American Fun

October 14, 2013
Beckman, an English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, traces the “three tributaries of American fun—the commercial, playful, and radically political,” from Thomas Morton’s anarchic Merry Mount colony in the 1620s to its modern counterpart, Burning Man. Accounts of politically motivated fun like the Boston Tea Party and the Yippies’ attempt to levitate the Pentagon are presented along with tales of pranksters like Mark Twain and P.T. Barnum, as well as accounts of playful hoaxes, such as the “Electrical Banana,” in which a 1960s underground newspaper convinced mainstream media that smoking dried banana peels produces “a cannabic effect.” Beckman laments the commercialized fun of organized sports as well as the neutering of counterculture spirit by Madison Avenue advertising or pop culture’s “test-tube teens.” He also traces African-American culture from Pinkster festivals and Brother Rabbit folktales—later hijacked by white journalist Joel Chandler Harris—to the Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of hip-hop in the 1970s South Bronx. Other notable characters include the “b’hoys and g’hals,” Irish street gangsters with an affinity for Shakespeare; the Merry Pranksters and their LSD-infused parties with the Hell’s Angels; and Jazz Age flappers like Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Beckman captures the rambunctiousness, subversiveness, and inventiveness of the American spirit, as well as its ugliness, violence, and bigotry. He also raises interesting questions about complacency and “the death of fun.”

January 15, 2014
A lively, entertaining history of American fun. Notwithstanding its obvious subjectivity, the definition of "fun" has changed significantly since early American colonization. Yet Beckman (English/U.S. Naval Academy; The Winter Zoo, 2002) is undeterred by the challenge of drawing out what he believes to be a uniquely American idea of fun as an act of rebellion. Using a cast of familiar characters--Samuel Adams, Ken Kesey, Mark Twain--as well as lesser-known Americans--Thomas Morton, King Charles and Buddy Bolden, to name a few--Beckman argues that it is quintessentially American to participate in pranks and tricks. (The Boston Tea Party is a prime example.) For Beckman, it is this "boldness in the face of adversity and restraint" that characterized early American fun. It was social, political and, above all, daring, and it represented an appeal to the democratic principles that would come to define the still-maturing republic. But, as "fun" became more popular, Americans were quick to exploit the economics of leisure. Fun was now a matter of entertainment--"Barnumization," as Beckman puts it--a big business that no longer relied on prankster risk. "These pleasures were fleeting and superficial--by design," he writes. "Nothing was at stake, except the ticket price." These two strands of fun continued to develop in parallel, defining their respective ages, from Jazz Age exuberance and the subversive counterculture of the 1960s to 1980s hypercommercialization and today's digital zombie-ism. While there is no shortage of irreverent and diverse examples that key in on various stages of fun's development in America, Beckman is often so diffuse in his breadth that his argument seems to be lost. His conclusions, moreover, slide dangerously close to exceptionalist rhetoric. Are Americans the only people that partake in such revelry? Nevertheless, he does identify uniquely American experiences that define a collective understanding of fun as a protest against the established order, even if one is a part of that order. With a novelist's care for detail and storytelling, Beckman offers a remarkably expansive, if flawed, cultural history.

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December 1, 2013
Fun, argues Beckman, is the secret ingredient in American culture. When the Sons of Liberty dumped tea into Boston Harbor in 1773, their message to the British was earnest, but their true power came from the rude and rowdy joy with which they carried out their actions, for this was what ultimately bound them together. Having funraucous, participatory, antiauthoritarian frivolitywas the impetus behind the ring shout dances of African Americans in the antebellum South, the practical jokes of California gold-rushers, the joyous revolt of the wets during Prohibition, and the hippies and yippies of the sixties. And although it wasn't always intended to be political, Beckman suggests that having fun has been key to Americans' ability to manage deep conflicts and see past their differences. The big American joke, argues Beckman, is that funespecially fun in the midst of struggleis the personal and communal experience of freedom, and as such has defined America, despite the efforts of various uptight constituencies and the constant threat of P. T. Barnumstyle commercialization. This rollicking and patriotic paean to American rough play deserves a serious look.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2013

Author of the debut novel The Winter Zoo, a New York Times Notable Book, Beckman shows that from Colonial revels to the Roaring Twenties to the Yippie invasion of the stock market Americans have been less puritanical than prankish.

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