Cover -- Half title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Introduction: What Makes These Pictures So Funny? -- Part One. The (Filmic) Roots of Early Animation -- 1. The Chaplin Effect: Ghosts in the Machine and Animated Gags -- 2. Polyphony and Heterogeneity in Early Fleischer Films: Comic Strips, Vaudeville, and the New York Style -- 3. The Heir Apparent -- Part Two. Systems and Effects: Making Cartoons Funny -- 4. Infectious Laughter: Cartoons' Cure for the Depression -- 5. "We're Happy When We're Sad": Comedy, Gags, and 1930s Cartoon Narration -- 6. laughter by numbers: The Science of Comedy at the Walt Disney Studio -- Part Three. Retheorizing Animated Comedy -- 7. "Who Dat Say Who Dat?": Racial Masquerade, Humor, and the Rise of American Animation -- 8. "I Like to Sock Myself in the Face": Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism" -- 9. Auralis Sexualis: How Cartoons Conduct Paraphilia -- Part Four. Comic Inspiration: Animation Auteurs -- 10. The Art of Diddling: Slapstick, Science, and Antimodernism in the Films of Charley Bowers -- 11. Tex Avery's Prison House of Animation, or Humor and Boredom in Studio Cartoons -- 12. Tish-Tash in Cartoonland -- Part Five. Beyond the Studio Era: Building on Tradition -- 13. Sounds Funny / Funny Sounds: Theorizing Cartoon Music -- 14. The Revival of the Studio-Era Cartoon in the 1990s -- Bibliography -- List of Contributors -- Index.