Entertaiment is the thing that keeps us distracted and amused – be it a clown at a birthday party, a Broadway show, or your friends fighting over the last potato chip. It comes from the French entretenir, to hold together; it involves performance. It is an objective activity; it communicates between text and audience; it requires external stimulus to exist; it offers pleasure and takes place in a passive form.
The power of entertaiment is shown by the way it can inspire retellings in other media: a story like Scheherazade from the Persian professional storytelling tradition may be turned into an orchestral piece by Rimsky-Korsakov, a film by Pasolini, and innovative video games by contemporary developers.