Funology 2: Critique, Ideation and Directions

The word academic is sometimes used to signify an occupation, a person who works in a university and studies a particular field, as in—“do you see that stoop-backed fellow over there? He’s an academic, he wouldn’t last long in the wild would he?” But it also means “pointless” or “unnecessary” as in “well it’s all academic in any case because I’ve already hit the send button.” Of course the two senses of the word often collide in figures like The Onion’s Professor at the “Center for Figuring Out Really Obvious Things” who discovers a link between teenage sex and drugs and alcohol (www.TheOnion.com). The idea of studying fun and enjoyment can seem like a project devised in that centre at The Onion. Fun, after all, is something that any five year old understands perfectly well. A group of children confronted with the limb of a tree that’s blown down outside their school need no instruction in how to have fun with it. They run straight over and clamber onto the branches, bouncing up and down, hiding in the leaves, and they play with the oldest and most popular toys in the world-sticks, they drum with them, turn them into swords, or lightsabres or blasters.