A Companion to Film Comedy

• A wide-ranging collection of 24 essays exploring film comedy from the silent era to the present
• International in scope, the collection embraces not just American cinema, including Native American and African American, but also comic films from Europe, the Middle East, and Korea
• Essays explore sub-genres, performers, and cultural perspectives such as gender, politics, and history in addition to individual works
• Engages with different strands of comedy including slapstick, romantic, satirical and ironic
• Features original entries from a diverse group of multidisciplinary international contributors

Joanna E. Rapf is Professor of English and Film & Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma, USA. She writes regularly about film comedy, with recent essays on Woody Allen, Jerry Lewis, Roscoe Arbuckle, Harry Langdon, and Marie Dressler, and has edited books on a range of subjects including Sidney Lumet, On the Waterfront, and Buster Keaton.

Comic Introduction: “Make ’em Laugh, make ’em Laugh!” 1

Part I Comedy Before Sound, and the Slapstick Tradition

1 The Mark of the Ridiculous and Silent Celluloid: Some Trends in American and European Film Comedy from 1894 to 1929 15
Frank Scheide

2 Pie Queens and Virtuous Vamps: The FunnyWomen of the Silent Screen 39
Kristen Anderson Wagner

3 “Sound Came Along and OutWent the Pies”: The American Slapstick Short and the Coming of Sound 61
Rob King

Part II Comic Performers in the Sound Era

4 Mutinies Wednesdays and Saturdays: Carnivalesque Comedy and the Marx Brothers 87
Frank Krutnik

5 Jacques Tati and Comedic Performance 111
Kevin W. Sweeney

6 Woody Allen: Charlie Chaplin of New Hollywood 130
David R. Shumway

7 Mel Brooks, Vulgar Modernism, and Comic Remediation 151
Henry Jenkins

Part III New Perspectives on Romantic Comedy and Masculinity

8 Humor and Erotic Utopia: The Intimate Scenarios of Romantic Comedy 175
Celestino Deleyto

9 Taking Romantic Comedy Seriously in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Before Sunset (2004) 196
Leger Grindon

10 The View from the Man Cave: Comedy in the Contemporary “Homme-com” Cycle 217
Tamar Jeffers McDonald

11 The Reproduction of Mothering: Masculinity, Adoption, and Identity in Flirting with Disaster 236
Lucy Fischer

Part IV Topical Comedy, Irony, and Humour Noir

12 It’s Good to be the King: Hollywood’s Mythical Monarchies, Troubled Republics, and Crazy Kingdoms 251
Charles Morrow

13 No Escaping the Depression: Utopian Comedy and the Aesthetics of Escapism in Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take it with You (1938) 273
William Paul

14 The Totalitarian Comedy of Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be 293
Maria DiBattista

15 Dark Comedy from Dr. Strangelove to the Dude 315
Mark Eaton

Part V Comic Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity

16 Black Film Comedy as Vital Edge: A Reassessment of the Genre 343
Catherine A. John

17 Winking Like a One-Eyed Ford: American Indian Film Comedies on the Hilarity of Poverty 365
Joshua B. Nelson

18 Ethnic Humor in American Film: The Greek Americans 387
Dan Georgakas

Part VI International Comedy

19 Alexander Mackendrick: Dreams, Nightmares, and Myths in Ealing Comedy 409
Claire Mortimer

20 Tragicomic Transformations: Gender, Humor, and the Plastic Body in Two Korean Comedies 432
Jane Park

21 Comedy “Italian Style” and I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958) 454
Roberta Di Carmine

22 “Laughter that Encounters a Void?”: Humor, Loss, and the Possibility for Politics in Recent Palestinian Cinema 474
Najat Rahman

Part VII Comic Animation

23 Laughter is Ten Times More Powerful than a Scream: The Case of Animated Comedy 497
Paul Wells

24 Theatrical Cartoon Comedy: From Animated Portmanteau to the Risus Purus 521
Suzanne Buchan

Index 545

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