Article
From the Old French entretenement, meaning “to hold together,” entertainment began as a word associated with hospitality, and eventually came to mean “amusement.” Today, we think of it as a form of distraction. The clown at your kid’s birthday party, a Broadway show, a stadium rock concert—all of these are forms of entertainment, and they all have something in common: they keep us entertained.
Oliver and Barstsch (2010) define entertainment as an activity that is understood objectively, involves communication between text and audience from an external stimulus, offers pleasure, requires an audience to exist, and happens in a passive form.