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Chapter V – Entertainment

A Voice from the 21^st Century

By, Timothy Bowling

Chapter V – Entertainment

- A Human Need -

Along with other higher animals, the need to be amused or pleased by others has been a constant. Being entertained individually or collectively has formed an important yardstick by which a civilization can be measured. How much effort they put in to being entertained can show its importance, and what they find entertaining speaks volumes about the psyche of a people.

When not actively toiling away at survival, human beings will often entertain each other or themselves. These diversions probably started as simple stories told by braggarts extolling eventful hunts, or mystics explaining with myth what people saw and couldn’t explain, or even histories of the group by those blessed with long lives and superior memories. The simple story remains a popular form of entertainment to this day, though regrettably not as common as it once was.

Stories could be acted out, with multiple storytellers depicting various characters in the story. From this the first plays were put on. These plays could become highly stylized with a chorus and props, and are the precursor to modern film. Combined with music, these plays became musicals and opera. From comedy to tragedy, these performances played the full gambit of human emotions. They were used to teach and persuade, and still are.

As writing was developed, stories could be written down for enjoyment at anytime as long as you are literate in the language they were written or translated into. We benefit from the literature of thousands of years of stories written on myth, history and drama. As in the oral tradition, written stories can become highly stylized with prose to create poetry with various styles and templates for meter and rhyming schemes.

Another form of entertainment is sport. Physical competition with various rules which can be played against others or test endurance and speed. These can be watched and vicariously experienced by an audience who take sides in the competition, or bear witness to accomplishments achieved.

The performance of music, along with story telling, its derivatives and sport are the major categories of public entertainment and will be the subject of our study in this chapter. As stated, it will give many clues to the thought processes of our present day and of our ancestors in the past, and a comparison between the two.

- History of Entertainment -

A treatise on all the variations of public entertainment in history would fill a library. Instead, let us look at a few examples and their evolution in the western tradition.

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