This lavishly illustrated collection of essays recalls the movies that over the past century have created never-ending waves of hilarity. Their authors include such prominent critics as James Agee, J. Hoberman, Robin Wood, David Thomson and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Beginning as the book does with the Silent Era, it also features Louella Parsons writing about Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton writing about, more or less, himself.

From Chaplin’s tramp to the Bathing Beauties, from madcap chases to skyscraper perils, slapstick comedy supplied many of the most enduring icons of American cinema in the silent era. This collection of fourteen essays by prominent film scholars challenges longstanding critical dogma and offers new conceptual frameworks for thinking about silent comedy’s place in film history and American culture. The contributors discuss a broad range of topics including the contested theatrical or cinematic origins of slapstick; the comic spectacle of crazy technology and trick stunts; the filmmakers who shaped the style of early slapstick; and comedy’s implications for theories of film form and spectatorship. This volume is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the origins and continued importance of a film genre at the heart of American cinema from its earliest days to today.

(Limelight). An illustrated collection of essays by masters such as H.G. Wells, Luis Bunuel, Jorge Luis Borges, Arthur C. Clarke, Anthony Burgess, Joseph Campbell, Pauline Kael, George F. Will, Robin Wood, and Susan Sontag.

The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader is a selection of the most outstanding critical analysis featured in the journal Comedy Studies in the decade since its inception in 2010. The Reader illustrates the multiple perspectives that are available when analysing comedy. Wilkie’s selections present an array of critical approaches from interdisciplinary scholars, all of whom evaluate comedy from different angles and adopt a range of writing styles to explore the phenomenon. Divided into eight unique parts, the Reader offers both breadth and depth with its wide range of interdisciplinary articles and international perspectives. Of interest to students, scholars, and lovers of comedy alike, The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader offers a contemporary sample of general analyses of comedy as a mode, form, and genre.

From classical Hollywood film comedies to sitcoms, recent political satire, and the developing world of online comedy culture, comedy has been a mainstay of the American media landscape for decades. Recognizing that scholars and students need an authoritative collection of comedy studies that gathers both foundational and cutting-edge work, Nick Marx and Matt Sienkiewicz have assembled The Comedy Studies Reader. This anthology brings together classic articles, more recent works, and original essays that consider a variety of themes and approaches for studying comedic media—the carnivalesque, comedy mechanics and absurdity, psychoanalysis, irony, genre, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and nation and globalization. The authors range from iconic theorists, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, and Linda Hutcheon, to the leading senior and emerging scholars of today. As a whole, the volume traces two parallel trends in the evolution of the field—first, comedy’s development into myriad subgenres, formats, and discourses, a tendency that has led many popular commentators to characterize the present as a “comedy zeitgeist”; and second, comedy studies’ new focus on the ways in which comedy increasingly circulates in “serious” discursive realms, including politics, economics, race, gender, and cultural power.

This reader brings together a wide range of writings to examine the role of music in cinema. Articles by leading critics including Theodor Adorno, Lawrence Grossberg and Lisa A. Lewis explore the function of the soundtrack, the place of song in film, andlook at how cinema has represented music and the music industry.

Charlie Chaplin. Buster Keaton. The Marx Brothers. Billy Wilder. Woody Allen. The Coen brothers. Where would the American film be without them? Yet the cinematic genre these artists represent--comedy--has perennially received short shrift from critics, film buffs, and the Academy Awards. Saul Austerlitz’s Another Fine Mess is an attempt to right that wrong. Running the gamut of film history from City Lights to Knocked Up, Another Fine Mess retells the story of American film from the perspective of its unwanted stepbrother--the comedy. In 30 long chapters and 100 shorter entries, each devoted primarily to a single performer or director, Another Fine Mess retraces the steps of the American comedy film, filling in the gaps and following the connections that link Mae West to Doris Day, or W. C. Fields to Will Ferrell. The first book of its kind in more than a generation, Another Fine Mess is an eye-opening, entertaining, and enlightening tour of the American comedy, encompassing the masterpieces, the box-office smashes, and all the little-known gems in between.