter, to throw off the stiff and wearing attitude of seriousness and to abandon oneself to mirth and jollity is, in truth, to begin to play. ”

“ Why do the enthusiasts rage and profess that it ought to be endowed? Well, upon reflection, one sees that there are two bodies of playgoers, both, no doubt, in search of pleasure: and, speaking very broadly, the one is the little group whose curiosity concerning life is almost entirely intellectual, and the other is the vast body of sensation-hunters, to whom the latest showy play, the newest musical comedy, the divorce case of the moment, the freak in vogue, are the means of real excitement—an excitement which they want to obtain with the minimum expenditure of time, trouble or thought. ”