Slapstick comedy / edited by Tom Paulus, Rob King - New York : Routledge, 2010 - xii, 275 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. - AFI film readers. . - AFI film readers. .

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : restoring slapstick to the historiography of American film / Originality and adaptation. The good thieves : on the origins of situation comedy in the British music hall / D.W. Griffith shapes slapstick / Genre parody and comedic burlesque : Keystone's meta-cinematic satires / Both sides of the camera : Roscoe'Fatty' Arbuckle's evolution at Keystone / Mud pies and tears : little Mary's funny side / Mechanics and modernity. Mack Sennett vs. Henry Ford / 'Uproarious inventions' : the Keystone Film Company, modernity, and the art of the motor / Mechanisms of laughter : the devices of slapstick / Slapstick skyscrapers : an architecture of attractions / California slapstick revisited / Bodies and performance. Dancing of fire and water : Charlot and L'esprit nouveau / Splashes of fun and beauty : Mack Sennett's bathing beauties / Back to the'slap' : slapstick's hyperbolic gesture and the rhetoric of violence / The art of imitation : the originality of Charlie Chaplin and other moving-image myths / Tom Paulus and Rob King -- Bryony Dixon ; Barry Salt ; Simon Joyce ; Joanna E. Rapf ; Anke Brouwers -- Eileen Bowser ; Rob King ; Tom Gunning ; Steven Jacobs ; Charles Wolfe -- Amy Sargeant ; Hilde D'Haeyere ; Muriel Andrin ; Jennifer M. Bean.

9780415801782 (hbk.) RM377.49 9780415801799 (pbk.) 0415801796 (pbk.) 0415801788 (hbk.)


Comedy films--History and criticism.