Types of Fun
Type I Fun
An activity that is enjoyable, relaxing, and/or pleasurable both while it is happening and when remembered fondly later, such as sunbathing on the beach or eating a delicious meal.
Type II Fun
An activity that is unpleasant, difficult, or even dangerous while it is happening, but which may appear meaningful or rewarding in hindsight, such as giving birth or working for Gawker in the mid-2000s.
Type III Fun
An activity that is neither fun while it is happening nor in recollection, often involving tremendous suffering and great risk.
Type IV Fun
An activity that is neither fun while it is happening nor in recollection, often involving tremendous suffering and great risk, but might later bring joy to many if a documentary is made on the subject; if, for example, you died in a highly preventable accident while cave diving, and a popular streaming service later commissioned a documentary on the mad folly of cave divers, where various solemn talking heads ask unanswerable, weeping questions of you like, “But why didn’t she turn back?” as viewers sit on something comfortable at home and congratulate themselves for having the good sense not to want to go cave diving.
Type V Fun
An activity that was fun in the moment, like a particularly creative moment of cruelty leveraged against a peer during adolescence, but painful in remembrance.
Type VI Fun
Something that was neither pleasurable in the moment, nor in the aftermath, but that someone else might hear about with a horrible sort of perverse pleasure. If, for example, they heard about a gruesome attack you suffered on a true crime podcast and felt simultaneous compassion for your terrible suffering as well as overwhelming relief that it did not happen to them.
Type VII Fun
Something that was not pleasurable to you in the moment, but was pleasurable to someone else after the fact, and that a third party took additional pleasure in denouncing the second party for experiencing.
If, for example, your gruesome attack were featured on a true crime podcast, and then someone else later decried the existence of the true crime podcast, saying everyone who produced such podcasts was tastelessly profiting off of the suffering of others, and derived pleasure from said denouncing the tasteless pleasures of others.
Type VIII Fun
Something that was darkly pleasurable to you in the moment and profoundly shameful in the aftermath, for example betraying a close friend or circumventing rationing laws, but that years later impelled you to write a complex and celebrated memoir about shame, and thereby bringing you closer in spirit to the vast majority of humanity.
Type IX Fun
An activity that was unpleasant both at the time and afterwards, such as surviving World War I due to a clerical error, but that led to your being ranked as one of the great martial poets.
Type X Fun
An activity that was unpleasant both at the time and afterwards, such as surviving World War I due to a clerical error, but that led to your being ranked as one of the great martial poets, only for your reputation to be completely overshadowed by the onset of World War II.
Type XI Fun
Dying in a highly ironic and immediately reported-upon fashion, for example in a national park or on Mount Everest while Jon Krakauer is there, such that countless others feel edified by your avoidable demise.
Type XII Fun
Something that is not fun in the moment but is noble and results in a sort of quasi-immortality, like dying in a plane crash and begging your fellow passengers to eat your body if it would help them survive long enough to see rescue.
Type XIII Fun
Something that is fun in the moment, painful and embarrassing for others, but impossible to remember, like becoming addicted to memory-loss drugs or developing delusions which please and reassure you but alienate those around you.
Type XIV Fun
Something enjoyable for you in the moment but impossible to quantify after the fact, such as imposing your will upon others in the form of a ranked scale of types of fun it is possible to have.
Type XV Fun
Something pleasurable at the time but with a relatively short half-life, such that the pleasure must be endlessly renewed by constant repetition, like asking your friends to take the Enneagram.
Type XVI Fun
Something which is dangerous and shameful in the moment, painful to recall in the aftermath, and which leads to an unpleasant late-in-life religious conversion which puts off nearly everyone, like for example being Lord Alfred Douglas.
[Image via]
This has given my family members and me a huge helping of Type I fun because we have a grandpa who’s always telling us that there are 3 kinds of fun… and now we are all so excited to share the layered nuances of IV–XV the next time we get that chance.
So beautiful, so timely!
Evocative of Arabic verb forms,* enabling type I fun: revisiting splendid Victorian grammar books and type XIV fun: expounding on Arabic grammar in a comments section without having been asked.
Verb forms II and V of the root letters s-l-a mean 'to have fun, to enjoy oneself' but form I is 'to banish from memory; to think no more on'. The s-l-a root thus spawns both "entertainment" and "oblivion". I highly commend Hans Wehr's noble and dramatic Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic to amateur philologists, no Arabic needed.
Type XVI fun (in English) is the only thing known to have induced my staid, placid and serene grandmother to wrinkle her nose. At least, I saw this happen only once, and at mention of "Bosie".
*the verb forms are usually reckoned fifteen in number, but the learner may pass over the last four [Wright's Arabic Grammar]