Cover image for Hokum! : The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture.
Hokum! : The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture.
Title:
Hokum! : The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture.
Author:
King, Rob.
ISBN:
9780520963160
Personal Author:
Edition:
1st ed.
Physical Description:
1 online resource (271 pages)
Contents:
Cover -- Title page -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Illustrations and Audiovisual Media -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Dates -- Introduction -- The "End" of Slapstick? Two Premises -- Premise 1: Rethinking Sound -- Premise 2: Displacing Features -- The Sociology of Residual Cultural Forms -- Chapter Breakdown -- Part One: Contexts -- Chapter 1: "The Cuckoo School": Humor and Metropolitan Culture in 1920s America -- "To Be Urban by Birth and Preference": Metropolitan Culture and the Modernizing of Mirth -- "Most of the Critics have had a Hand in Writing the Show": Critics, Collaborators, and 1920s Broadway Comedy -- "I Covet the Watermelon": Cuckoo Humor and Early Sound Cinema -- "Keep them Doing Slapstick Gags": The Demise of Cuckoo Humor in Motion Pictures -- Chapter 2: "The Stigma of Slapstick": The Short-Subject Industry and Its Imagined Public -- "Sound Came Along and Out Went the Pies": Vitaphone's Broadway Strategy and the Delegitimizing of Slapstick -- "A State of Moral Collapse": The Short-Subject Industry and the Exhibition Landscape of the 1930s -- "Something to think About": The Educational Uses of Short Subjects -- "The Zany Creatures that People this Earth": New Deal-Era Populism and the Comedy Shorts of Robert Benchley -- Part Two: Case Histories -- Chapter 3: "The Spice of the Program": Educational Pictures and the Small-Town Audience -- "An Entirely New Form of Entertainment": Educational and the Transition to Sound -- "Our Product was Blocked": Educational and the Short-Subject Market -- "It's Old Stuff but It Made the Farmers Laugh": Educational and the Small-Town Audience -- Chapter 4: "I Want Music Everywhere": Music, Operetta, and Cultural Hierarchy at the Hal Roach Studios -- "Where they Thought the Music Ought to Be": Songs and Underscoring in the Hal Roach Studios' Early Sound Output.

"Straining the Risibilities": The Hal Roach Studios' Transition to Features -- "A Child's Conception of Fairy Land": Social Order and Fairy-Tale Utopia in the Laurel and Hardy Operettas -- Chapter 5: "From the Archives of Keystone Memory": Slapstick and Re-membrance at Columbia Pictures' Short-Subjects Department -- "A Two-Reel Out-and-Out Slapstick Mack Sennett-Type Comedy": Jules White and Slapstick Revivalism -- "Landing on the Floor with a Thud": The Aesthetics of Slapstick Atavism -- "An Arena of Life Which We Don't Understand": The Three Stooges and New Deal-Era Populism -- Coda: When Comedy Was King -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Index.
Abstract:
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.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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