fun of the not actually funny kind

After I had spoken with Yuval Saar, of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz for about an hour, we finally discovered that for Yuval, "fun" implied "funny." This made many of my comments about discovering the fun of work, the fun of art, the fun of creating, of marriage, of life - significantly less than relevant. So, in the 5 minutes we had left, I immersed myself in furious contemplation, searching for an instant metaphor which might encapsulate the concept for him.

It's like being on a roller coaster, I explained. You might laugh at first, but there are times in which your experience closely approximates sheer terror. You're not laughing. In fact, you're often screaming in fear. But if you hadn't been so scared, it wouldn't have been fun, at least not fun of the roller-coaster-riding kind.

So, what I learned from Yuval is that though a lot of my focus has been on fun of the less-than-funny kind, it's easy for me to forget that this is not what most people think of when they think of fun. I suppose that unfunny fun is yet another flavor of fun. But for me, the key is neither the not-funny fun nor the funny fun, but the understanding that, at some level, both are fun. And therein lies the playful path, etc.

You can try to read his article in Hebrew. Or, if you are desperate enough, you can try to wade through Google's English translation. Don't try to understand it. Better to just laugh along.



from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith