List of Illustrations and Audiovisual Media
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I. CONTEXTS
1. “The Cuckoo School”: Humor and Metropolitan Culture in 1920s
America
2. “The Stigma of Slapstick”: The Short-Subject Industry and Its
Imagined Public
PART II. CASE HISTORIES
3. “The Spice of the Program”: Educational Pictures and the
Small-Town Audience
4. “I Want Music Everywhere”: Music, Operetta, and Cultural
Hierarchy at the Hal Roach Studios
5. “From the Archives of Keystone Memory”: Slapstick and
Re-membrance at Columbia Pictures’ Short-Subjects Department
Coda: When Comedy Was King
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Rob King is Associate Professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts and author of the award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture.
"King thus explores a series of critical questions about how
cultural forms dwindle and reemerge... his work points toward a new
avenue of research worth looking into when considering alternative
constructions of American film history; instead of breaking down
the myths that haunt much of film scholarship, the development of
these very myths may reveal more about cultural consciousness."
*Film Quarterly*
"King’s approach is thoroughly revisionist, a genre history as
grounded in the archive and the trade press as it is in the
screening room, one that seeks to dramatically expand which films
matter. ... Hokum! is a triumph! King demonstrates what
happens in an era of expanded access to archival texts that are now
more widely available on DVD, the digitization of trade press
reports, and the ongoing refinement of film historiography. At the
risk of ending on an unapologetically bad pun, comedy has a new
King. "
*Journal for Cinema and Media Studies*
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