Slapstick Comedy

Slapstick comedy and its cast of film stars'”Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Cops, Fatty Arbuckle, and Buster Keaton among them'”has long been viewed as central to the early formal development of narrative cinema generally, and of American cinema in particular. This new volume in the AFI Film Readers series presents 14 essays exploring the enduring debates and questions surrounding slapstick's role in the origins of cinema, as well as its place in movies today. A star-studded group of international film scholars discuss a broad range of topics including the contested theatrical or cinematic origins of slapstick, the links between comic spectacle and modernity, slapstick in a global context, and cognitive frameworks for understanding the spectatorship of the bodies at the heart of slapstick performance onscreen.

illustrations	p. ix
acknowledgments	p. xi
introduction: restoring slapstick to the historiography of american film	p. 1
originality and adaptation	p. 19
the good thieves: on the origins of situation comedy in the british music hall	p. 21
d. w. griffith shapes slapstick	p. 37
genre parody and comedic burlesque: keystone's meta-cinematic satires	p. 49
both sides of the camera: roscoe "fatty" arbuckle's evolution at keystone	p. 67
mud pies and tears: little mary's funny side	p. 89
mechanics and modernity	p. 105
mack sennett vs. henry ford	p. 107
"uproarious inventions": the keystone film company, modernity, and the art of the motor	p. 114
mechanisms of laughter: the devices of slapstick	p. 137
slapstick skyscrapers: an architecture of attractions	p. 152
California slapstick revisited	p. 169
bodies and performance	p. 191
dancing on fire and water: chariot and l'esprit nouveau	p. 193
splashes of fun and beauty: mack sennett's bathing beauties	p. 207
back to the "slap": slapstick's hyperbolic gesture and the rhetoric of violence	p. 226
the art of imitation: the originality of charlie chaplin and other moving-image myths	p. 236
contributors	p. 262
index	p. 265
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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