Is “Light Entertainment” Bad For You?

Certainly most of us probably consume more “light entertainment” than we should, just as we probably eat more junk food than we should. But I still think there’s a place for it.

If I eat nothing but asparagus and broccoli for the rest of my life, I may be incredibly healthy and live into my 100’s, but what good is it if I’m miserable because I really hate asparagus? Being allowed to consume a greasy Philly cheesesteak now and then would make the other days of eating what I should much more bearable.

High art and literary work is mostly deep and often full of angst and rage, making you think, discuss, argue, ruminate…in other words, work. God prescribes six days of work followed by a day of rest each week. Sometimes you get enough angst and rage in your everyday life and you just want to laugh. Or see what happens when something blows up. I think light entertainment fits into the category of “rest”.

Still not sure what the definition of “light” entertainment is. My first reaction is to say it speaks of entertainment that does little else other than to entertain. Doesn’t try to make a point, allegorize anything, speak to social, political, or religious issues, and any theme or point it ends up making or promoting is purely incidental and often accidental. The whole point is merely to entertain.

And that is probably where some of the more “heavier” stuff, the more literary, can fail. Sort of following your points about trying too hard to have a theme, much of it so focuses on that, that it fails to do the one thing entertainment is supposed to do: entertain.

If our entertainment doesn’t entertain, then it is pointless no matter how much meaning is stuffed into it. It might as well be non-fiction, self-help book then, and read for that purpose, not to relax and enjoy something.

But what is entertainment is the subjective part of this. I listened to a speaker one time whose primary job was an accountant. He said he liked numbers, and he could read the phone book for entertainment. So what some find entertaining is the “heavy” stuff. They enjoy a puzzle, to think about things, and focus on deep thoughts helps them to relax. For other people, just a good story that keeps their interest, but says little about the realities of life, is how they relax.

To me it almost sounds like we are mixing points to a degree. By “light” entertainment and “heavy,” it almost sounds like you are making the point of whether “To much relaxing can be bad for us.” Or, “Why don’t people find my kind of entertainment relaxing?”

I’m of the type that if I want to be entertained, I don’t want to have to think about things a lot. I want to just sit back and enjoy without having to try and pull meanings out of the story, or look up some obscure word the author decided to plug into the book so as not to be “common.” (As a matter of fact, I would rarely look up such words, if it isn’t clear from the context, I shrug and move on…I’m not reading entertainment to learn anything, generally, unless it sort of happens by default).

I guess because at the jobs I’ve tended to have in the past required a lot of mental focus, learning lots of information, etc. that anything associated with learning equals work, not relaxing. But to someone who works at a job, like a daycare taking care of kids all day, for instance, may find more “intellectual” stories very entertaining and a good way to relax.

Naturally we can’t relax all the time, and some people who are lazy do just that. But if we want to accomplish anything in life, we can’t be on retreats 24/7. But that doesn’t negate the need to have a retreat from the world we live in day in and day out.

So to me it isn’t so much whether a person is smart or not that moves them toward light or heavy reading. It is what they find relaxing and entertaining. And to me it becomes “elitist” when whichever category of entertainment you find relaxing and entertaining, you act or treat others with disdain as if they are wrong for finding the other type of entertainment as entertaining when you do not. That goes for those who like literary, as well as those who like space opera or sword and sorcery.

It’s not like fiction is the only place one learns anything, if they want to. It is why any “messages,” if the story is done right, are natural and organic to the story, and not overt. And that’s why the more overt “and the meaning of this is…” doesn’t sit well with readers of fiction. If they wanted that, they’d be reading non-fiction. When I read fiction, I primarily want an entertaining story, not to learn anything. Not that learning something from such a story is a bad thing, mind you. I can appreciate it when it is there, and I write such stuff. But that shouldn’t be the primary purpose of fiction. The primary purpose is to entertain, and if it fails at that primary task, none of the rest matters.

So the more central question to me is what is entertainment to any one person? And why should I, if I don’t find literary writings to be entertaining, be expected to read it much if at all? I don’t see the problem here, really.

My problem has been that I tend to be too serious, and forget to have fun.

case in point about the differences between people… Louis L’Amour is only known to me as the author of the one book I had to read for history class in high school that I could not stand… (I was the odd girl who actually liked most of our assigned readings – there’s few books that I’ve ever been assigned that I completely hated- that Louis L’Amour book is the only one I hated enough to actually remember) So it was assigned class reading for me, but pleasure/light/fluff reading for you!