Are You Havin’ Any Fun?
Tonight I turned on that wonderful movie Quartet starring Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Tom Courtenay, and Pauline Collins about four aging opera singers who find themselves in the same old age home for musicians in the outskirts of London. They are struggling with their old relationships and their fading talents as singers. They struggle to agree to sing Rigoletto, an opera written by the most famous operatic composer of all time, Giuseppe Verdi, based on the book by Victor Hugo. The story revolves around a successor to Hugo’s obsession with Quasimodo since Rigoletto is also a hunchback. He is the court jester or basically a clown and instead of protecting his daughter as he intends to do, he puts her in the spotlight and in the path of peril. The opera was initially met with opprobrium, but was eventually elevated to star status as part of the trilogy with Il Trovatore and La Traviata with the great tenor part of La Donna e Mobile, sung by Pavarotti and many other great tenors. As with Hugo’s and Verdi’s stories, the real story within the story has nothing to do with troubadours, fallen women or even clowns for that matter. It is all about love and the limitless impact it has on all humans.
In the movie Quartet, the song that keeps reverberating in the old age home that they regally occupy is Are You Havin’ Any Fun? which is from an obscure 1939 Broadway show, but which became famous because it is regularly sung by Tony Bennett. It is about the importance of ignoring all the things we have been rationally trained by life to consider as important and instead focusing on the base human need to enjoy life.
Are you havin’ any fun?
What y’gettin’ out o’ livin’?
What good is what you’ve got
If you’re not havin’ any fun?
The reason this is such a poignant song to sing in an old age home is because it is too easy to focus on one’s maladies and problems, the things that get in the way of the essence of life, which the song says is havin’ fun.
You better have some fun
You ain’t gonna live forever
Before you’re old and gray, feel okay
Have your little fun, son!
Have your little fun!
There is a part of me that wants to always be serious and look at the important things in life in a serious manner. Social injustice, crimes against humanity, uncaring avoidance of the basic human needs of a vast swath of the world’s people. These are the ills of the world that keep one awake at night and force us to work for change and the betterment of the world. But for what purpose? If we say righteousness we are being a bit trite and are perhaps confused about the meaning of life. Life for the sake of life is a difficult concept to feel that good about. If you change that to life for the sake of love, it feels a bit better. But if you go all the way and say life for the sake of having fun it sounds frivolous and meaningless. But I would argue that the beauty of this song is that given the finality of life in this world, there may not be anything more important than having fun.
Why do you work and slave and save?
Life is full of ifs and buts
Are you havin’ any fun?
I am prepared to admit that no matter how serious life gets in the workplace or at home, I like to add humor to my thinking and my commentary. I cannot go through the day without expressing some humor. It is hard to draw inside the lines sometimes and I therefore occasionally go too far with my humor and it cost me an apology at the very least. The good news is that I consider apologies to be one the great bargains in life. Their only price is the price of pride, which I have managed (in my case, bu necessity) to devalue to the point where the price of it is insignificant. Therefore the cost of an apology is negligible and I use humor without all that much regard to its potential infringement on someone else’s ego. I try not to be negative in my humor because that crosses over into cruelty and the playing on other people’s fragility and emotions. But if I am able to stay upbeat and positive in my humor, I believe I cannot be chastised or chastened enough to make me not have the fun I like to have.
Fun is such an arbitrary and amorphous thing. I have never tended to define fun the way many others do. I have never really enjoyed partying the way others do. I have never been as big a fan of spectator sports the way others are. The elegance and pleasure of fine dining has never meant to me what it does to others. To me fun comes in several forms. First and foremost it comes to me in accomplishment. The fun, as they say, is in the doing and achieving. As for travel, the fun is clearly in the journey rather than the destination. But there is also fun in the expression of joy. That is perhaps why I am, by nature, a storyteller and joke teller. I like seeing people react to the turn of phrase of the thoughts of irony. Anything that distracts one from the woes of life is a good thing. It is probably why I have so much trouble writing anything but happy endings and humorous anecdotes. I like to lighten the burdens of life not add to them. None of us is perfect nor can we fully anticipate how one man’s pleasure is another man’s burden, but in general, I like to make sure everyone I encounter is havin’ a little bit of fun.