stupid fun — a category i would like to defend
the term shows up in reviews of mediocre movies and good board games. it is meant as a downgrade. it is not a downgrade. fun that does not require irony or status is a rare resource and the world keeps mislabeling it as stupid fun. i would like to defend the category against its own apologists.
4:18pm, a wednesday. carla left for the second-floor offsite ten minutes ago wearing the green blazer she only wears when there is catering. that buys me a stretch.
so. stupid fun. those two words, kept in a drawer together, like a spoon and a knife somebody glued at the handle. the phrase comes out of someone’s mouth and the speaker is always doing a small linguistic apology, as if the fun in question needs a permission slip from the seriousness committee on the third floor.
someone always says it. that’s just stupid fun. and they say it the way a doctor says “interesting” when the x-ray comes back wrong.
stupid fun: a phrase used to describe enjoyment that lacks an obvious justification — a film with a weak plot, a board game with no theme, a hobby that produces nothing transferable to a resume. the qualifier “stupid” is a social downgrade applied by people uncomfortable with pleasure that does not improve them. it is a complaint about the fun’s lack of reportable output, not the fun itself.
FUN. DOES. NOT. OWE. YOU. A. RECEIPT.
stupid fun, what people mean when they say it
when someone calls a thing stupid fun, they are usually performing one of three social maneuvers. they want to enjoy something. they suspect that enjoying it makes them look unserious. so they pre-emptively call it stupid before anyone else can. it is a rhetorical handshake. i know this is beneath me, please don’t put it on my permanent record.
the second is worse. it is when somebody else is having the fun, and the speaker, watching from across the kitchen, does the labeling FOR them. oh, that’s just his stupid fun. that one is a knife. that one is the entire reason this post exists.
the third is marketing. a studio knows the script is thin. they put it on the poster. just a piece of stupid fun. you cannot complain. they have already conceded the high ground.
why the adjective is doing more harm than good
here is what gets lost when we say stupid fun instead of just fun: the implication that there is a smarter version, sitting unused in another room, which we are too lazy to attempt. there is not. there is no advanced microwave-popcorn league. there is no vitamin-fortified bowling. there is just bowling. you put on the rented shoes. you throw the ball. that is the activity, top to bottom, no upgraded model behind a paywall.
the adjective also does a small theft. it removes the activity from real things you did with your time and files it under shameful indulgence. once it is in the shameful folder, it cannot be the answer to “what did you do this weekend”. it has to be hedged. the hedge is the cost.
so here is the suspicion, and i would like a court reporter present.
the people pushing the phrase stupid fun are the same people who, if you look at their tuesdays, are not having any. there is a man called the productivity bro, in a brand zip-up, whose calendar is color-coded down to the meal. he labels other people’s chess club stupid fun. he does this because he cannot afford to call it just fun. if it is fun, full stop, his color-coded friday becomes the absurd object in the room. the qualifier is the problem.
i rest my case, mostly. there is a small hangnail of doubt. the doubt is part of the rest. stefan, the man with an actual vineyard who once spent forty minutes tasting his own wine for “notes of forest floor,” would tell you that anything you genuinely enjoy will eventually be downgraded by someone with a worse sunday — and stefan, in this one matter, is right.
examples of stupid fun i logged this month
i have, in the spirit of (some kind of) research, kept a small list. it is on the back of a takeout receipt wedged under the bowl of sparky, the fork that carries a small black mark from the seventh microwave i killed. the list is incomplete. that is part of the point.
- watched a film, in my kitchen, with a 41 on a review aggregator. i enjoyed it. there were car chases. one happened indoors.
- played a game on my phone for forty minutes, the kind where you tap a fruit to make it bigger. nothing to report. i was not improved.
- read three chapters of a paperback i bought from a bin at the airport in 2019, about a detective with a drinking problem. the detective solved nothing.
- walked to the supermarket the long way, two blocks longer, for a song on my one airpod that i wanted to finish.
none will appear on a performance review. none produced a transferable skill. all were, by the metric that matters at 4:18, fun. not stupid fun. fun. deeper case on the verb at stupid — i would like to disagree.
the case for unjustified enjoyment
let me try this from the other side. there is a hot take i would like to enter into evidence: “reading on a kindle is the same as reading.” i mean it. there are people, with degrees, who will tell you the e-ink, the lack of binding glue, the absence of a particular smell, demotes the activity to a lesser form. those people are doing a job for somebody. that job is not yours. the activity is reading. the activity is, by extension, fun.
the broader rule, on the record once: fun is a category that does not require an upstream justification. you do not need a roi spreadsheet. you do not need it to also count as cardio, also count as networking, also count as content. it is allowed to be one thing.
once you accept that, the stupid in stupid fun falls off like the third yoga mat from under my couch, where it has been since 2023 and is, possibly, evolving. the mat is not stupid. it never got rolled out. that is on me. not a category problem.
when stupid fun stops being fun
the term stupid fun sometimes does describe a real failure mode. not the fun itself. it is when the activity has stopped being fun and has continued out of habit, and the speaker reaches for the qualifier as a small concession that, yes, this is no longer good for me, but i am still doing it. that is a small hostage situation, and the hostage is your saturday.
i have lived this. i had a streak in a phone game that, by week eleven, was no longer enjoyable, only un-quittable. when it finally broke, on a friday, i felt — and you can write this on the back of a flier i just threw out — relief.
so, refined: activity minus pressure equals fun. activity plus pressure equals chore. the word stupid is sometimes the pressure asking to be named. listen to it. do not blame the activity.
a colleague just dropped a stack of binders on the desk three over from mine and walked away without saying anything. i do not work with binders. moving on.
verdict, the fun is fine, the qualifier is the problem
the phrase stupid fun is doing a small con on you. it asks you to apologise, in advance, for an enjoyment that owes nobody anything. it asks you to file the activity in the shameful folder before anybody else does. that is a tax. you are paying it on something that should be free.
i am, on the matter, opposed. the fun is fine. the bowling, the paperback detective, the fruit-tap game, the long walk for one song — fine. it is the qualifier that needs to come off.
the test is not does this activity have a serious cousin. the test is did i, in fact, have fun. if yes, the case is closed.
for what stupid was supposed to mean before it became social currency, see stupid meaning — i would like to file a complaint. if you have heard somebody say this is stupid at a thing they were enjoying, you know the move. on the long bet: stupid is forever.
(my friend tom, who owns a volvo, plays a game on his phone too. it has a leaderboard. he is on it. when i asked if he was having fun, he said “i am winning”. i had no follow-up. tom and i are both a kind of fool, in different denominations. mine is cheaper.)
the paperback is on the kitchen table. the takeout receipt with the list is, i suspect, going through the laundry. the green blazer just stepped out of the elevator. that is my signal.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
writing this from a chair that does not adjust in any way, with a fork in a drawer that has a small black mark on it
P.S. the third yoga mat, possibly evolving, has been excluded from the lunch plan. it knows what it did.
