The clown at your child’s birthday party, a Broadway show or stadium rock concert, your friends fighting over the last potato chip–these are all examples of Entertainment. From the Old French entretenir (“hold together”), it originally meant hospitality–keeping guests happy. Later, it came to mean any amusement or distraction. Today, we think of theatrical entertainment as shows, visual entertainment as things to look at, and audio entertainment as music.
According to Bates and Ferri (2010), Entertainment is activity understood objectively, entails communication between text and audience from an external stimulus, offers pleasure, requires an audience, and is a passive form of activity.