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Is tribal dancing as much entertainment as reading a Harry Potter book? Do you make a distinction between active (physical such as dance or sport, mental such as game playing) and passive (television, to some extent internet) entertainment?
I think the crux of most entertainment is that it transports people beyond their immediate situation. I wonder if anybody has an antropological/social evolutionary perspective on this - what was the role of entertainment for our earliest ancestors, vs. the role it has assumed now? I agree with ARTelevision that (to paraphrase - hope I get the essence of your statement right) entertainment keeps "the masses" from rebelling by giving them an outlet for (or perhaps masking) the dissatisfaction with their lives necessarily created by living in a repressive and power-unbalanced hegemony. If Marx had ever seen a television he would have thought that it, not religion, was the opiate of the masses.
I think entertainment can either be liberating and transcendent, or it can be repressive and controlling, depending on the type of entertainment and the disposition of the persons engaging in it.
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"If ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
- Anatole France
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