The first full-length study of comedy on the burlesque stage, this book takes the reader inside the burlesque houses of the 1930s, looks at the role comedy played in an entertainment form known mostly for striptease, and explores how these sketch performers approached their craft.

The first full-length study of comedy on the burlesque stage, this book takes the reader inside the burlesque houses of the 1930s, looks at the role comedy played in an entertainment form known mostly for striptease, and explores how these sketch performers approached their craft.

(Applause Books). Here is the first-ever collection of classic comic sketches from the bawdy, rowdy world of our slum music halls! Habitues of Burlesque (and sons of habitues) will revel in the boisterous stock scenes and blackouts of this uniquely American form of popular entertainment. Features a foreword by Dick Martin.

The Comic Offense from Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy examines how contemporary writer/performers are influenced by the comedic vaudevillians of the early 20th century. By tracing the history and legacy of the vaudeville era and performance acts, like the Marx Brothers and The Three Keatons, and moving through the silent and early sound films of the early 1930s, the author looks at how comic writer/performers continue to sell a brand of themselves as a form of social commentary in order to confront and dispel stereotypes of race, class, and gender. The first study to explore contemporary popular comic culture and its influence on American society from this unique perspective, Rick DesRochers analyzes stand-up and improvisational comedy writing/performing in the work of Larry David, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, and Dave Chappelle. He grounds these choices by examining their evolution as they developed signature characters and sketches for their respective shows Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, The Colbert Report, and Chappelle's Show.

First Published in 1987. This is the second edition with an additional foreword. The purpose of this book—the first to recount the history of the popular musical stage on Broadway and its intersecting streets—is to tell what the various entertainments were like, how they looked and sounded, who was in them, and why they made people laugh or cry. The values employed in the book are changeable and inconsistent. Sometimes an affable smile is bestowed upon a musical comedy, burlesque, or revue that was really very bad. Sometimes a harsh verdict is brought in against an entertainment that received widespread approval and praise.

Although books on the comedies of the silent era abound, few have attempted to survey film comedy as a whole—its history and evolution, how the philosophical visions of its greatest artists and directors have shaped its traditions, and how these visions have informed both the meaning and manner of their work. Blending information with interpretation, description with analysis, Mast traces the development of screen comedy from the first crude efforts of Edison and Lumière to the subtlety and psychological complexity of Annie Hall. As he guides the reader through detailed discussions of specific films, Mast reveals the structures, the values, and the cinematic techniques which have appeared and reappeared in comic cinema. The second edition of The Comic Mind treats the comic developments of the 1970s in terms of the traditions of film comedy set forth in the first edition, including a discussion of the evolution of Jacques Tati and the emergence of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen as the two greatest American comic stylists of the seventies. "The most comprehensive study of film comedy yet written in English. . . .The book's extensive index with references to companies from which 16mm prints of many of the cited films may be rented will be of great value to the film teacher and audiovisual librarian."—Choice