Machine Age Comedy

In this work, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature.

A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam provides a fresh, up-to-date exploration of the director’s films and artistic practices, ranging from his first film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) to his recently released and latest film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). This volume presents Gilliam as a director whose films weave together an avant-garde cinematic style, imaginative exaggeration, and social critique. Consequently, while his films can seem artistically chaotic and thus have the effect of frustrating and upsetting the viewer, the essays in this volume show that this is part of a very disciplined creative plan to achieve the defamiliarization of various accepted notions of human and social life.

This unique anthology presents a selection of over seventy of the most important historical essays on comedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span it traces the development of comic theory, highlighting the relationships between comedy, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, and other arts and genres. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to the twenty-first century, in which special attention has been paid to writings since the start of the twentieth century. Reader in Comedy is arranged in five sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts from the period: * Antiquity and the Middle Ages * The Renaissance * Restoration to Romanticism * The Industrial Age * The Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries Among the many authors included are: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Donatus, Dante Alighieri, Erasmus, Trissino, Sir Thomas Elyot, Thomas Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Battista Guarini, Molière, William Congreve, John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean Paul Richter, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Søren Kierkegaard, Charles Baudelaire, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Henri Bergson, Constance Rourke, Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georges Bataille, Simon Critchley and Michael North. As the selection demonstrates, from Plato and Aristotle to Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, comedy has attracted the attention of serious thinkers. Bringing together diverse theories of comedy from across the ages, the Reader reveals that, far from being peripheral, comedy speaks to the most pragmatic aspects of human life.

The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction explores the importance of comedy in contemporary literature and culture. In an era largely defined by a mood of crisis, bleakness, cruelty, melancholia, environmental catastrophe and collapse, Huw Marsh argues that contemporary fiction is as likely to treat these subjects comically as it is to treat them gravely, and that the recognition and proper analysis of this humour opens up new ways to think about literature. Structured around readings of authors including Martin Amis, Nicola Barker, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Howard Jacobson, Magnus Mills and Zadie Smith, this book suggests not only that much of the most interesting contemporary writing is funny and that there is a comic tendency in contemporary fiction, but also that this humour, this comic licence, allows writers of contemporary fiction to do peculiar and interesting things – things that are funny in the sense of odd or strange and that may in turn inspire a funny turn in readers. Marsh offers a series of original critical and theoretical frameworks for discussing questions of literary genre, style, affect and politics, demonstrating that comedy is an often neglected mode that plays a generative role in much of the most interesting contemporary writing, creating sites of rich political, stylistic, cognitive and ethical contestation whose analysis offers a new perspective on the present.

This book explores how humorous depictions of the Great War helped to familiarise, domesticate and tame the conflict. In contrast to the well-known First World War literature that focuses on extraordinary emotional disruption and the extremes of war, this study shows other writers used humour to create a gentle, mild amusement, drawing on familiar, popular genres and forms used before 1914. Emily Anderson argues that this humorous literature helped to transform the war into quotidian experience. Based on little-known primary material uncovered through detailed archival research, the book focuses on works that, while written by celebrated authors, tend not to be placed in the canon of Great War literature. Each chapter examines key examples of literary texts, ranging from short stories and poetry, to theatre and periodicals. In doing so, the book investigates the complex political and social significance of this tame style of humour.

Published in association with the seminar series of the same name held by the University of Oxford, Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies presents the best new scholarship addressing the sources, development and ongoing influence of Samuel Beckett's work. Edited by convenors Dr Peter Fifield and Dr David Addyman, the volume presents ten research essays by leading international scholars ranging across Beckett's work, opening up new avenues of enquiry and association for scholars, students and readers of Beckett's work. Among the subjects covered the volume includes studies of: ·Beckett and the influence of new media 1956-1960 ·the influence of silent film on Beckett's work ·death, loss and Ireland in Beckett's drama - tracing Irish references in Beckett's plays from the 1950s and 1960s, including Endgame, All That Fall, Krapp's Last Tape and Eh Joe ·a consideration of Beckett's theatrical notebooks and annotated copies of his plays which provide a unique insight into his attitude toward the staging of his plays, the ways he himself interpreted his texts and approached theatrical practice. ·the French text of the novel Mercier et Camier, which both biographically and aesthetically appeared at a very significant moment in Beckett's career and indicates a crucial development in his writing ·the matter of tone in Beckett's drama, offering a new reading of the ways in which this elusive property emerges and can be read in the relationship between published text, canon and performance

Film scholars and fans have used distinctive terms to describe the Classic Hollywood comedian: He is a "trickster," a "rebel," or a "buffoon." Yet the performer is almost always described as a "he." In Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity, Scott Balcerzak reads the performances of notable comedians such as W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello through humor and queer theory to expose a problematic history of maleness in their personas. He argues that contrary to popular notions of Classic Hollywood history, these male comedians rearranged or, at times, rejected heteronormative protocols. Balcerzak begins by defining the particular buffoonish masculinity portrayed by early film comedians, a gender and genre construct influenced by the cultural anxieties of the 1930s and '40s. In chapter 1, he considers the onscreen pairing of W. C. Fields and Mae West to identify a queered sexuality and drag persona in Fields's performance, while in chapter 2 he examines the two major constructions of Fields's film persona-the confidence man and the husband-to show Fields to be a conflicted and subversive figure. In chapter 3, Balcerzak considers the assimilation and influence of Eddie Cantor as a Jewish celebrity, while he turns to the cross-media influence of Jack Benny's radio persona in chapter 4. In Chapters 5 and 6, he moves beyond the individual performer to examine the complex masculine brotherhood of comedy duos Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey. Buffoon Men shows that the complicated history of the male comedian during the early sound era has much to tell us about multimedia comedic stars today. Fans and scholars of film history, gender studies, and broadcast studies will appreciate Balcerzak's thorough exploration of the era's fascinating gender constructs.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Hokum! is the first book to take a comprehensive view of short-subject slapstick comedy in the early sound era. Challenging the received wisdom that sound destroyed the slapstick tradition, author Rob King explores the slapstick short’s Depression-era development against a backdrop of changes in film industry practice, comedic tastes, and moviegoing culture. Each chapter is grounded in case studies of comedians and comic teams, including the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and Robert Benchley. The book also examines how the past legacy of silent-era slapstick was subsequently reimagined as part of a nostalgic mythology of Hollywood’s youth.