This is a comprehensive career study and filmography of Mack Sennett, cofounder of Keystone Studios, home of the Keystone Kops and other vehicles that showcased his innovative slapstick comedy. The filmography covers the more than 1,000 films Sennett produced, directed, wrote or appeared in between 1908 and 1955, including casts, credits, synopses, production and release dates, locations, cross-references of remade stories and gags, footage excerpted in compilations, identification of prints existing in archives, and other information. The book, featuring 280 photographs, also contains biographies of several hundred performers and technical personnel connected with Sennett.

While comedy writers are responsible for creating clever scripts, comedic animators have a much more complicated problem to solve: What makes a physical character funny? Comedy for Animators breaks down the answer by exploring the techniques of those who have used their bodies to make others laugh. Drawing from traditions such as commedia dell’arte, pantomime, Vaudeville, the circus, and silent and modern film, animators will learn not only to create funny characters, but also how to execute gags, create a comic climate, and use environment as a character. Whether you’re creating a comic villain or a bumbling sidekick, this is the one and only guide you need to get your audience laughing! Explanation of comedic archetypes and devices will both inspire and inform your creative choices Exploration of various modes of storytelling allows you to give the right context for your story and characters Tips for creating worlds, scenarios, and casts for your characters to flourish in Companion website includes example videos and further resources to expand your skillset--check it out at www.comedyforanimators.com! Jonathan Lyons delivers simple, fun, illustrated lessons that teach readers to apply the principles of history’s greatest physical comedians to their animated characters. This isn’t stand-up comedy—it’s the falling down and jumping around sort!

From its founding in 1912, the short-lived Keystone Film Company—home of the frantic, bumbling Kops and Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties—made an indelible mark on American popular culture with its high-energy comic shorts. Even as Keystone brought "lowbrow" comic traditions to the screen, the studio played a key role in reformulating those traditions for a new, cross-class audience. In The Fun Factory, Rob King explores the dimensions of that process, arguing for a new understanding of working-class cultural practices within early cinematic mass culture. He shows how Keystone fashioned a style of film comedy from the roughhouse humor of cheap theater, pioneering modes of representation that satirized film industry attempts at uplift. Interdisciplinary in its approach, The Fun Factory offers a unique studio history that views the changing politics of early film culture through the sociology of laughter.

Before making a name for himself as an undisputed master of cinema, Charlie Chaplin first developed his acting, writing, and directing skills at Keystone Studios. This book examines each of these films, assessing the important early work of a comedian who became a timeless icon.

This is the story of Mack Sennett, one the world’s most influential entertainers. Based on interviews with Mr. Sennett and persons associated with the master comedian, King of Comedy begins with Sennett’s birth on January 17, 1880 in a province of Quebec. The story invites the reader to follow Sennett through his childhood, his many entertainment experiences, his personal life highlighted by his relationship with Mabel Normand, his creation of masterpieces such as Keystone Cops and his discoveries of unforgettable entertainers such as Charlie Chaplin. As he states in his final chapter, Mack Sennett strives to, “…tell about the comedies and how we made them, and about the funny fellows and the pretty girls who acted in them. They are a lost breed. Their like may never, walk, tumble, or pratt-fall again.” And the same holds true for the likes of a man such as Mack Sennett.

'A lavishly illustrated, affectionate treatment by one of the finest critics of our time...Kerr is more than a brilliant master of verbal description; he is a penetrating, lucid theorist. This book is as much about comedy as about movies, about eyes and ears and how and why we laugh.'-Thomas Wills, Chicago Tribune Book World

Slapstick comedy landed like a pie in the face of twentieth-century culture. Pratfalls percolated alongside literary modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s before slapstick found explosive expression in postwar literature, experimental film, and popular music. William Solomon charts the origins and evolution of what he calls slapstick modernism--a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, Solomon embarks on an intellectual odyssey from the high modernism of Dos Passos and Williams to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout, he shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century, and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War II.