Author: L. Peacock
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137438975
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
Slapstick comedy has a long and lively history from Greek Theatre to the present day. This book explores the ways in which comic pain and comic violence are performed within slapstick to make the audience laugh. It draws examples from theatre, television and film on both sides of the Atlantic.
Author: Ervin Malakaj
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110571986
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 423
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Book Description
Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.
Author: Tom Paulus
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135966230
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
From Chaplin's tramp to the Bathing Beauties slapstick comedy supplied many of the most enduring icons of American cinema in the silent era. This collection of fourteen essays by film scholars challenges longstanding critical dogma and offers new conceptual frameworks for thinking about silent comedy's place in film history and American culture.
Author: Burke Hilsabeck
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438477325
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Slapstick film comedy may be grounded in idiocy and failure, but the genre is far more sophisticated than it initially appears. In this book, Burke Hilsabeck suggests that slapstick is often animated by a philosophical impulse to understand the cinema. He looks closely at movies and gags that represent the conditions and conventions of cinema production and demonstrates that film comedians display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium—from Buster Keaton's encounter with the film screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924) to Harpo Marx's lip-sync turn with a phonograph in Monkey Business (1931) to Jerry Lewis's film-on-film performance in The Errand Boy (1961). The Slapstick Camera follows the observation of philosopher Stanley Cavell that self-reference is one way in which "film exists in a state of philosophy." By moving historically across the studio era, the book looks at a series of comedies that play with the changing technologies and economic practices behind film production and describes how comedians offered their own understanding of the nature of film and filmmaking. Hilsabeck locates the hidden intricacies of Hollywood cinema in a place where one might least expect them—the clowns, idiots, and scoundrels of slapstick comedy.
Author: George Jean Nathan
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 80
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Book Description
This American book was published in 1917 and is full of jokes and written sketches very much representing the humour of that time and culture. George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) was an influential theatre and drama critic
Author: David Kalat
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476636524
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
American silent film comedies were dominated by sight gags, stunts and comic violence. With the advent of sound, comedies in the 1930s were a riot of runaway heiresses and fast-talking screwballs. It was more than a technological pivot--the first feature-length sound film, The Jazz Singer (1927), changed Hollywood. Lost in the discussion of that transition is the overlap between the two genres. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd kept slapstick alive well into the sound era. Screwball directors like Leo McCarey, Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch got their starts in silent comedy. From Chaplin's tramp to the witty repartee of His Girl Friday (1940), this book chronicles the rise of silent comedy and its evolution into screwball--two flavors of the same genre--through the works of Mack Sennett, Roscoe Arbuckle, Harry Langdon and others.
Author: James Robert Parish
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781515387060
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Part of the Encore Film Book Classics series, this is a reprint of the original text to The Slapstick Queens by James Robert Parish. At one time or another, most every nostalgia-conscious film enthusiast has laughed heartily at the wild onscreen antics of gifted movie comediennes Marjorie Main, Joan Davis, Martha Raye, Judy Canova, and Phyllis Diller. The Slapstick Queens provides an in-depth study and appraisal of the professional work of these exceptionally noteworthy funsters. Each of these five talents has a lengthy, comprehensive chapter devoted to her oncamera and personal life, containing, as well, a detailed filmography of the subject's screen work. In addition, the book provides a full survey of each of these stars' stage, radio, television, nightclub, recording, and book-writing careers. Personal interviews with Phyllis Diller and Judy Canova give this volume an added dimension. The Slapstick Queens delves deeply into the lives and times of five major laugh makers, numbered among the cream of comediennes, particularly in motion pictures and television. Moreover, these antic talents-Marjorie Main, Joan Davis, Martha Raye, Judy Canova, and Phyllis Diller-were among the highest paid non-glamour actresses in the annals of Hollywood. This volume extols not only the film careers of these exceptionally skilled comics, but also the essence of their mirthful work in other media. The Slapstick Queens is a chronicle of, and a testament to, the fabulous careers of a quintet of Hollywood's most memorable comediennes!
Author: Buster Keaton
Publisher: London : Allen & Unwin
ISBN:
Category : Actors
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Author: Rob King
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520288114
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
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.
Author: Alex Clayton
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 078643063X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
Because they rely heavily on physical comedy, many Hollywood slapstick films can be understood as comic meditations on the place and nature of the human body. Focusing on the works of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy, among others, this book examines ways that the body represents or interacts with the mind, setting, voice and machines in slapstick films. Also covered are female performances in slapstick and brutality and suffering in the slapstick tradition.
