The Purpose of Entertainment

I consider myself an artist. An entertainer of sorts. Or at least, that's what I hope to be someday. So naturally, whether it's music, film, books, or any other form of entertainment, I have very definite feelings about whether or not I think something is "good" - which says something, because I'm typically not that opinionated of a person. I guess I just can help it with this.

Barney Fife and his famous bullet.

One of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently is the purpose of entertainment. I saw a picture of Don Knotts' grave the other day. The inscription reads, "He saw the poignancy in people's pride and pain and turned it into something hilarious and endearing."

To many people, Don Knotts is Barney Fife. But if that quote is accurate, which I imagine it is, than Knotts was much more than a bumbling character in a T.V. show. He was a genius.

Rothko with one his paintings.

You see, the purpose of art is extremely important. Knotts saw a world of pain and sought to make it a little more beautiful - mission accomplished. Latvian-American painter Mark Rothko, on the other hand, looked at the same world and bitterly painted artwork for the Four Seasons restaurant of which he said, "I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every [expletive] who ever eats in that room." Charles Dickens tried to change Victorian England, skewering corrupt politicians, the elite upper class, hypocrites, and pretty much everybody else who crossed him until he made his point and saw change accomplished.

Something all three of those men had in common, no matter what their perspective or purpose, was that they each dealt with the world as they saw it. That used to be the purpose of art. But somewhere along the way, we lost that. Entertainment is no longer about looking at the world around us and figuring out how to understand it.

Now, it seems entertainment is either about forgetting there's a reality around us (pick a sitcom), or wallowing in our misery (pick a modern dystopian novel).

Have we completely lost our will to face reality? Am I totally off base here? I don't know. But these are the things I think about as I analyze what I see. One thing I do know: entertainment shouldn't just let us escape from the world for a little bit; it should send us back to that world better people than it found us.