What is it about?
A history of slapstick short subjects after the coming of sound
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Why is it important?
The book challenges the received wisdom that sound somehow "killed" the slapstick tradition. Instead, it situates slapstick's sound-era development against a backdrop of changes in film industry practice, comedic tastes, and moviegoing culture. The book also examines how the legacy of silent-era slapstick came to be reimagined as part of a nostalgic mythology of Hollywood's youth.
Perspectives
This book is a sequel of sorts to my earlier The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (2009). Having explored there the processes by which slapstick achieved success with a mass, cross-class audience during the 1910s, I became interested in investigating how and why the genre began to lose that audience in the late 1920s/1930s. I also wanted to see how a more socially- and culturally-contextualized approach would lend dimension to a decline that has too often simply been linked to the coming of sound.
Rob King
Columbia University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture, April 2017, University of California Press,
DOI: 10.1525/luminos.28.
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